Gendered memories
Semahat Sevim
The effects of wars and political violence on women throughout the 20th century were discussed for the first time in Turkey during the conference on “Gendered Memories of War and Political Violence”, 22-23 May 2012. Traumas faced by women during wars and in violent environments were addressed during the conference as if the words uttered by Prime Minister Erdo€an just one week after the conference were foreseen: ‘Abortion is murder and should be banned’ and ‘women who have been raped and impregnated should give birth, the state would look after those children’. If the AKP and Prime Minister had participated in this conference, they probably would not have demonstrated that attitude one week later.
Co-organized by Sabanc› University Gender and Women’s Studies Forum and Central European University, the conference looked at how war and political violence are remembered from the perspective of gender. The conference, supported by the Heinrich Boell Stiftung Turkey Representation, hosted 46 feminist academics as speakers or panelists, and 200 participants from 22 countries.
Feminist researcher Cynthia Enloe began her talk with the questions, “In which war are women remembered and which ones are forgotten in the post-war period?” and “Why should the feminists care?” and argued that how women are effected during and after the war is not a subject much talked about although the issue of war and memory is an ongoing discussion. Enloe pointed out the lack of women in the monuments built after the wars and how these monuments are shaped around men’s victories or losses and then she opened the floor to discussion that many participants joined by giving examples. According to Enloe, recent feminist studies have been posing important questions related to the setting and time of wars. Enloe also underlined that in traditional narration, war is considered merely as a fight on the battlefield, however, it actually covered a greater area: “We, the feminists, claim that a battlefield can also be a kitchen, a refugee camp or many other places out of the geographic area of the war”. She went on by arguing that even many years after the end of the war, the effects of it on women and gender relations still continue and, therefore, the “post war” concept has been redefined in feminist studies, in which classical definitions are questioned.
Another important topic of the conference was how sexual assault and harassment against women in times of war or military coup were handled in works of literature and art. The speakers emphasized that sexual violence, as a matter of shame, honor or “national honor”, is spoken about only if it is committed by the enemy; violence against women is usually taken as an insult or attack at men or the nation and is used as a tool to otherize the enemy.
Within the scope of the panel on “Women’s Narratives of War and Soldiering”, attention was drawn to the war and civil war experiences of women from Italy, Vietnam, Turkey, Abkhazia, Israel and Yugoslavia and to the way they legitimized their decisions to join the war. In an example given related to the Italian Civil War, the speaker told that the struggle of the women who volunteered to join the armed forces of Mussolini was not a political move, but a spiritual one. Many women enlisted in the army following Mussolini’s call for volunteer service during the civil war in 1943, leading to the establishment of the “Women’s Reserve Troop”. The troop consisted of six thousand women, three hundred of whom were killed during the war. A researcher on these women, Schiavo, explained that the post-civil war period attempted to forget the existence of these women of the fascist movement, who then became a taboo subject in democratic Italy. As it was emphasized by the other speakers, most of the women who fought in battles were deleted from history as they did not fit the “good mother, loyal wife” definition which was created immediately following the war.
The majority of the female soldiers felt the necessity to join the army as they were disturbed by the damage to their country’s honor. Those who isolated their connections with the war from politics and ideologies had a more spiritual attachment to the decisions they made. The extracts from the diaries of Italian women who joined the war were interesting:
“I could accept to lose, even to cry but never to lose honor!”
“I went to war in order not to feel like a worm among other worms, not because I support Mussolini or his fascist regime.”
“Did we lose? No! Mission accomplished. I won my personal war.”
Another panel of the conference had a provocative title: “Wars at home”. The focus of this panel was the experiences of women and men “at home” after the war. Invisibility of the physical and emotional efforts of women in Turkey whose husbands are veterans with a transformed definition and experience of manhood; and the problems faced by female soldiers in the USA after they return home from wars in faraway places were discussed. In her talk, Yeflim Sünbüo€lu, a researcher on the unappreciated victims of wars, the wives of disabled veterans, told that in such cases, women assume different roles such as providing care for their husbands and following up on the relations between state institutions and their husbands; and despite being a critical part of the rehabilitation process, the physical and emotional efforts of women are usually ignored or perceived as a natural process to ease the burden and the pain of the veteran.
“The bodies of the disabled soldiers become dependent on others, their wives. As they require intensive care, their “fragile manhood” also is damaged. Women, on the other hand, see this as a situation to be fixed in addition to the physical injuries, and try to re-establish the role of the veteran at home. The following words from a woman who was a part of this study explain this quite well: ‘My husband may be dependent on me now, but I still listen to his opinion about everything. He solves our problems. After all, he is the man of the house.’.”
In two panels, the conference also focused on the sexual crimes committed during war times and their reflections in the international law processes upon the testimonies of women in the post-conflict or post-war periods. During the panels, stress was put on the fact that crimes of rape during war are not analyzed from the perspective of the feminist context as they are usually considered to be a systemic “ethnic cleansing” method. This, of course, leaves the analyses of these experiences incomplete.
Today’s discourse leads to the perception that crimes of sexual violence in times of war are remorseful and regrettable; however, they are war crimes that can be ignored. One of the consequences of such a perception is that many men who are described as ‘normal’ become a rape monster during the war and can continue their lives after coming back from war without feeling ashamed at all. It is almost impossible to adjudicate all individuals who have committed those crimes, but, would the imprisonment of those who give the orders be sufficient to comfort the social conscience? Some of the panelists who believed that the feminist analyses should produce a broader perspective for the rape discourse emphasized that war and killing have been erotized by today’s patriarchal culture, and it was important to examine and question the tools of erotization.
The panel on “Gendering the Armenian Genocide”, in which the Armenian genocide was evaluated from the gender perspective, was both challenging and influential for the speakers and for the audience as well. The researchers who presented their studies in this panel addressed the deletion of the rapes during genocide from history, the ostracization of the raped women from Armenian society, and the process of forced marriages and forced conversion to Islam. Attention was drawn to the importance of the purification of historical narrative from the patriarchal gender analyses.
Although rape was routine during the genocide, there is little research dealing with this issue. This was a fact underlined by the panelists who stated that in the verbal history studies conducted with genocide survivors, narratives related to sexual violence usually included softened and allusive expressions, the details of how these events happened were not given and both men and women were dominated by the feeling of embarrassment when they were talking about sexual violence. Men either do not want to talk about this issue or find it very difficult to say what happened. Women, in general, do not want to speak about what they have gone through. A few women who decided to share their experiences did not give consent to have their stories recorded. Many women prefer to remain silent, as openly talking about what they went through makes them feel as if they are being raped again.
The presentation of a report made on Armenian women who converted to Islam revealed that some of the Armenians who survived the genocide were adopted by or were married into Muslim families and they were given Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic names. According to the rumors, there are 200 thousand Armenians who were forced to convert to Islam, however, the exact figure will never be known. So far, this issue was handled by only a few scientific studies, also history writers consider the Islamized Armenians as part of the “disappeared Armenian society”. The panel also discussed the issue of qualifying Islamized Armenian women as “unowned” both in Turkish and in Armenian languages and the expressions such as “our women” and “their women”, as a reflection of the masculinized understanding of nation and patriarchal gender discourse.
Broad discussions were held on the trauma women go through in the post-coup or post-war periods and how this can be corrected, resorting to sexual violence and assault during wars and the situation of women impregnated during war, remembering through photo narratives various conditions women have to face during and after the war and the past and the current status of feminist memory studies.
The papers presented during the conference are scheduled to be published in a book, in English, by an international publishing house and some of them will be published in a special edition of the European Journal of Women’s Studies in 2015.
For further information related to the conference publications: www.tr.boell.org and http://genderforum.sabanciuniv.edu
2012