Gender and "Postmodern War"

Robin May Schott

Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 19-29.

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Gender and "Postmodem War"

ROBIN MAY SCHOTT

In this essay I argue that war is not "above" gender analyses. I question in
particular whether the concept of "postmodern war" is adequate to e x p h n the
intersections of gender with ethnicity and nationality, which underlie the sexual
violence against women in wartime. The poststructuralist concept of the "fluidity" of
the category of gender needs to be modified by an analysis of how "non-fluid"
configurations of gender are entrenched in material conditions of existence.

A new "war" consciousness is developing in Europe. With the recent Gulf

War and the current devastation in the heart of Europe, Western intellectuals
are beginning to respond to war as a presence, as opposed to a determinative
event in our memory. There is n o doubt that in sheer numbers, the tragedies
of war have escalated in this century. In the last ninety years there have been
over four times as many war deaths as in the preceding 400 years (Vickers 1993,
2). But in the wake of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, contemporary
intellectuals have been forced to face war not as a subject of historical
analysis-of traumas survived and recollected, of guilt and punishment already
apportioned-but as an ongoing offense of unbearable proportions, a witness
to intellectuals' own failure of foresight and a testing ground of one's moral
commitment. How are Western intellectuals to come to terms with the bur-
geoning of civil wars under nationalistic auspices, as in the former Yugoslavia
or Rwanda? Do those who call themselves feminists have something particular
to contribute to a n understanding of and response to war and violence?
Here I will begin to explore some questions about the constellation of
problems involving war, violence, women, and gender. First in my mind is the
question: Does war exaggerate the conflicts of gender? (By gender conflicts I
have in mind issues like pornography, sexual harassment, violence against
women, differences in political participation and household labor, and so
forth.) War has typically been viewed as "above" the questions of gender. How
can gender be relevant, when life and death are at stake? In 1948, Mohandas
Hyptia vol. 11, no. 4 (Fall 1996) 0by Robin May Schott
20 Hypatia

K. Gandhi wrote, "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and
the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of
totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" (Vickers 1993,
18). If the nature of the perpetrators' goals makes no difference in light of the
final and irreducible fact of death, then the identity of the victims seems also
irrelevant. Since dead bodies are dead bodies, whether they are male or female,
perhaps gender has no bearing in the dust left by war.
But Miriam Cooke argues, "Gender analysis reveals that the prosecution of
mass, legitimized, psychotic violence depends on a particular way of construct-
ing and maintaining gender identities" (Cooke 1993, 1). What could be more
profoundly gendered, she adds, than a space said to contain nothing but men,
an activity described as performed by men only? In looking at how war
constructs gender identities, it is crucial to look at how gender is located
among the participants of war, as well as its victims. If gender is obfuscated as
a category of analysis with regard to war and violence, the histories of concrete
women once again will be obliterated (Cooke and Woollacott 1993, xi). In
examining the intersections of gender and war, I will focus briefly on the
following empirical, cultural, and symbolic aspects of gender: the impact of war
on women; war and the construction of gender identities; and the gendering
of war discourse.
Although I defend gender as an analytic category in understanding the
violence of war, I do not mean that any analysis of wartime violence can rest
on gender alone. Gender is always refracted and constituted through a multi-
plicity of other factors-e.g., race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and so forth.
Thus, there is no unitary or univocal position of women in relation to war.
Wars are complex events, uniquely situated in place and time. The impact of
war on women and gender constructs was very different under enslavement in
the United States, during World War I1 and the Holocaust, and in South
Africa under apartheid. Ethnic, religious, and geographical factors profoundly
mark the fate of women in the former Yugoslavia. Concepts of patriarchal or
sexist violence alone can never be adequate to analyses of war.' Moreover,
individual women may find or choose a variety of roles in these conflicts, not
all of which are negative for women. They may be terrorists, guerrilla fighters
and soldiers, but most frequently they are civilians in the midst of war who
suffer profoundly as casualties of war.

While wars are being fought in streets and graveyards, intellectuals are
carrying out their own skirmishes about how to interpret what Lyotard has
named the postmodern condition in which we live. In this climate, writers as
diverse as Frederic Jameson, Catharine MacKinnon, and Miriam Cooke use
the term "postmodem war" to describe how postmodernity has affected the
 Robin May Schott

interweaving of the waging and writing of war. In Cooke's analysis, "post-

modem war" refers both to a periodization and to a cluster of defining charac-
teristics. Chronologically, it refers to the violent conflicts in the post-World
War I1 nuclear, postcolonial period. The term "postmodern war" has been used
especially in reference to the Vietnam War and more recently to the Gulf War.
Postmodem wars are both the products and the consumers of technological
revolution, though postmodem wars are not exclusively high-tech affairs.* In
this epoch, there are multiple spaces for individuals both to act and to interpret
their own agency. Thus, women who have always been part of war can
articulate and hold on to their participation. Women's writing on war can
challenge prevailing war myths, expose the mechanisms of power, and decen-
ter and fragment hegemonic d~scourse.Postmodem combatants cannot be
easily defined and compartmentalized. They occupy positions that are highly
fluid: terrorist, guerilla, liberation army activist, soldier in national army.
Today's terrorist may be tomorrow's loyal soldier of a new state military
apparatus. In a postmodern context, violence is different from earlier forms of
violence not because it is more cruel, but because it is continuous, total, and
undifferentiated. The centrality of violence in social and political relations
ensures that postmodem wars end through exhaustion. Judgements about
victories are open to continual renegotiation and re~ersal.~ The United States
may have lost the war in Vietnam, but for many it seemed that America won
this war twenty years later through its victory over Iraq. But this perception of
victory could not be sustained for long. In June 1991, George Bush announced
that Saddam Hussein's nuclear activities might force the United States into
another war. And by mid-January, Hussein celebrated the anniversary of his
victorious war.
Cooke argues that it is not necessarily a substantive difference that marks
postmodem wars off from previous violent conflicts, but a representational
difference. Postmodem wars are not necessarily more inconclusive than earlier
wars, but are represented as more inconclusive. Moreover, postmodem wars are
fought by and for the media. Hostage-taking, hijacking, videotaping of rapes
to be aired on the evening news become media events that create a theatrical-
ization of violence. Rules that used to define the beginning and end of wars,
the distinction between war and peace, the identity of the enemy, the roles
women and men were to play in peacetime as opposed to wartime, have been
broken. Postmodern wars, Cooke argues, are represented as breaking the binary
structures of warlpeace, goodlevil, frontlhome front, combatant/noncomba-
tant, friendlfoe, victoryldefeat, patriotismlpacifism. She writes that post-
modem wars reveal that "both gender and war are highly fluid and negotiable
structures within which meanings are constantly constructed and
deconstructed" (Cooke 1993, 182) .'
I find this conceptualization of postmodern war both provocative and
problematic. To the extent that it debunks myths of rigid gender patterns
 Hypatia

during wartime, which define women on the homefront and men at the front
(not relevant when these fronts are coextensive), it is an important contribu-
tion to the interpretation of war. But to the extent that it risks overlooking the
way that gender may not be primarily fluid, but may be a predetermining factor
in how war becomes carved on women's bodies, then this concept of post-
modem war becomes highly suspect. As many feminists have argued, the
postmodern deconstruction of "women" is useful in challenging a universalist
conception of women, which separates out gender from other factors of social
identity. But this deconstructive move undervalues the significance of the
material conditions and needs that shape the particularity of women's lives
(Schott 1993,171-84).The women who were raped during the civil war in the
former Yugoslavia were raped at least in part because they were women
(though also because they were Muslim or Croatian). Postmodern theorists'
emphasis on the fluidity of gender categories may detract attention away from
the solidity of this category+.g., the way in which gender is entrenched in
sexual violence. The task of a feminist theorist of war is to see how gender and
sexuality is constructed amidst other factors such that sexual violence against
women becomes a weapon of war.

Women may play a variety of roles during wartime-as guerrillas, terrorists,

soldiers, doctors, nurses, volunteer workers. But most prevalently, it is as
civilians that women experience war. War is not only a bad thing for women
civilians. It can give them opportunities to work in jobs (and earn pay)
otherwise reserved for men; it can give them the glory of being the mother of
a hero. But in war women civilians also may be killed or injured in ethnic
fighting or civil disturbances, despite being innocent bystanders. They are
often left to sustain the family and endure the loneliness and vulnerability of
separation. Their houses may be damaged, they may suffer from a dwindling
food supply, their children may go hungry, and they may suffer the loss of male
family members. Rural women must tend to both farm and domestic needs.
They often lose their crops first to occupying troops and then to their own.
Armed conflict often means loss of livelihood, abuse, and rape. Rape and
sexual abuse is frequently used to extract information from women or to punish
women, and it becomes a tool of military strategy. In Bosnia-Herzegovina there
have been horrifying stories concerning the rape and deliberate impregnation
of women (mostly Muslim and Croatian women violated by Serbian soldiers)
as a form of "ethnic cleansing" (Vickers 1993, 18-23).
In a much disputed article, Catharine MacKinnon has published some of the
stories women are telling about the use of rape as a weapon of war. Natalie
Nenadic wrote that she learned from Muslim sources that "some massacres in
villages as well as rapes and/or executions in camps are being videotaped as
 Robin May Schott 23

they are happening" (MacKinnon 1993,27). MacKinnon describes this use of

videotapes and televisions as "postmodern genocide": "Signs and symbols,
words, images, and identities are manipulated to mean anything and its
opposite. . . . When human beings are 'represented' out of existence, playing
reality as a game emerges as a strategy of fascism" (MacKinnon 1993, 28).
How is it possible to represent events that should never happen, and perhaps
should not be spoken about--e.g., the event of a woman who was seven or
eight months pregnant being tied to a cross, her belly ripped open, both fetus
and woman dying within fifteen minutes while her husband was forced to look
o n (MacKinnon 1993,30).The witnessing and recording of these events raises
a number of questions: How should these horrors be described? Is any descrip-
tion a form of complicity and voyeurism? O r is the greatest form of complicity
silence?Are there some people who can speak "trulyn or "authentically" about
these events? Why are women attacked so sadistically and persistently in their
sexuality?
Klaus Theweleit answers this last question by arguing that men have used
war and violence to rival women's power to give birth (1993, xiii). Certain
psychoanalytic feminists answer it by arguing that "normal" masculinity is
expressed under pressure in defensive, aggressive misogyny. In this story,
masculinity is viewed as constructed through a distantiation and devaluation
of emotion and embodiment, both associated with women. In times of war,
soldiers are forced to control emotions of fear, rage, and desire, and may rage
against absent women and the emotionality they represent. Commanders
often encourage aggressive "masculine" impulses. Given this encouragement
and the pressures to which their "normal masculinity" is subject, it may not be
surprising that many soldiers in imagination or actuality engage in rape and
assaults on women (Ruddick 1993, 111). Catharine MacKinnon answers the
question of women's sexual abuse during wartime by reference to the dehuman-
ization of women in pornography. She refers to the events in the former
Yugoslavia as a form of sexualized genocide, drawing its incitement from the
pornography that saturated the country before civil war and that pervades the
soldiers' e n ~ i r o n m e n t In
. ~ her mind, pornography is clearly linked with the
sexualization of the environment of torture and the sexual acts that are
performed.
Whatever account is given to explain sexual violence against women in
wartime, the persistence of this violence is one indicator that gender identity
is a pivotal factor in women's fates both during and after war. Many women
raped during war-for example, in the former Yugoslavia-become pregnant
and birth children who were conceived in violence. Will these women give
their babies to adoption and be glad to be rid of them, or bear them as a cross
for the rest of their lives? If a woman gives her child to adoption, will she then
feel cleansed of the slaughter she witnessed and of her own rape? Will it ever
be possible for these women to renew life and love, to bear children out of love
24 Hypatia

again? These questions and more must be answered if one is to adequately

assess the lifelong impact of war on women.
T h e struggles of refugee women also attest to the significance of gender after
women have left the field of war. Women and young girls constitute 80 percent
of the world's refugee population (Vickers 1993, 27). (Although in countries
like Germany, with an effectively gender-selective policy on refugees, women
constitute only about a third of the refugee population [Gottstein 1993, 131.)
Women refugees are frequently victims twice---during violence and persecu-
tion in their home country, as well as during flight, in camps and settlements,
and even in the process of integration into a new society (Vickers 1993,27).
When refugees in the asylum country are kept in camps with no possibility of
integrating into the surrounding society, the level of frustrations, hostility, and
violence rise within the camps, from which women are the first to suffer. Both
in the home countries and the countries of asylum, women bear the burden of
discrimination based on their race and ethnicity (as men do) as well as on their
gender. In addition to the violence experienced by many men, women are also
subject to domestic violence, abuse, rape, incest, and sexual discrimination
and harassment (Vickers 1993, 106). Women refugees also may be subject to
particularly natalist policies. For example, refugee women in Germany have
access to health care for pregnancies and deliveries, but they are not explicitly
entitled to have the costs for abortion or contraception covered (Gottstein
1993, 10).

WARAND THE CONSTRUCTION

OF GENDER

War affects not only individuals who are gendered as female, but also more
generally contributes to the construction of gender identities. Sara Ruddick
discusses the many ''masculinities" of war. One such attitude she calls an
assaultive misogynist masculinity. The soldier who goes off to war singing of
the faggot assholes he is ready to sodomize and the whores he is ready to rape
expresses attitudes that may be actualized in rape, sexual assault, and torture
(Ruddick 1993, 110). But there are other forms of masculinity created by war
rituals and myths as well. There is the just warrior-restrained and self-sacri-
ficing, protecting women and vulnerable people-and the conquering hero
who serves the national glory (Ruddick 1993, 111 ). Masculinities are also
differentiated between "our men" and the "enemy." Our soldiers may be
viewed as just warriors, whereas "theirs" are viewed as criminal, aggressive,
sexualized, and racialized (Ruddick 1993, 112).
Virginia Woolf said, during World War 11, "No, I don't see what's [to] be done
about war. It's manliness; and manliness breeds womanliness-both so hateful"
(quoted in Ruddick 1993, 112). Not only "manliness," but different forms of
"womanliness" become available to women on the basis of war. Ruddick argues
that women may take up distinctively "feminine" work such as nursing, or
 Robin May Schott 25

work that is a temporary substitute for the work men will return to. (The film,
"Rosie the Riveter" shows clearly how the reluctant admittance of women into
"men's" work such as shipbuilding was reversed immediately to make room for
returning soldiers.) Women become the mourners, the vulnerable to be pro-
tected against the cruel enemy, the military loyalist who eroticizes "our" heroes
(Ruddick 1993, 112-13).
However, Ruddick's list of military "femininities" is drawn from reflection
on World War 11, as was Virginia Woolf's comment. Therefore, it oversees
many of the gender positions made available to women during "postmodern
wars." Women during the Lebanese civil war and the Palestinian war have not
just acted as nurses, workers, mourners, and patriots. They have also been
writers (as they were in earlier wars), creating "the war they had known
without reference to an epic m ~ d e l , "negotiators,
~ unarmed fighters. The
discourse of "postmodern war" is said to create a new imagery and a
"counterdiscourse" that challenges traditional war myths and binary opposi-
tions. Nonetheless, this new imagery exists amidst social relations in which
gender remains a determinative, and not infinitely malleable category. Cooke's
discussion of the intifada illustrates this point. She characterizes the intifada
as originally a women's i n s ~ r r e c t i o nas
, ~a form of unarmed fighting relying on
stone throwing and kicking to incapacitate the violence of the other (Cooke
1993, 193). Yet she also acknowledges that this form of fighting was trans-
formed when the movement was recognized and legitimated by men's partici-
pation. In other words, the multiplicity of "discursive spaces" stressed by
postmodern theorists exists within a social environment that is still pervaded
by gender oppositions and differential powers.

Just as military rituals and practices create distinct masculinities and

femininities, the discourse that is dominant amongst military analysts and
policy makers is profoundly gendered. Carol Cohn argues convincingly in
"Wars, Wimps, and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War," that military
analysts' thinking is greatly shaped by the gendered discourse that permeates
their thinking. Although real men and women may not fit these gender ideals,
this system of meanings affects them nonetheless. She quotes a story told by a
white male physicist:

Several colleagues and I were working on modeling counter-

force attacks. . . . A t one point, we remodeled a particular
attack . . . and found that instead of there being thirty-six
million immediate fatalities, there would only be thirty million.
And everybody was sitting around nodding, saying "Oh yeah,
that's great, only thirty million," when all of a sudden, I heard
 Hypatia

what we were saying. And I blurted out, "Wait, I've just heard
how we're talking--only thirty million! Only thirty million
human beings killed instantly!" Silence fell upon the room.
Nobody said a word. They didn't even look at me. It was awful.
I felt like a woman. (Cohn 1993,227)
The physicist added that afterwards he was careful never to blurt out anything
like that again.
In this story, concerns and feelings that express an emotional awareness of
the human reality behind the sanitized abstractions of death and destruction
become marked as feminine, and thus are difficult both to speak and to hear.
Voicing concern about the number of casualties and the suffering of the killed
and wounded-imagining children with their flesh melting away from their
bones, imagining the psychological effects on soldiers and citizens, imagining
their deprivation, their helplessness in watching babies die from diarrhea-all
of these are not to be spoken. Instead, one must be cool, dispassionate, and
distant. Other ways of thinking about weapons and security have been pre-
empted by gender discourse (Cohn 1993, 232).
In this context, the accusation that one might be "acting like a wimp," be
insufficiently masculine, erases everything else. Accusations that the Soviet
"new .thinkersn are a "bunch of pussies," that West German politicians con-
cerned about popular opposition to Euromissile deployments are "a bunch of
limp-dicked wimps" indicates that manliness is equated not only with an
ability to win a war but to threaten and use force (Cohn 1993, 234). To these
military analysts, the only thing worse than a man acting like a woman is a
woman acting like a woman. Discussions of strategy take on the tone of a
sporting match, pitting one single male opponent against another, bypassing
the complexity of governmental and military apparatuses, domestic politics,
and so on. For example, in personalizing the Iraqi army as Saddam Hussein
during the Gulf War, individual human beings in Iraq were abstracted out of
existence (Cohn 1993, 240-41).
Cohn's analysis of "defense" intellectuals' discourse is based on her view that
in Western culture, gender oppositions remain a fundamental component of
the system of meanings. Even though individuals may seek to take up positions
of resistance vis-5-vis this system, they are not immune to its effects. She
confesses that when she was called a "wimp" after a war simulation, she was
stung. Even though she thought it was an inane term, even though she did not
think of her identity as being wrapped up with not being wimpish, it was
impossible in that environment not.to feel humiliated (Cohn 1993,237). Her
self-insight is an important reminder that it is not enough to look at the sites
of resistance to traditional categories. It remains necessary to look at how
political institutions operate, what the conditions for entrance into these
institutions are, what codes of thinking and behavior become normative for
 Robin May Schott

the insiders of these institutions. Although Cohn draws her remarkable

insights from her renegade position within the world of defense intellectuals,
the story she tells is of the nearly irresistible power of the gendered oppositions
of this discourse, that makes resistance so difficult and seldom.
I have tried to show that gender is a defining condition of how war affects
individuals, what roles and situations it makes available to them, and what
categories of thinking and speaking appear legitimate to them. But analyses of
gender are of course inadequate to comprehend the way that war shatters the
private worlds of everyday life and individual happiness. War may mean, as it
did in Sarajevo, that children cannot go out in the sunshine for two years for
fear of bombardments, and that they sleep with their arms clutched around
their mothers' necks. It may mean that families are separated, that one's sister
might have been shot to death when she went out to visit a relative, that one's
daughter might have been killed by a shell had she been sitting as usual on the
sofa, instead of in an asylum center in Denmark.'
For those of us sitting safely distant from the fields of battle, war poses
different challenges than for those whose lives are in tumult because of them.
T h e question of the moral and political tasks of intellectuals is a troubling one.
O n the one hand, there is the view of a Polish journalist, a politically
committed intellectual, who described his visits to Sarajevo as strictly super-
fluous. Since Sarajevo has been saturated with media coverage, intellectuals
hardly can open the public's eye to tragedy. From his point of view, the political
commitment of intellectuals can at most result in their own moral self-satisfac-
tion. O n the other hand, there are writers and intellectuals who view their
work as integral to political struggle. Alice Walker wrote, "When I didn't write
I thought of making bombs and throwing them. Of shooting racists. Of doing
away-as painlessly and neatly as possible-with myself. Writing saved me
from the inconvenience of v i ~ l e n c e . "O~n this view, writing is itself a form of
nonviolent political struggle.
Susan Sontag underscores the necessity of intellectuals' political commit-
ment to international solidarity. She laments the apathy amongst contempo-
rary intellectuals toward the genocide of the Bosnian people-an apathy that
has contributed to a climate in which international intervention was too late,
a climate in which an unjust peace could be ratified (Sontag 1995, 818-20).
Intellectuals, in her view, contribute to a moral and political environment in
which violence becomes acceptable as it has been in Bosnia (because of
intellectuals' own material comfort, complacency, racist prejudice, and inter-
national indifference) or in which such violence is opposed (as in intellectuals'
joining the fight against fascism in Spain in the 1930s). One could add that
minimally, intellectuals can provide moral and practical support to individuals
directly affected by war (including the many Yugoslav intellectuals who are
now displaced forever by this war), and can create a climate and critical
discourse that informs current and future decisions about armed intervention.
 Hypatia

Does t h e discourse of "postmodern war" contribute to these goals? A r e t h e

concepts of resistance, fluidity, and anarchy used in analyzing t h e postmodern
condition and response t o war adequate t o aid t h e cause of peace? W h e r e it is
limited, i n my view, is i n its veering away from analyses of material
conditions-how power is distributed across race, class, ethnic, religious
identity, a n d so forth. Similarly, t h e terms used t o describe postmodern war
undervalue t h e way i n w h i c h gender hierarchies remain entrenched in
meanings, institutions, a n d interactions. O n e may choose t o break o p e n
t h e rigid categories of gender,'0 b u t t h e violence of rape a n d sexual abuse
may be stronger t h a n one's choice t o resist gender dualisms. However, t h e
more o n e c a n understand h o w hostilities a n d aggressions are catalyzed
along gender lines, t h e more o n e c a n explore strategies for diffusing this
aggression. I t is i n this spirit t h a t inquiries into t h e relation between gender
a n d war may serve t h e struggles for peace.

1. See Bat-Ami Bar On, "Thinking About Women and Rape in Bosnia-
Herzegovina: O n Trauma and its Theorization" (n.d.). The author argues that sexual
violence and abuse on mostly Muslim and Croatian women by Serbian men has to be
understood multidimensionallv, as sexual violence in the context of nationalistic
genocidal policies. Bar O n points out, moreover, that unidimensional analyses, which
only focus on sexual violence, privilege Euro-American perceptions of sexual violence
and its containment.
2. Bat-Ami Bar O n points out in her essay, "Thoughtless Action intoNature: The
Technologies of Genocide," that post-World War I1 genocides also employ low-tech
means of slaughter. In Rwanda, Hutus used machetes and clubs in the mass murders of
Tutsis. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed over one million Cambodians mostly
through starvation and overwork (n.d., 1-2).
3. Of course, historians constantly engage in the task of reinterpreting history. But
in postmodem wars, the dualisms of good and evil, victor and vanquished are constantly
reassessed. For examule. there is no consensus in the American ~ u b l i as
c to whether the
Vietnam War was a valiant effort by a democratic government to thwart the spread of
communism, or a brutal attempt by an imperialist country to defeat a movement of
national self-determination.
4. This explication of "postmodern war" is drawn from Cooke's discussion (1993,
179-82).
5 . MacKinnon has been roundly attacked for reducing the events in the former
Yugoslavia to the issue of pornography. Such an analysis cannot possibly do justice to
the complex historical, ethnic, and political conflicts that led up to the war, nor can it
explain why similar wars have not broken out in other East European countries that
have been similarly saturated with pornography. Critics have also pointed out that
MacKinnon has distorted the evidence to support her anti-Serb tirade, and that her
argument that television reports have switched the ethnic identity of victims cannot he
supported by the Helsinki Watch.
 Robin May Schott 29

6. Cooke's description of the women writers of the Lebanese civil war (1993,190).
7 . Cooke points out that intifada is a domestic term referring to the shaking out of
dustcloths and carpets. It was only when men recognized the women's successes that the
intifada acquired a capital "I" and became worthy of men's participation (1993,
195-96).
8. These examples are drawn from a series of articles in Politiken during the week
of March 14, 1994, about everyday life under siege in Sarajevo. Susan Griffin's book, A
Chorus of Stones; The Private Life ofwar (1992), beautifully weaves together the public
events of violence and war with the inner lives and memories of individuals.
9. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens" (cited in Cooke 1993,199).
10. I am thinking here of Denise Riley's argument against the use of women as a
theoretical category for feminism, although sometimes she admits it is necessary for
practical purposes ( 1988).

Bar On, Bat-Ami. N.d. Thinking about women and rape in Bosnia-Herzogovina: O n
trauma and its theorization. Unpublished manuscript.
. N.d. Thoughtless action into nature: The technologies of genocide. Unpuh-
lished manuscript.
Cohn, Carol. 1993. Wars, wimps, and women: Talking gender and thinking war. In
Gendering war talk. See Cooke and Wollacott 1993.
Cooke, Miriam. 1993. w - M a n , retelling the war myth. In Gendering war talk. See
Cooke and Woolacott 1993.
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