Violence

The issues of violence cut across national, racial, and ethnic boundaries and thus are international. They include abuse, armament, battery, capital punishment, crime, femicide, infanticide, militarization, pornography, imprisonment, rape, refugees, murder, sexual slavery, sexual harassment, sexual mutilation, street harassment, terrorism, torture, and war. Peace is the alternative to these various forms of violence—more specifically, peace that takes the form of nonviolence and social change, conflict resolution (mediation and negotiation), disarmament, peace activism, peace education, women's human rights, international peace organizations, and resistance and peace movements.

Sexuality and sexual relations are central to an analysis of political and national struggles worldwide. Recent sociological, anthropological, and political studies dealing with aggression, violence, war, and the role of women clearly indicate this connection. Aspects of nationalism and the ways in which they relate to sexuality and to women's traditional roles in society are also part of this complex.

GENDER AND EXPLOITATION OF NATURE

The problems associated with masculinity include aggressiveness and violence, which are linked directly with the political and personal exploitation of nature and women. Exploitation takes various forms, from exhausting and misusing the world's resources; to oppressing people of other races, sexes, and ages; to invading and/or dominating other countries or continents; to conducting an arms race. The consequences of that exploitation are death, destruction, and violence. It is a vicious circle that keeps repeating itself, as if human beings were incapable of breaking the chain of war creating valorizing codes of heroism and masculinity and then masculinity creating war. Only a different vision, different values, and a change in power relationships and in the social construction of identities so that they would be grounded not in dominance and submission but in a harmonized acceptance of differences could bring about harmony and a future of life and hope instead of wars and a nuclear holocaust.

GENDER AND INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS

Many studies have found a link between sexuality and national and international conflicts. Jean-William Lapierre and Anne-Marie de Vilaine (1981) see a connection between masculine predominance and the importance of war. According to those authors most civilizations are based on conquest and war. They explain how in so-called modern societies, politics, industry, and business constitute a kind of war in which men and sometimes women imitating men's behavior must be energetic and aggressive to have power. Miranda Davies (1983–1987) demonstrates how many women in the third world realize that although women may join guerrilla movements, participate in the economy, enter politics, and organize trade unions, they still are seen as second-class citizens, bearers of children, and domestic servants. Zarana Papic (1992) and Helke Sander (1992) remark that women's condition drastically worsened in the former Yugoslavia because of the civil war there. This holds true for most places that have experienced similar postmodern wars.

GENDER AND NATIONALISM

In Asia and Europe and North America, in old and new concepts of the term, nationalism is a complex component of revolutionary discourse. It can move among all the facets of political power. For example, nationalism in an extreme form can be fascism. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi (1976) analyzed fascist ideology in Italy from a feminine perspective. The collective irrational is at work in all human groups. Conscious and unconscious forces brought the masses to fascism, leading them from a transcendence of the individual ego into total allegiance to the Italian nation. The first victims of that racism, women adhered to it through a form of masochism that prepared them to make all possible sacrifices

Although nationalism has been necessary in young Arab states that gained autonomy from colonialism, as with fascism, nationalism has reclaimed many of the most patriarchal values of Islamic traditionalism. Lebanese writer, artist, and activist Mai Ghoussoub (1952–2007) analyzed how the political rights of women, although nominally granted by national states, are in practice a dead letter in military dictatorships in which suffrage has no meaning.

Sander (1992) noted how in the former Yugoslavia the strongest and most dominant parties express extreme forms of nationalistic ideology so that their nationalism rejects the national identities of others. Civil society is the first victim of this totalitarian, domineering, nationalistic ideology. The former Yugoslavia, which used to be, as did Lebanon, a country in which various ethnic, cultural, and religious groups lived in tolerance and relative autonomy and harmony, became a place in which human rights and especially women's rights were threatened because women were looked at almost exclusively as reproductive bodies whose purpose was to bring into the world bodies to kill and be killed. Sander explained how that irrationality is actually a rational manipulation aimed at leading people to accept the dominant, exclu-sive, nationalistic ideology with its cruelty and hatred for the other.

Croatian philosopher and writer Rada Ivekovic (b. 1945) has shown how radical nationalism is a mechanism of binary oppositions that in the long term invariably leads to war. Because women are less anguished about their internal frontiers and the limits of their bodies, they are more peaceful in regard to outside (political) frontiers; this involves identity and the way the subject (the one who acts) is constructed. Women are biologically and socially more open to the acceptance of the other in themselves, as is seen in the sexual act and pregnancy.

VIOLENCE AND MACHISMO

In societies that take pride in the leader, chief, or hero, the macho man embodies all the masculine values. Those values of conquest, domination, competition, fighting, and boasting, which allow one to get what one wants through lying and perfidy, transform the hero into the man with the gun—the militiaman. The man with the gun has a military role and an economic and social function. He uses the weapons of war to destroy and seize control of a region or another group. He participates in looting to benefit his clientele of family members and extend the range of his influence. Through the extension of his influence, he builds a system of wealth distribution and gains even more power. Material goods and gains are obtained through the gun and other weapons. It is a primitive system and a vicious destructive cycle rather than a self-preserving one. The more men desire omnipotence and control of others, the more weapons are used. The means of conquest are valued in proportion to their success.

The gun, the machine gun, and the cannon—masculine sexual symbols that are extensions of the phallus—are used to conquer and destroy. Some authors indicate that for some men there is a kind of jouissance—pleasure in a sexual sense—in war. It is for men the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: an initiation into the power of life and death. Elisabeth Badinter (1986) makes a connection between the experience of childbirth and war. However, there is a fundamental difference between creating life in the act of childbirth and destroying it in war. Even if the two experiences could be brought together, they would divide rather than unite man and woman.

The meaning and importance given to a military weapon and to the sexual weapon are equal. Man uses his penis the way he uses his gun: to conquer, control, and possess. In a macho society one tries to obtain material goods and territory not to enjoy them or out of need but to enlarge one's domain and authority. Similarly, sexual relations often are built not on pleasure, tenderness, or love but on reproduction, the preservation of girls' virginity (the honor of the family), the confinement and control of women to increase male prestige, and overestimation of the penis. Lapierre and de Vilaine (1981) have shown that this phenomenon exists in almost all civilizations, with hunting followed by war lying at the root of women's oppression. Bob Connell (2001) sees a relationship between masculinity, violence, and war, saying that it is not by chance that the great majority of soldiers are men. However, that connection should not be attributed to biology, which would absolve masculine responsibility, but to social and cultural factors.

GENDER AND RAPE

Susan Brownmiller (1975) has shown how rape is a conscious tactic of warfare. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) wrote about the connection between death, sex, violence, and male sexuality. Wilhelm Reich (1972) analyzed how repressed sexuality based on authoritarian family patterns is at the root of sadistic murders, perversions, psychological problems, and social and political conflicts. René Girard (1972) analyzed the relationship between violence and religion, tracing it back to sexuality, as it is expressed in human groups that often need a scapegoat to avoid violence that would lead to annihilation. Issa Makhlouf (1988), in an analysis of the Lebanese tragedy, which he sees as a collective fascination with death and destruction, described Lebanese males as having gone mad and becoming drunk from killing.

Through the ages men have been fascinated with war. At a deep level it has been a way to prove their existence, an expression of male desire. Desire closely linked to sexuality and the death instinct has been written about extensively by scholars from Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) to Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Sexuality connected with war, oppression, power, and aggressiveness has been analyzed by authors ranging from Reich, Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Foucault, Henri Laborit (1971), and Girard, along with more recent works by men who have pointed to the connection between masculinity and war (Connell and Poole [1985], among others). Those themes also have informed the entire body of feminist writing. How these issues can be articulated in contemporary societies and what avenues can be found for nonviolence and peace as a positive force are topics that have informed the work of a great many other writers.

VIOLENCE AND MALE THEORISTS

The difference between male theorists and feminist theorists is that the connection between sexuality and violence in men does not lead male scholars to want to change men, women, objectification, or dominant/submissive sexuality; in fact they celebrate it. In contrast the women scholars and a group of Australian male theorists want to change these conditions of female oppression and male domination.

Aggression and submission are at the core of the basic relations between men and women. Many theorists insist that these basic relations must change because they are the primary cause of forceful exploitation and account for perhaps the most significant common characteristic of sexism and the war system: rape.

Ivekovic notes that rape is a way for a rapist to capture what constitutes strength and power in women: mixity. She says that in the Balkan wars at the end of the twentieth century, as in many other wars, women exercised less violence, expressed more compassion, and felt a desire to help and understand the other side. The notion of mixity, hybridity, and creolization is developed by Ivekovic, who says that symbolically, women, more than men, represent a space of mixity, meeting, and mixing. It is the feminine principal that women create through mixing that is attacked by those who want to purify their origins, liberate themselves from the other, and negate the other. She shows how for men identification means exclusion of the other; for women it implies a paradox because women have to identify with the different or the other. For women nationalism does not signify exclusion of the other (sex) but, rather, coexistence, because identification with the father figure itself entails mixing and inclusion. Nationalism for women does not mean (symbolic) self-breeding, because identification is with the father figure, not with the mother figure. It entails symbolic breeding in and with the other.

Nationalism needs founding myths, and those myths usually say something about the birth of a nation and declare that one culture is more ancient, better, male, and heroic. The sexual dimension allows and structures a very important form of thought and one of the mechanisms for the symbolic construction of power: The dominant group has the power to represent God the father or the father of the nation. She says that Belgian feminist and cultural theorist Luce Irigaray's (b. 1930) research, particularly that on syntax, shows that generally, women do not place themselves at the center of the space opened up by their speech. They tend to ask questions more than they state affirmations. Their subject is hesitant, open to interaction with the other, oriented toward the other, and waiting for it (him).

GENDER, PLURALITY, VIOLENCE, AND SOME NATIONAL DIFFERENCES

The idea of mixing and blending leading to hybridity, plurality, and creolization is at the center of action and theory for peace. It allows one to see problems from many angles and to identify or distance oneself when necessary. Multiculturality can be viewed as a positive factor in these contexts. It allows one to be assertive and autonomous, rejecting traditional as well as neocolonialist values, and to struggle in the world for human values. Violence against women still happens in most cultures to different degrees and in different manners. Women in the Middle East are victims of forced marriage, required virginity, honor crimes, sexual mutilation, beatings, lack of freedom of choice, claustration, and veiling. One of three women in the United States will be raped during her lifetime; women will experience discrimination in the workplace and earn one-third less than what men earn with the same qualifications and in the same jobs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Accad, Evelyne. 1990. Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East. New York: New York University Press.

Badinter, Elisabeth. 1986. L'un est l'autre: Des relations entre hommes et femmes. Paris: Editions O. Jacob.

Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Connell, Robert. 2001. "Men and Violence." Columbia University. Available from http://www.health.columbia.edu/pdfs/on_men_violence.pdf.

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Morgan, Robin. 1989. The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. New York: Norton.

Morgan, Robin. 1992. The World of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches 1968–1992. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Sander, Helke. 1992. "Une Guerre de Mâles à l'Extrême." Cahiers de Genre 26: 207.

                                            Evelyne Accad