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Men, Masculinities and Genocide

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Book cover A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention

Part of the book series: Rethinking Political Violence ((RPV))

Abstract

This chapter highlights both the gendered invisibility in and the centrality of men, boys and masculinities in acts and processes of genocide and mass atrocity. It outlines how taking a critical masculinities approach can help in understanding the complex relationship between gender norms and genocidal violence. Although men play central roles as perpetrators, victims, survivors, enablers, bystanders and witnesses, they are seldom analyzed as gendered beings, with expectations projected onto them by society and in part internalized by themselves. These projections are not the same for all men, but interact with age, class, sexual orientation, dis-/ability, as well as ethnic or religious background. In a given genocidal situation, these may interact to push one group of men to become perpetrators, and force others into a position of targets of violence and death. By outlining such an intersectional, critical approach to masculinities at the macro- and micro-levels of perpetration, the chapter offers the required tools to develop a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of violence as well as of the gendered ideologies underpinning genocide.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example the edited volume on gendercide and genocide by Adam Jones (ed.), Gendercide and Genocide (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).

  2. 2.

    This relational approach means that, for example, what is considered “masculine” is defined in relation to what is “feminine,” what is seen as “heterosexual” is defined in relation to what is considered “homosexual.” See Henri Myrttinen, Jana Naujoks and Judy El-Bushra, Rethinking gender in peacebuilding (London: International Alert, 2014).

  3. 3.

    Jeff Hearn, The Violences of Men (London: Sage Publications, 1998), but also Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) and Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), Michael Kimmel, Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (New York: Sage Publishers, 1987); and Michael Messner, “When Bodies are Weapons: Masculinity and Violence in Sport,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 25:3 (1990), 203–218.

  4. 4.

    By way of an unscientific, one-off indicator: the 2016 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, which by now does have a strong and vocal feminist theory and gender studies section, only two out of 1384 panels had the word masculinity in their title.

  5. 5.

    For example Adam Jones, Gendercide.

  6. 6.

    Chris Dolan, Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda 1986–2006 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009) and Chris Dolan, War is Not Yet Over: Community Perceptions of Sexual Violence and its Underpinnings in Eastern DRC (London: International Alert, 2010).

  7. 7.

    Sandesh Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict,” The European Journal of International Law 18:2 (2007), 253−276.

  8. 8.

    Lara Stemple, “Male Rape and Human Rights,” Hastings Law Journal 60 (2008–2009): 605–645.

  9. 9.

    Dolan (2002).

  10. 10.

    Jani De Silva, Globalization, Terror & The Shaming of the Nation: Constructing Local Masculinities in a Sri Lankan Village (Crewe: Trafford Publishers, 2005).

  11. 11.

    For example Connell, Gender and Power and Masculinities; Hearn, Violences; Kimmel, Changing Men and Messner, “When Bodies are Weapons.”

  12. 12.

    For a discussion of some female perpetrators of genocide and other atrocities, and an analysis of their portrayal, see Laura Sjoberg and Caron E. Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007).

  13. 13.

    Hatzfeld (2002).

  14. 14.

    Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frakfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2006).

  15. 15.

    The most common English translation of this, “master race,” does not quite capture the explicitly masculine element of the German original, where “Herr” both means master and is also the masculine form of address.

  16. 16.

    Leila J. Rupp, “Mother of the Volk: The Image of Women in Nazi Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (Winter 1977), 362–379.

  17. 17.

    For example Nicole Loroff, “Gender and Sexuality in Nazi Germany,” Constellations 3:11 (2011), 49–61.

  18. 18.

    The literal translation is “bands of men.” These were male-only associations celebrating “virile” masculinity and homosociality.

  19. 19.

    Jürgen Reulecke, “‘Ich möchte einer werden, so wie die…’” . Männerbünde im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus Verlag, 2001).

  20. 20.

    See also Todd Richard Ettelson, The Nazi “new man”: embodying masculinity and regulating sexuality in the SA and SS, 1930–1939 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

  21. 21.

    Susanne zur Nieden and Sven Reichardt, “Skandale als Instrument des Machtkampfes in der NS-Führung. Zur Funktionalisierung der Homosexualität von Ernst Röhm,” in Formen öffentlicher Empörung im NS-Staat und in der DDR, edited by Martin Sabrow (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), 33–58. The Sturmabteilung was, until the 1934 purge, the main paramilitary wing of the German National Socialist Party.

  22. 22.

    Burkhard Jellonnek, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz: Die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1990).

  23. 23.

    Geoffrey J. Giles, “The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler’s SS,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11: 1/2, Special Issue: Sexuality and German Fascism (2002), 256–290. According to Jellonnek, Homosexuelle, 57 percent of those arrested in Düsseldorf for homosexual offences during the Nazi regime were members of Nazi organizations. On the inherent contradictions of military/militarized masculinities with respect to homosociality and male penetration, see also Aaron Belkin, Bring Me Men – Military Masculinity and The Benign Façade of American Empire 1898–2001 (London: Hurst and Company, 2012).

  24. 24.

    Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Both countries experienced several rounds of targeted killings of Hutus and Tutsis following the end of colonial rule, with the killings 1972 and 1993 in Burundi and in 1994 in Rwanda classified as genocides.

  25. 25.

    See for example Gourevitch (1998); Jean Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes: The Rwandan Genocide – The Killers Speak (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2008) and Malkki, Purity and Exile.

  26. 26.

    See also Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes.

  27. 27.

    Myrttinen et al., Rethinking gender.

  28. 28.

    Gourevitch (1998); Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes; Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Oakland: University of California Press, 2004); Welzer, Täter.

  29. 29.

    For example Dave Grossman, On Killing – The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996).

  30. 30.

    For example Belkin, Bring Me Men; Higate (2012).

  31. 31.

    Bernd Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten: Die USA in Vietnam (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, HIS, 2007).

  32. 32.

    Welzer, Täter.

  33. 33.

    Notably, those taking a stand were not from the unit carrying out the massacre, but rather a helicopter crew – highlighting the importance of peer-to-peer dynamics, in-group loyalty and subordination to command chains in maintaining unit cohesion (Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten).

  34. 34.

    Adam Jones, “Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17: 1 (1994), 115–34 and “Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion in the Kosovo War,” Transitions: The Journal of Men’s Perspectives 21: 1–3 (2001); TheProsecutor vs. Dražen Erdemović. In the Erdemović case, the ICTY reduced the defendant’s sentence upon appeal, accepting that he had committed the offences under the threat of death had he disobeyed orders.

  35. 35.

    Hinton, Why Did They Kill?

  36. 36.

    Ibid.

  37. 37.

    Henri Myrttinen, “Languages of Castration – An attempt at reading the message of an act of sexual violence in different conflict settings,” Paper presented at ISA Annual Convention, Atlanta, March 16–20, 2016.

  38. 38.

    For example Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, Welzer, Täter, but also in Joshua Oppenheimer’s (2013) extraordinary documentary film “Act of Killing.”

  39. 39.

    In Oppenheimer’s powerful film on perpetrators of the 1965–66 killings of perhaps over a million alleged communists, the male protagonists at one point decide to “lighten up the mood” of what they see as the rather dour topic of re-enacting the killings they committed by dressing up in drag and literally doing a song and dance.

  40. 40.

    Jones (“Gender and Ethnic Conflict”, “Effacing the Male” and Gendercide).

  41. 41.

    For example Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes; Malkki (1995); Theweleit (1977/1978).

  42. 42.

    Wolfgang Ayaß, “Asoziale” im Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995); Till Bastian, Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich. Geschichte einer Verfolgung (München: C. H. Beck, 2005); Günter Grau (ed.), Homosexualität in der NS-Zeit. Dokumente einer Diskriminierung und Verfolgung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-TB, 2004); Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat. Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer TB, 1985).

  43. 43.

    Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence.”

  44. 44.

    Paula Drumond, “Embodied Battlefields – Uncovering Sexual Violence against Men in War Theaters,” Paper presented at Workshop “Sexual Violence Against Men during Conflicts:

    Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice,” Geneva Graduate Institute, 26.-27.2.2015.

  45. 45.

    Dolan, War is Not Yet Over; Henri Myrttinen, Lana Khattab and Jana Naujoks. “Re-thinking hegemonic masculinities in conflict-affected contexts”, Critical Military Studies (2017), 1–17; Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence.”

  46. 46.

    Sivakumaran, “Sexual Violence.”

  47. 47.

    Uta Klein, “‘Our Best Boys’: The Gendered Nature of Civil-Military Relations in Israel,”Men and Masculinities 2 (1999), 47–65.

  48. 48.

    Caroline Williamson, “Genocide, masculinity and posttraumatic growth in Rwanda: reconstructing male identity through ndi umunyarwanda”, Journal of Genocide Research 18: 1 (2016), 41–59, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2016.1120463.

  49. 49.

    I have stressed the word “yet” as the teleological, modernizing project of the Rwandan state foresees that, in time, all citizens will have progressed on the path of personal and national development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Alert, London, United Kingdom

    Henri Myrttinen

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  1. Henri Myrttinen
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Correspondence to Henri Myrttinen .

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  1. Juris Doctor Program, Melbourne Law School, Melbourne, Australia

    Mary Michele Connellan

  2. Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Christiane Fröhlich

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Myrttinen, H. (2018). Men, Masculinities and Genocide. In: Connellan, M., Fröhlich, C. (eds) A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention. Rethinking Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60117-9_3

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