- My name is Dr. Dan Lesham,
and I'm the director of this center,
Kupferberg Holocaust
Resource Center and Archives.
For those who are here for
the first time, welcome.
Please take a chance to look around.
To make room for this event,
our permanent exhibit is set on the side,
but come back another time and see it,
and we're gonna have a new,
rotating exhibit in going up this week,
by next week it should be up,
on Hollywood and the Holocaust,
so please stop by next week and
join us for the new exhibit.
We'll have an official launch
event in a couple weeks.
Please, before you leave,
grab one of these catalogs.
It's our series of events,
and in here you'll find
the opening of the exhibit
on March 6th, so that'll help
you figure out what you want
to attend in the future, and
we also have a smaller brochure
that hopefully you have all seen
that details the events in this series,
which is this year's
KHRCA colloquium series.
The focus is on gender,
mass violence, and genocide.
If any of you had the chance to join us
for the first four events last semester,
you've seen what a remarkable
and compelling topic we have
and how interesting
our speakers have been,
and please join us for the
remaining lectures as well.
So this colloquium
series is in part thanks
to the support we received
from the National
Endowment for Humanities,
who was looking for a way
to help community colleges
like ours use the resources
that they already had
in cultural centers on
campus like art galleries,
like museums, and like
holocaust and genocide centers
like the one you're in right now.
We were able to get a very
large matching grant from them
where we raised money
and they gave us money,
and the idea is that every
year starting four years ago,
and we'll continue
forever into the future,
we're gonna have a series of
lectures on a topic related
to holocaust, genocides, or human rights
that'll be led by a faculty
member from this campus
and will be targeted towards
the students of this campus
and really will be focused
on introducing these deep,
substantive, complex, humanities questions
into courses all across the humanities.
So it's not just in a class on genocide
that you'll hear about genocide,
but that you can, in your sociology
or in your econ class, get
examples of real-world,
deep, complex, and challenging issues
that come out of the work
we do here at the center.
I think this kind of work is crucial.
The kind of education
you're here to get is not
just the memorialization
of dates and facts,
and it's not just the
special knowledge you'll need
in your careers in the future.
Our hope is that you'll
also gain a critical sense
for interpreting the world
around you and the world
to come in becoming
agents in affecting change
and in helping shape the world
that we will all come
to inhabit very soon.
So without further ado, I
would like to introduce you
to this year's faculty
coordinator, Dr. Amy Traver.
(audience applauding)
- Hi, everyone.
It's nice to be with all of you.
Thanks for being here.
After a series of cold days,
I'm happy to be inside with all of you.
Okay, so we're commencing
the second semester
of the 2015/2016 Kupferberg
Holocaust Resource Center
and Archives colloquia
series, as Dan said.
The title of this year's series is Gender,
Mass Violence, and Genocide.
As a reminder, this series
draws together expert scholars,
students, faculty, and staff in a study
of gender's influences on experiences
of mass violence and genocide,
so during the fall semester
of this academic year,
we learned a great deal about
what Dr. von Joeden-Forgey
calls life force atrocities,
the uniquely gendered forms
of violence that women
and girls experience in
the process of genocide.
As we analyzed the civil war in Bosnia
and the Nazi Holocaust,
we came to understand
that these atrocities often include,
but are not limited to, sexual
and reproductive violence
as well as the forcible
separation of families.
Our four spring events will
continue this comparative
and in-depth study,
offering additional insights
on gender, mass violence, and genocide,
and today's event is a great example
of the intellectual work
that we have left to do.
Oftentimes, our efforts to understand
how gender shapes human
social life focus solely
on the experiences of women and girls.
The reason for this are obvious.
Given the extent to which women
and girls experiences have
been ignored and suppressed
throughout history, they are
certainly due our attention.
But what happens when we fail
to consider men's experiences
in society, when we neglect
to examine the ideology
of masculinity that is so central
to our collective
organization of the world,
and what might this oversight
mean for our efforts
to predict, to prevent,
and to reconcile mass
violence and genocide?
So today's speaker, Dr. Adam Jones,
will help us begin to understand
the role masculinity plays
in mass violence and genocide.
To do so, he'll introduce
us to the concept
of gendercide, or
gender-selective mass killings
which have historically
targeted noncombatant men.
Dr. Jones is professor
of political science
at the University of
British Columbia in Canada.
He's the author of Gender
Inclusive: Esssays on Violence,
Men, and Feminist International Relations
as well as a dozen other books.
He was recently cited as
one of 50 key thinkers
on the Holocaust and genocide,
and he has worked as an expert consultant
with the United Nations
Office of the Special Advisor
on the Prevention of Genocide.
Dr. Jones is also the co-founder
and executive director
of Gendercide Watch,
a web-based educational initiative
that confronts gender-selective atrocities
against men and women worldwide.
Please join me in
welcoming Dr. Jones to QCC.
(audience applauding)
- Excellent.
Thank you very much.
Let me begin by thanking Amy and Dan
and everyone at the Kupferberg
Center for this invitation.
It's a great pleasure
to come back to Queens
and to look around at this audience
and see such wonderful
diversity in the faces.
We were talking just before this talk
about a recent book called Pax Ethnica
that looks at certain territories,
municipalities around the world
that have done extraordinary
things in encouraging
and accepting diversity,
and there's a chapter
in that book about the Queens experience.
In many ways, what I'm seeing in front
of me right now is an important aspect
of the project of genocide prevention,
that is to say encouraging diversity,
encouraging inclusivity, and
in presenting to you today
on the theme of gender, I
also want to promote a kind
of inclusive approach to the subject.
As Amy was hinting in her introduction,
I have done a lot of
specific work on the issue
of men and masculinities
in the context of genocide,
but it became to clear
to me fairly early on
that if I wanted to say
something valid on that theme,
it needed to be a framing
that was indeed inclusive
of the experiences of girls and women,
and particularly of the
frameworks and guidance
that we've received now from generations
of feminist critics and
scholars on these subjects.
I'll talk a little bit more
about that as we move along.
Let me just begin by
defining a couple of terms,
because unfortunately
when one gives a talk
on gender and genocide,
one is dealing with two,
as we call them, essentially
contested concepts.
Relatively few people will
agree on the parameters
of either of them, and those of you
that might be familiar with
my introductory textbook
on genocide will know that
chapter one contains no less
than about four pages of
alternative definitions
of the word genocide
that have been put forward over the years.
When we look at the concept of gender,
most scholarship and
commentary draws a distinction
between what we might call
physiological or chromosomal sex
on the one hand and gender,
which is presented basically
as the forms of cultural
conditioning that determine values
and identities of
femininity and masculinity.
My own use of the term
is a little bit different
and follows Joshua Goldstein's quote here.
You can refer to his book
for sort of exploration
of this argument, but he sees physical sex
and cultural gender as
being mutually constitutive.
He's skeptical about
easy binary distinctions
between the two, and therefore he, as I,
uses the word gender to refer to masculine
and feminine roles and bodies alike
in all their aspects,
biological and cultural.
To give you an idea of how
this works in practice,
when I talk about something
like the gendering
of a mass grave, I'm referring
at once to the sexed bodies
that are in that mass grave,
and I'm also referring
to the cultural patterns
and expectations of gender
that put those bodies there
or contributed ideologically
to very often
gender-disproportionate outcomes
or sex-disproportionate
outcomes if you prefer,
in these graves, so just keep that in mind
as we move along.
When we talk about genocide, of course,
we have the United Nations
convention on genocide,
which has established a kind of consensus
in the sense that nobody's
really very (laughs) happy
with it, and most scholars in the field
of comparative genocide
studies, which I'll talk about
in a second, have preferred to adapt
or develop their own framing of genocide.
Particularly, you may recall the
United Nations genocide
convention protects
only four categories of human groups.
Those groups are national,
ethnic, racial, and religious,
and leaving aside the fact
that since the convention
was drafted in 1948,
we're now much more skeptical
about terms like race,
which seemed very much to be essentialized
to the drafters of the
conventions, so there's problems
with the genocide convention's categories
but also with the fact that it is limited
to those four groups.
Some of you will know that
there was extensive debate
during the drafting process
about including political groups.
They were eventually left out.
Many other scholars have argued
for the inclusion of social classes.
A classic example of
that might be the Kulaks,
the so-called Kulaks under
Stalinist collectivization
in the Soviet Union during
the 1920s and 1930s.
A scholar named S. P.
Udayakumar has developed
a concept called poor side,
meaning basically the targeted,
intentional destruction of the poor.
These are social classes, but something
that is increasingly
well recognized, I think,
among genocide scholars
and reflects the fact
that we now have several generations
of predominantly feminist commentary
on gender issues is a recognition
that the genocide convention
does not protect gender groups
as such, and that could be not
only biologically defined women and men
but gender groups in the
sense of, for example,
LGBTI individuals and so on.
I'll come back to that briefly later.
So one of the reasons
that I took an adapted form,
Steven Katz's definition
from his book The Holocasut
in Historical Context is
that I like very much the fact
that he enumerates a range
of additional groups
that should be included
in this category, including gender groups.
He makes the important point,
which I don't really have time
to get into in detail but
I think is intellectually
quite fascinating, that these are groups
as they are defined by the perpetrator.
Just to use the example
of the Jewish Holocaust,
for example, what determined
whether or not you were murdered as a Jew
by the Nazi regime was not
whether you claimed that
identity for yourself.
Indeed, many of the German Jews
who were genocided considered
themselves to be assimilated,
or secular, or even to have
converted to Christianity.
Rather, the Nazis had a
particular biological definition
of Judaism based on lineage,
and that was applied to you.
You were a Jew regardless
of whether you claimed
that identity or not.
And another interesting example
perhaps is the European
witch hunts, for example.
Were those victims standing up and saying,
"Yes, I belong to the society of witches"?
No, and indeed, there
were no people flying
around on broomsticks at the time.
This was a figment of imagination,
but it was nonetheless
the kind of identity
that was imposed upon the victims.
And by whatever means at the
end of Katz's definition there
I think is also important
and pertains to the question
of structural and institutional
forms of violence,
which I think are very
much standardly left out
of the portrait of genocide.
We tend to think of genocide as an event.
No, we might differ as to whether
the Jewish Holocaust began
in 1933, or 1938, or 1941, but we feel
that it has a beginning and an end.
Attention to structural
and institutional forms
of inflicting mass mortality
allows us to recognize
that genocide can also be
a process and that it can
in fact be a deeply
embedded process extending
back millennia, and I think
that that framework is
particularly important
in understanding the
gendered vulnerabilities
of women and girls who may
receive a certain exemption
for reasons I'll discuss, may, I stress,
receive a certain exemption
from physically exterminatory
actions during genocide
and yet nonetheless may be vulnerable
to structural and
institutional forms of violence
that can exact a death
tolls many times greater
than even some of the
most severe genocides
on the human record.
So that's basically the
project that I've put forward.
Let me give you a little bit of a sense
of where I'm coming from
here and how not only I got
into the field of
comparative genocide studies
but how my interest in gender
issues was in fact the spur
to explore what was, at
the time, a very new field.
I did my master's degree on
a totally unrelated subject
at McGill University in Montreal in 1989,
and I was in Montreal on a date
that will probably not
resonate with anyone
in this audience but which
is very much inscribed
in the collective memory of
Canadians, December 6th, 1989,
when the largest mass murder
in Canadian history took place
at the Ecole Polytechnique
institution in Montreal
at a time when I was living a
couple of miles down the road.
A crazed and vengeful young
man walked into the college
with a gun, systematically
separated female students
from male students,
shouted out at the women,
"You're all a bunch of feminists,"
and gunned down 14 of them.
It still stands as the largest
massacre in Canadian history.
Unlike the United States,
we don't have one of these every week.
It was an enormously impactful
time to be in that city.
I was one of about a million Quebeckers
who filed past the coffins of the victims
at the National Cathedral,
and it got me thinking
along a number of lines,
one of them being the
continuing power of misogyny
in our culture and the way
that it can have detrimental
and destructive impacts
upon women and girls.
There was one comment that
surfaced in the aftermath
of the massacre, and it was
made by one of the young men
who was separated from the women,
and he told the newspaper,
"I assumed he was going for the men."
When the women were
separated from the men,
he assumed that the killer
wanted to target the men.
I had already by that
point achieved something
of a familiarity with a wide
range of global conflicts,
and it did strike me that to the extent
that I was familiar with such
processes of gender separation
for the purposes of murder
and genocidal destruction,
it seemed to me actually
that the vast majority
of cases would have reflected the reaction
of that young man that
one would have expected,
that it would be the men
that would be murdered,
not that the women would
simply be sent to a safe place.
Indeed, a whole range
of gendered atrocities,
particularly sexual assault
and sexual enslavement would tend
to be imposed upon the
surviving population,
but the physically
exterminatory dimension was
overwhelmingly directed to men.
I asked myself, "Has anybody
ever looked at that?"
And it still seems to me the case,
and it still seems to me very surprising
that until I published an
article called Gendercide
and Genocide in the year 2000, it seems
that nobody had ever
taken a kind of systematic
and global historical
look at that phenomenon.
I wanted to explore that.
I wanted to advocate around
it, and this, I think,
is one of the things that drew me
into this remarkably
interdisciplinary field
of comparative genocide
studies to which I now belong
was a sense that you
were not only engaging
in an intellectual exercise, oh,
isn't genocide interesting, etc,
but you were drawn to that subject
because you wanted to stage
some kind of an intervention.
And in my very.
I'll never forget a comment made to me
by a fellow attendee at a
conference in Switzerland
in the early 2000s, when
I was just beginning
to present on the broad theme
that I'm addressing here today
as well, and it was a bit of a tense time
to be presenting some of these arguments.
I think the debate has
evolved substantially
since that time, so I was a
little nervous and hesitant,
and I think she saw that.
She was an African woman
delegate to the conference,
and after I'd talked and she
was on her way out of the room,
she passed behind me, just
patted me on the shoulder,
said, "Good for you."
"Men need advocates," she said.
And it struck with me and has
stayed with me ever since,
because it really in some
ways flies in the face
of some stereotypical understandings
of men and masculinity, does not it?
That they are the power wielders,
that they are the
perpetrators of violence,
that they have a degree of invulnerability
and impunity that is not
extended to females and so on.
I wanted to get beyond those stereotypes,
but as I said, I wanted to
do that in an inclusive way.
I wanted to do it in a way that,
among other things, recognized that
the limiting of genocide to the category
of political and military
events was not going
to take us very far, and moreover,
that if one wanted to do
justice to the generations
of feminist thinking around
these issues, one really needed
to explore structural
and institutional forms
of violence reflecting
patriarchal ideologies in society.
And in terms of situating myself then,
particularly vis a vis feminist critiques,
I wanted to make sure
that this didn't become
just another kind of reactionary,
anti-feminist discourse saying,
"Yeah, what about this,"
or, "You're always playing the victim,"
the kind of stuff you hear
from the men's rights movement and so on.
In 1999 came another watershed.
That was the year of the interventions,
or the genocidal or
proto-genocidal outbreaks
in Kosova and East Timor.
I, by that point, had done some early work
on the former Yugoslavia, and in 1994,
I published an article you can find
on my website called and ethnic conflict
in Ex-Yugoslavia where I argued,
among other things, that if we were going
to have a really inclusive
gender framework, we needed
to be looking at a wide range
of gender-specific atrocities
against women and men both,
and this was very evident
throughout the 1990s in the Balkans Wars.
You're probably familiar
with the Srebrenica massacre
of 1995, when 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men
and boys were systematically separated
from the remainder of the
internally displaced population
and massacred by various means
and at various sites in the vicinity.
And as those sort of reports
started coming out again
from the battlefields
in Kosovo and after that
in East Timor, particularly
in the case of Kosovo,
I remember reading the news reports
and going, "Gendercide."
I've always had a kind of ...
I'm English by origin, so I
like to play with words, right.
We're sort of born punsters I suppose,
and I briefly paused to
congratulate myself for having made
such a notable new
contribution to the language.
Unfortunately, even back
then, we had search engines,
and I plugged the term in and found
that someone had gotten there first,
and the person who got their first
in 1985 was Mary Anne Warren
in a book called
Gendercide: The Implications
of Sex Selection.
She coined the word, but as you can see
from this crucial paragraph from her sort
of framing, theoretical chapter,
she rejected terms like
genocide and femicide,
the latter of which is
still quite widely used,
because they were not
sufficiently gender inclusive.
Gendercide is a sex-neutral
term, she writes,
in that the victims may
be either male or female,
and from the advocacy
perspective, there is a need
for such a sex-neutral term.
Notice, incidentally,
how she also goes back
and forth between gender and sex
without kind of collapsing the two.
Since sexually discriminatory killing is
just as wrong when the
victims happen to be male.
She goes on from there to spend the rest
of the book talking about
female-specific issues,
but it nonetheless gave me
something, a kind of peg,
to hang this framework on the combination
of an inclusive language and the sense
that a project of moral
advocacy around gender
and humanitarianism as
it related to genocide
also needed to be attentive
to the masculine men
and boys side of the coin.
Let me try to indicate
some of the ways now
where the introduction by myself
and others of a gender framing
in comparative genocide
studies has led us.
How does it help us to
understand ideological aspects
of genocide, but particularly the kind
of empirical dynamics
and processes and stages
that we very often see
in genocidal outbreak?
Genocide scholars are
especially attentive to the kind
of data that can help us
develop more sensitive tools
of recognizing potential
genocidal outbreaks
and potentially intervening in them
before they reach the level
of full-scale outbreaks of mass violence.
And I've argued in chapter
one of the same textbook
that one of the useful aspects of gender,
and let me just clarify
that I am not presenting
to you and have never presented gender
as some kind of magic key
to understanding genocide or stopping it.
It is one variable among others.
I'm gonna talk in a second
about how it combines
with other variables
in rather complex ways.
I personally think it is
one of the more interesting
and significant variables that helps us
to understand this phenomenon
and to develop interventionist
strategies against it,
and I have argued that the vast majority,
and perhaps the totality, of genocides
throughout history and around
the world today can be defined
as one of two types.
Either they are gendercidal,
which means physically
destroying selectively members
of one gender group, or they are
what is often called
root-and-branch genocide.
Have any of you heard that phrase before?
Basically, implying the total destruction
of all sectors of a group.
Think about the term for
a second, root and branch.
Where does that metaphor arise from?
What's the root?
What's the branch?
- [Attendee] It reminds
of eugenics, the tree.
- Okay, did you say eugenics?
- Yeah.
- Yeah, okay.
I think you're very
much on the right track.
I think it is a reproductive metaphor.
I think it is suggesting
that you are ripping out,
essentially, the organism
of that targeted community
at its reproductive roots,
and I think implicitly understood here is
that the root is the
female that gives birth
to the branch, which is the child.
I think what is going on here is
that there is implicitly a
sense that in root and branch,
that is totalizing genocides,
children and women are being
drawn into the target category.
Implicitly then, there
is a separate category
where they are not
or where they are being
exempted to a significant degree
from the physically
exterminatory dimension,
usually I stress, as a prelude
to inflicting other forms
of gendered abuse and atrocity upon them
that do not descend to the
level of total extermination,
and I should clarify
that my own understanding
of genocide, like Steven
Katz's, does focus very much
on the physical killing dimension.
I do feel that that has to
be there in a systematic
and fairly large-scale way in order for it
to meet the framing of
genocide that I use.
When we talk about gendercide
versus root-and-branch genocide,
we can talk about it as two
different types of genocide,
but we can also talk about it
as a phase model, by which I mean
that virtually all root-and-branch
genocides will begin
as gendercidal ones against
the adult male component
of the community.
To see that operating, there's
no need to look further
than perhaps the three canonical genocides
of the 20th century, the ones
that have received the
greatest attention and study.
In chronological order,
the Armenian genocide
of 1915 to 1917, the Jewish Holocaust,
which I personally date as 1941 to '45,
and the Rwandan genocide
of 1994, April to July '94.
In all three of those cases,
one sees a progression
from the selective
targeting of the adult male,
and specifically younger adult male,
sometimes what is called
battle-age male component
of the society, and that gives you a clue
as to why this is being done.
One might ask whether
it also gives us a clue
as to some of the different
origins of this kind of atrocity
against men versus women, that is to say
if you are a genocidaire,
a genocidal perpetrator,
and I do hope you will never become one,
you have a project to complete
which involves conquering,
neutralizing, destroying,
transferring, whatever
it is, a population.
Logically, and genocide is
standardly a very logical policy.
We want to think of it as some
kind of irrational outburst
of hatred, and it is far from that.
It includes a great of ideological hatred,
but it is also a rational
and often very successful,
from the perspective of the perpetrators,
policy to follow, and if you wish
to impose your suzerainty
over a targeted group,
you stereotypically understand
the adult male component
to be the group that is best
able to resist your designs,
and therefore even if your
goal is to exterminate
every last member of that population,
first you want to remove
those who are most deemed able
to resist your further designs.
So it may also be the case,
and frequently is the case,
that such discriminatory
killing of the younger,
predominantly younger
adult male population
of the society is necessary and sufficient
as far as the physically
exterminatory dimension
of the genocidal project is concerned.
And therefore, what I've tried
to present here is some examples
from roughly the last
hundred years of cases
where we see the physical killing bounded
by this kind of gendercidal strategy,
so these can be considered
gendercides as opposed
to root-and-branch
genocides, but also the way
that such gendercides often
serve as a kind of harbinger
or tripwire for extensions
of the genocidal strategy
to the remaining surviving
members of the population:
children, women, the elderly,
the disabled, everyone.
Now, the classic example of
that, the canonical example,
is the Jewish Holocaust.
That is probably the case of genocide
that most people think of.
How do we see these strands playing out
in the case of the Holocaust?
Many people date the onset of
the Holocaust to Kristallnacht
in 1938, the Night of
Broken Glass in Germany,
in the aftermath of which
30,000 Jews were rounded up
and sent to Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen,
and Dachau, and other concentration camps
where they were severely brutalized.
Hundreds were killed,
and the remainder were
freed only under coercion
that they would immediately
emigrate from Germany.
Every last Jew arrested
in that roundup was male,
and one of the arguments that I'll make
at the conclusion today is that that kind
of generalized mass roundup,
detention, persecution
of the male section of
the population is one
of the most reliable
indicators that we have,
one of the most brilliant
canaries in the coal mine,
if you like, that lets us know
that something large scale
and exterminatory may be in the offing,
and we should be, if we
are indeed interested
in stopping these process
before they reach they stage,
we should be very attentive
to those kind of dynamics.
1941, the Nazis invade the Soviet Union
with the Einsatzgruppen battalions,
the death squad batallions,
following behind the regular army,
cooperating with the
regular army to round up
and murder Jews en masse.
Look at how that project develops,
and you will see that in a
very short period of time,
we're only really
talking about six, eight,
maximum 12 weeks of the summer of 1941,
you begin with mass executions
of overwhelmingly Jewish men,
and just a few weeks later,
you're seeing now the dynamic
of root-and-branch genocide,
where whole families,
whole communities of
Jews are being rounded up
in the kind of scenes that
probably are best symbolized
by the massacre at Babi
Yar in Kiev in late 1941.
One can argue that the use
of the gendercidal strategy
against Jewish men was a form of blooding
and acclimatizing the perpetrators
to their genocidal tasks,
because Jewish men were
understood prima facie
by the Nazis to be dangerous,
and I will show you shortly
some of the imagery,
propaganda imagery, that was
designed to create that sense
of the satanic, not just the satanic Jew,
the satanic male Jew.
The population had been primed
to view that as the enemy,
and had they just been let
loose on the entire population
at the time, you would
likely have seen what you
in fact did see.
When the killers are set loose
against children, women,
the elderly, the disabled,
all of the groups that are
stereotypically constructed
in patriarchal society as
helpless, weak, defenseless,
and so on, the perpetrators start
to break down psychologically.
They start to exhibit a
lot of anomic behavior.
They start to seek to
avoid killing duties.
They start to drink
themselves senseless at night,
and that is the reason for the development
of the gas chambers, to
take the killing away
from those up-close mass
executions by rifle fire
which were producing
psychological breakdowns
among some of the killers
being forced to kill groups
that they had grown up
believing were defenseless
and helpless and should be protected
and to take them into a
more physically secluded,
sanitized kind of environment
where you have one
technical specialist looking
through a peephole to see that everyone
in the gas chamber is dead.
It's been long understood
that that was a way
of sparing the perpetrators the
kind of psychological stress
that up close and personal
killing with blood
and brains splashing all
over you as you're doing it.
It's rarely understood
the gender dimension.
Now, here's something interesting
about the Holocaust as well.
By the end of the exterminatory
program in 1934, '44,
even the Nazis have
come to the realization
that maybe it would be better
to enslave these people
and get some value out of them as opposed
to simply murdering them out front.
What happens then?
Men, surviving men among
the Jewish population,
become selected for slave labor,
because the stereotypical understanding is
that men are more capable of hard labor,
and women, certainly
women who are pregnant
or with children, at the selections
on the platforms in Auschwitz
and other places are sent
directly to the gas chambers,
and so by the end of
the genocidal process,
you are actually beginning
to see a gendercidal dynamic
that is disproportionately
targeting Jewish women.
That is very, very rare in
the history of genocide,
and it is in the sense
of actually selecting
between the two groups.
Shaka Zulu, in the mid-19th
century in southern Africa,
is about the only other
case I've ever read.
He was a despot who thought
that he could basically
incorporate out group men
into his army, but children, women,
the elderly didn't have
any military function,
so they could just be killed.
There's a logic to that, notice, okay,
but it's a logic that's extremely rare
in the history of genocide.
I think that's kind of
intriguing and worth exploring.
Now, I've mentioned that there
are other variables involved.
I've contended that no genocide has
ever targeted a given human community
on the basis of a single
identity, a single variable alone.
Let's again use the Jewish
Holocaust as a test case of that,
because I think if there
is a collective sense
that a particular group was once target
on ethno-religious grounds
for total destruction,
that is it, okay.
Well, I've already suggested and indicated
that there was a notable
gender variable operating
in that policy as well
and that indeed the image
of the Jewish enemy that
the Nazis are setting up
in their propaganda is very
much gendered male/masculine.
Jeffrey Herf, in a very good
book called The Jewish Enemy,
has argued that in fact the
Nazis constructed the Jews
primarily as a political
enemy rather than a racial one
and that it was the
construction of this notion
of Judeo-Bolshevik , the
notion that Jews were
in league with Stalin and communism
and incidentally in league
with FDR and Churchill
and capitalism, pulling all of the strings
behind the scenes, but that construction
of Judeo-Bolshevik, you're starting
to see a political variable coming in.
You could argue in some of the propaganda
that there's also a
dimension of social class.
Certainly, the Jewish enemy is depicted
as a plutocratic figure, the person
who is commanding the world economy,
the elite of the elites, right,
so there is an economic slash
or socioeconomic variable operating,
and without all of those
variables coming together,
you don't get the particular
outcome of the Holocaust.
And I think you can look at
virtually every other genocide
and see a wide range of
other variables operating,
and it's one of the reasons
that makes it difficult
to say that a genocide is being directed
against a particular
group because of its race,
ethnicity, nationality, and so on.
The variables can also
operate as a phase model,
and what I've tried to suggest
with this very simple diagram,
which is the only kind I'm
capable of constructing,
is that you see a progression
from a general targeting
of a broadly constructed group
according to nationality,
ethnicity, race group, racial, religious,
I've added political, social class,
the categories that are usually recognized
as being the targets of genocide.
Then, once that decision has been taken
to destroy or neutralize that group,
certainly weaken it to a
point of posing no threat
to the perpetrator's designs,
there will be further
breakdowns, and I stress this is
for the physically exterminatory
aspect of the genocide,
by gender and secondly, by age.
One might also say physical ability
versus disability might
factor in there as well,
that men, for example, who
are disabled might be seen
as less of a threat and might
be granted an exemption.
So the variables can come
into play at different times
at different stages of
the genocidal enterprise,
and again, I think this
helps us understand something
of stage model and perhaps
develop useful strategies.
Now, I've been speaking
so far about genocides
as traditionally understood
as political/military events
with clearly defined beginnings and ends.
The first challenge to that
in the genocide studies
framework was scholars
of indigenous peoples around the world.
Ward Churchill, the controversial scholar,
has a book called A
Little Matter of Genocide
about the North American
indigenous experience,
and the subtitle is Holocaust
and, oh my goodness.
The point is From 1492
to the Present, okay.
He's arguing that this
is a process of genocide
that has been going on
for hundreds of years,
and those who look
particularly at the fates
of indigenous people around
the world are much less likely
to adopt this kind of
event-based structure
and to recognize that these
can be very long-term processes
that in fact that can still be continuing
in particular forms today,
so that's one framing
that gets us beyond this
rather limited understanding
of what is genocide.
Another one I would argue
is attention to forms
of structural and institutional violence,
and I argue this not only
because I've long been interested
in the concept of structural violence,
but from an advocacy perspective,
if your primary concern is to
help alleviate the suffering
of the maximum number
of people, certainly not
to arbitrarily exclude
huge numbers of people,
how can you ignore the kind of structural
and institutional phenomena
that in fact give rise
to death tolls that can be
many, many times greater
than the political, military events
that we standardly refer to as genocide?
How many infant girls
throughout history have been
victims of female infanticide?
It's not purely on the
basis of their gender.
We could get into that some other times.
Obviously, age is a factor here as well,
but it clearly represents
a patriarchal animus
against femaleness that is entrenched
in virtually every
human society going back
to the dawn of history
and probably beyond.
Female infanticide and neonaticide,
meaning the killing of
newborns, and the subject
of Mary Anne Warren's
1985 book, Gendercide,
that is sex-selective abortion,
are some of the institutions
that have been explored in terms
of structural violence against women.
I've done what I can consider
a kind of plausibility probe
to see whether this
framing can be extended
to the subject of maternal mortality.
I was stunned early in my
research on gender and violence
to find out that five to 600,000 women
around the world were dying
every year in pregnancy
and in childbirth, and these are some
of the most grotesque
deaths that you can imagine.
Why?
Is it because they're in poor societies?
Well, most of them are in poor societies,
but there's also poor
societies, Cuba, Bangladesh,
in the Cuban case that have succeeded
in reducing maternal mortality
to below United States levels,
a much, much richer country.
Now, we start to see elements
then of choice and intent.
If you are a regime, and
it is your preference
to spend your hundreds of millions
of dollars not on maternal
health, or popular health
for that matter, but
on shiny military toys,
which seems to be the preferred approach.
Just reading yesterday that
Sudan's national budget
now goes 75% to the military.
That is an intentional decision.
You have the resources available.
Cuba, Bangladesh have shown you
that you can bring
about massive reductions
in maternal mortality with
rather limited investment
of resources, but you don't.
It doesn't mean that your
motive is to kill women.
Your motive is actually to
get nice, shiny military toys,
and feel macho and big,
and maybe bash the head of your enemy,
but that choice represents
an intentional depravation
of the resources necessary to sustain life
among a huge portion of the population,
and that death toll of
five or 600,000 per year,
which fortunately has
declined somewhat since,
is equivalent to the lower-end estimates
for the death toll in the Rwandan genocide
in 1994, repeated every year.
So why would we ignore
that if our concern is
about the intentional targeting
for physical destruction of human beings?
What are we missing when we
miss the institutional level?
Sorry, Women's nutritional
deficit, I think is one
of the most often neglected ones.
What does it mean to systematically
underfeed girl children
in the earliest stages of
their life versus boy children?
What are the health implications of that
and the destructive
connotations of those policies?
Honor killings, sati,
rape-murder I'll talk about.
We can talk also about a phrase
that has become quite common
in the literature in recent
years, genocidal rape,
which is in itself, I think,
reflective of structural
and institutional forms of
sexual violence against women.
Does it indeed qualify
as a genocidal strategy?
It has been accepted
as such by the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
and particularly when we understand,
think of the Nanjing
massacre in 1937, '38,
that the mass rape and gang rape
of women is very standardly followed
by their killing or is
the means of killing them.
Clearly, there is a
strong link to genocide.
What does this mean in
the age of HIV/AIDS,
where you can rape a
woman, and 20 years later,
she may be destroyed by the
act that you've inflicted?
So we're beginning to see some attention
to this sort of structural dimension.
Can we also consider structural
and institutional forms
of violence against men and boys?
I've argued that we can,
and I've proposed here
that certain forms of
military conscription,
which is, after all,
a form of enslavement,
when it comes to the kind
of human wave assaults
that are just throwing
away hundreds of thousands
of lives in kind of futile
battlefield trench warfare,
we really are getting
the kind of sacrifice
of an entire generation of young men
in some of these countries.
The picture at the top there is
from the Ethiopia-Eritrea
War of the late 1990s.
The death penalty throughout history
overwhelmingly targeted against males.
In the United States, I think
98, 99% of those executed
since the onset of capital
punishment have been men.
Vigilante killings and lynchings,
I've done some exploration
of this in the context of gender politics
in the U.S. South and elsewhere
during the Jim Crow period,
but above all, and I think
arguably the most
destructive human institution
of all time, more than
war, more than genocide,
or at least one of the most
destructive forms of genocide,
the phenomenon of corvee or forced labor.
And you might sort of
think of this in terms
of building the pyramids.
You might think of in terms
of the Congo Rubber Terror
or the Stalinist gulag camps,
both of which swept up millions
of respectively Congolese and Soviet males
and resulted in dramatic
demographic disparities
between the sexes after the period
of the mass atrocities had concluded.
Interestingly, there is a
convention on forced labor,
1930, international convention
on forced labor bans forced labor, right?
Nope, it allows forced labor
for one group and one group only,
men between the ages
of 18 and 45 years old,
and that is still international law, okay.
And why did that happen?
Because many states refused
to sign the convention
if it inhibited their ability
to conscript men for military duty.
That is obviously a form of forced labor,
and it was seen as essential
to the security of the state,
and so the same exemption for
battle-age men is enshrined
in international law in
a rather clearly gendered
and arguable gendercidal fashion.
One of the aspects of gender and violence
that is just beginning to creep
into the scholarly literature now is rape
and sexual violence against men and boys.
We've had very little sense of
how widespread this has been
in war and genocide going
back thousands of years,
the ritual castration, for
example, of out group males,
the bearing of their severed genitals
as kind of trophies of conquest.
And if one looks, for
example, at the experiences
of those detainees in Syria today,
you see standardly as part
of the detention, and incarceration,
and torture process
extensive sexual violence,
rape, including with inanimate objects,
is one of the most typical
ways of breaking down,
just as with the rape of women and girls,
breaking down bonds of
community, setting up all manner
of difficulty, and tension,
and anxiety between members
of the communities,
humiliating populations,
which is so much part
of genocidal projects.
You have to show to yourself
that the person you're
targeting is somehow subhuman,
and therefore you have to
humiliate and persecute them
into the kind of subhuman state
that retrospectively
justifies you imposing
your genocidal designs upon them.
As I say, we're just
beginning to explore this
and to realize how widespread it's been,
but for example, I think there's
some pretty indicative data
to suggest that the systematic
rape and sexual violence
against Bosnian Muslim men
during the Yugoslav Wars was
at least as widespread
and perhaps more extensive
than the systematic rape
of Bosnian Muslim females,
en main because over 95%
of those who were detained
in these prison and torture
facilities by the Serbs
and other parties were male,
a typical sort of male phenomenon.
I don't have enough time to
talk about the LGBTI dimension
of this, but I've done some
work, including on the subject
of rape and genocidal
rape, that shows above all
how threatening these
dissident gender identities
and dissident sexualities can be seen
in patriarchal society, and it is notable,
and I do not wish in any
way to discount the level
of discrimination that is experienced
by lesbians, but it is the
case that in, for example,
the most systematic
campaign, genocidal campaign
against homosexuals that we've witnessed,
which is under the Nazis,
it was exclusively gay
men who were targeted.
There were no legal or
discriminatory measures enacted
against German lesbian women.
That was considered irrelevant as far
as the Nazis were concerned.
As long as they did their
duty, quote-unquote,
to reproduce the race,
and the understanding was
of course that they would
be the pliant objects
of men's designs whether they were gay
or straight, that was
okay, but the gay male
under Nazism was an extremely
threatening subject,
because that male was not doing his duty
to reproduce the race.
He was a traitor to
the purity of the folk.
He was an effeminate
undermining of proud sort
of Nazi macho, militarist tradition,
and as a result, you saw
persecutory violence.
I think we see this also
in what we might call the
proto-genocidal violence
that is afflicted on LGBTI communities,
particularly against gay men and trans,
and in both of those cases,
you see groups that are seen
as having violated patriarchal strictures
in especially offensive or dangerous ways,
are threatening to the
mostly male power holders
in the society, and are therefore
seen as specific targets
for the kind of public brutality,
often public brutality,
and violence that you see.
Look also at the campaign
going on in Uganda today
against homosexuals and you will see
that is exclusively
focused upon Ugandan men.
Let's look briefly at the
dimension of perpetration
of genocide, because I've presented to you
so far, at least in the men
and masculinities concept,
a kind of victim and
survivor focused perspective
in large part because I think
that's simply been absent
from the picture before.
We have a kind of stereotypical
understanding of men
as bearers of power and wielders
of discriminatory and
persecutory instruments,
but that stereotype obviously is grounded
in a pretty obviously empirical reality
that the overwhelming majority
of genocidal perpetrators
throughout history have been male
and still are around the world today,
well in excess of 95%.
Why?
Is that nature or nurture
or a combination of the two?
There's one debate one can have.
Are men physiologically, hormonally,
biologically predisposed
to aggression and violence
in a way that chromosomal,
physiological women are not?
I think it's an open question.
To what extent do these
patterns of perpetration,
including the specific targeting
of out group men, reflect patterns
of intramale hierarchy,
competition, and conflict?
I think that can be usefully studied.
I think we get a lot of
really interesting insights
into the way that gender
is being constructed
for genocidal purposes by looking at some
of the propaganda that has
been used to accompany it.
These kind of images often are meant
to activate subconscious biases,
subconscious anxieties
and aversions within us,
and they're also meant to
marginalize and invalidate some,
the out group, and to valorize
and heroicize others, the in group,
and this will standardly
be done in gender ways,
I would argue because
gender identities are
among the most kind of intimate
and organic that we feel.
They can't really be taken off and put on
as easily as many others.
It's a particularly effective way
to activate people's
anxieties and concerns.
Here's a couple of images
that I've always found really interesting
from the Nazi propaganda, World War II.
Okay, there's the Nazi male,
but there's also the Nazi
female, the German female.
The male, the classic
erect, hard, impervious.
Sigmund Freud would have a field day
with that bayonet sticking up
from roughly the midsection
of the figure on the left,
facing outward against all threats.
Threats to what?
On the right, the woman is designated
as the bearer, as the
symbol of home, and hearth,
and domesticity, everything
which must be protected
about the folk, everything
about the fatherland
and the motherland that must be protected.
And I've often argued that
one of the best reasons
to adopt and inclusive gender framing
of these issues is because it allows us
to realize these kind
of relational aspects.
Different messages will be
sold to women and men depending
upon the gender identity
of both the regime
and its target audience.
I think also when we
talk about relationality
in the context of genocidal experience,
feminism taught us to ask a question.
Where are the women?
Revolutionary question.
If we also ask where are the men,
we often gain insights into dynamics
that might otherwise elude us,
and just a very quick example of that.
There's been a lot of attention
in the humanitarian literature
to the particular plight
of women as widows, okay.
This is a very widespread phenomenon,
and as you can speculate, I'm sure,
when a women loses that sort
of patriarchal connection
with a breadwinner, she
is often considered kind
of chaff in the society.
Widows were particularly
vulnerable to being targeted
as witches during the European witch hunts
and still are in many
witch-hunting societies today.
They're seen as objects of suspicion,
something not quite
right about them, okay.
Well, that's really
important, and I do reading
and work on widowhood as well.
Why are they widows?
What happened?
I think if you think
about that for a second,
you can see that there's a whole category
of victimization on, to
speak in binary terms,
the other side of the
gender coin that is implicit
in that construction but which
is not really brought out.
What has happened to the men
that has produced this
phenomenon of widowhood?
Likewise, if you wanna make a
point about raising concerns,
let's say about mass detentions
of the males of a community,
which is a very typical
pattern in mass atrocity,
what are the implications
on the other side
of the gender coin?
What happens to women who are left alone
after males have been detained?
What happens to their life chances?
What particular challenges do they face?
This kind of relational and
inclusive understanding,
I think, helps us forge
some of those connections
and also to develop new conceptual tools
and tools of humanitarian intervention.
I mentioned gendered propaganda,
and there's two examples
again from the Nazis.
The classic Der Ewige
Jude, the Nazi exhibition,
anti-Semitic exhibition that
toured in the late 1930s,
that was the propaganda poster for it.
Fascinating image.
I have reviewed a very wide
range of Nazi propaganda imagery
around Jews, and I can
count almost on the fingers
of one finger the number
of images of Jewish women
that I've seen in Nazi propaganda.
Virtually the totality of
them depict the Jewish enemy
as male, and they depict him as shifty,
corrupt, physically
gross, disheveled, dirty,
that's activating a lot of sort of health
and hygiene anxieties that
may be kind of subconscious.
Subversive.
One of the things that I
tried to do with that list
of terms above the images
is to show how many
of our standard terms of defamation
and abuse are actually deeply gendered,
and unfortunately, I think we can all kind
of play this game if you
actually think to yourself,
okay, imagine a demon.
Imagine a monster.
Imagine a terrorist.
Imagine a rebel.
Imagine a spy.
Imagine a subversive.
What's the face that comes to your mind?
Is it female or male traditionally?
I'm arguing that there's a lot
of implicit gendered implications
in this language that's
being deployed, and we need
to understand the
connection between the use
of this kind of rhetoric and phenomena
like the mass roundups
of out group males viewed
as being terrorists, subversives,
dissidents, rebels, et cetera.
On the right, actually, that's an image
from the Nazi propaganda
in the Ukraine showing the
classic Judeo-Bolshevik,
so here it's a
stereotypically Jewish figure
but now wearing the Bolshevik
cap with a red star.
We see the kind of
combination of the political
and ethno-religious dimension.
I think we see the gender
dimension writ very large.
We probably also see an image,
an aspect of social class there.
It looks like a kind of
vagabondish figure, doesn't it?
Kind of dirty, lumpen-looking figure.
Again, that combination of
variables including gender,
but here really limited to the
depiction of gendered males.
You can find examples of
genocidal propagandas,
I would define it, against females.
You'll notice first of all that the words,
the rhetoric I'm citing
here, are far fewer
than in the case of men,
and maybe you can think
of one or two that I've forgotten,
but I think this reflects simply
that under patriarchal society,
women's roles have tended
to be much more circumscribed than men's
and have tended to be
domesticated in the sense
that it is women's
reproductive capacity above all
that has been emphasized.
Likewise, a lot of the
genocidal propaganda directed
against women tends to emphasize
either their reproductive capacity,
such as, "Oh, they're baby factories.
"You have to kill women so
that they won't give birth
"to the next generation
of terrorists," right?
That's, again, a military logic
there to a certain extent.
Or their sexuality, and
when you see the image
at the top there, that's from a woodcut
from the medieval, the era
of the early modern European witch hunts.
You see the construction of the crone,
implicitly the widow, in
league with the supernatural,
a sense that women's gender
and sexuality naturally orients them
towards supernatural
connections or involvements.
This clearly is reflecting a lot
of misogynistic fantasies about womanhood.
And in the bottom there,
from the Rwandan genocide,
the targeting of Tutsi
women as being a kind
of sexual elite in the society
and of being a particular
subversive threat,
a kind of fifth column that
was able to seduce the fine,
upstanding Hutu males,
and you see very clearly
in the Rwandan genocide
incidentally not only a great deal
of humiliating violence and
sexual violence directed
against Tutsi women to
cut them down to size,
but it's one of the main
strategies that is used
to sell the genocide to
Hutu women in Rwanda.
It's like you've always been
told you were less beautiful
than Tutsi women.
Now, you have your chance
to take your revenge
and to humiliate them and make them dirty
and to make them far below
anything that you are,
and the Rwandan genocide
notably is the case
where we have, I think,
on the historical record
the highest amount
of direct female participation
among genocidal perpetrators,
probably not more than 10 or
15% among direct perpetrators,
but that's nonetheless many
times more than the norm.
I'll conclude with some thoughts
on where we go with this
and how some of these
insights may assist us
in developing more nuanced
and effective tools
of humanitarian intervention
in genocide and mass atrocity,
and let's again keep with
this rather boring binary
for the moment of women and girls on side
and boys and men on the other,
but addressing, I think, first
the particular gendered needs
of girls and women.
There's been very interesting
research done recently
about how the so-called
new or degenerate wars,
of which wars in places
like the Democratic Republic
of the Congo is probably
the classic example,
being the most destructive
military conflict
in human terms since the Second World War,
6 or 7 million people now directly killed
as a result of that, but relatively few
of them killed by munitions.
The large majority killed
by structural forms
of violence such as starvation, disease,
the breakdown of
infrastructure, the breakdown
of medical services, the
disruption of agricultural cycles
that is standard in these kind of new wars
where civilians are the targets.
We know that women are
especially vulnerable
to sexual violence in these conflicts,
that rape becomes seen as basically one
of the standard allures to
draw young men in particular
as perpetrators, so the way
that warfare is shifting
now, arguably, to become
more genocidal in itself,
to focus on the destruction
of civilian populations
is probably stripping
from women some of the limited exemptions
that they may have received
from exterminatory violence
in previous models of warfare.
Attention to rape and sexual assault,
including genocidal rape.
I think it's fair to say
this is now at the forefront
of the international humanitarian agenda.
I've argued that we need
much greater attention
to gendercidal institutions, to structural
and institutional forms
of violence against women,
because that is likely
to be the principle form
by which mass mortality
among females is engineered
intentionally, as it
has been for millennia
and is likely to continue to be.
And if it's true, as I've argued,
that there is this tendency
to disproportionately
or selectively target the males
of a community for killing,
as with the phenomenon
of widowhood or the woman
who is left alone while
a male is incarcerated,
there are very specific and
significant humanitarian needs
and policies that need to be addressed
to women in that particular
gendered situation.
With regard to boys and
men, I think we need
to move past our stereotypes
that they are never more
than the kind of bearers and inflictors
of violence and to recognize ...
And incidentally, it's often men
that often have the hardest
time recognizing this,
because it means acknowledging
masculine vulnerability.
I've been struck by the fact
that ever since I began this
inquiry, the majority of people
who've been interested in
it and have supported me
in various ways have been women,
usually self-identified
feminists, and I think
that maybe has something
to do with this reluctance
among many men to sort
of conceive of themselves
as potential victims and
survivors of violence
rather than the more macho model.
We need, I think, greater attention
to the background dynamics
of state repression,
the way that, for example,
mass roundups and detentions
of men that are not in and
of themselves genocidal
but may be the canary in the coal mine
that shows us that something
worse is on the horizon.
We need to understand the
way that the targeting
of that sector is often a
prelude to root-and-branch forms
of genocide and gives us a point
of possible intervention there,
and I also think that some understanding
of structural and
institutional forms of violence
and gendered vulnerability
are relevant in the case
of men and masculinities also.
In summary, I'm arguing that
a gender-inclusive approach
to the subject of gender, a humane,
and empathetic, and
advocacy-oriented approach
that does not arbitrarily
exclude any gendered category
of the population from
consideration or from empathy
and concern is most
appropriate to the project
of atrocity prevention
and genocide prevention
that we're engage in.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- So we have a few moments
for questions and comments,
and I'd also like to remind you
to fill out the evaluation survey,
which all of you should have.
If you don't, please let me know,
and I'll make sure that you get one.
And when we break, we'll
leave them at the back, okay,
but please, go right ahead.
- [Attendee] Under the topic
of genocide against gay men,
do you think men should
(mumbles) with AIDS,
even before it was called AIDS,
manifested itself first with gay men?
It took the government years
before they allocated
funds and made an effort
that I believe that
we're capable of doing?
- Yes, yes.
I agree.
That's a very good point
and probably does reflect,
indeed, some of the mindsets,
probably also some of the kind
of female and feminist-centered advocacy
around health issues that was
already rather well established
when the HIV crisis took hold.
Perhaps the absence of such advocacy,
the absence of such kind of
thinking, specific thinking,
about health needs of
males was a factor indeed
in that kind of stereotypical.
There was also, as I
recall from that period,
a lot of emphasis on
homosexual promiscuity.
These people brought it on themselves
because they're going out and having sex
with hundreds of men.
There was a kind of gay
masculine stereotype constructed
that suggested they had
lost control on some level.
They'd lost the type of
rectitude and masculine control
that was ideal, and therefore
deserved what they got.
Maybe in general we're
more inclined to say
that men deserve what they
get as opposed to women.
That's a pretty dangerous
kind of assertion these days
to make, that a woman is
asking for it, whatever it is.
We're perhaps less ...
I've often had comments, for example,
that, "Well, what do you expect?
"Sure, men are gonna be killed?
"They're the ones doing the fighting."
This conflation of the victim
with the perpetrator is very easy to do
in the case of men,
because they're all part
of the same gender class.
Boys will be boys, right.
So I think that's very interesting.
I'd also just like to
mention that in terms
of contemporary examples of this,
I mentioned the Ugandan case, but in terms
of actually genocidal
atrocities, murderous atrocities
where this is most evident
right now is probably Iraq,
and that was true even before
Islamic State took hold.
The kind of systematic
campaigns by officials
of the Shia regime, Shia-dominated regime,
in Iraq against gay males
in particular were savage,
and we're seeing it of course
also with Islamic State,
that IS considers any
homosexual man basically
to be a traitor to Islam.
Their typical punishment is
to be thrown off a tall building.
You may have seen examples of this,
but they will be executed for it.
I think there is no place
in the world right now
where the discrimination
against LGBTI broadly,
because this includes trans as well,
is so pronounced and so
close to being genocidal
as I understand the concept.
Thank you for the comment.
Yes, sir.
- [Attendee] Well, first of all,
as far as AIDS goes, back
then and to the present,
the religious right attributes AIDS
as God's vengeance against
sin, and on the day of 9/11,
one of the, I don't remember which one,
said that 9/11 was
because of homosexuality
in the United States.
And there's somebody
who's backing Ted Cruz
who was saying that it says in the Bible
that homosexuals should be killed.
- I think what we're seeing there,
I've been using the term
patriarchal ideology
as a kind of catchall, but given
that most societies have
been heavily religious,
it's always had a religious,
spiritual dimension and justification.
The hierarchy between men
and women is justified
because God determined it to be so,
and the designation of what
is acceptable sexuality
versus unacceptable is also considered
to be God given and so on,
so I would say that patriarchal formations
and institutions reflect
a wide range of influences
which we see writ very
large in the religious texts
and precepts of the
society in question often,
probably more the monotheistic religions
than others, interestingly.
- [Attendee] Okay.
No, I just had a question.
You mentioned earlier that, generally,
in terms of the LGTBQ
community that it is men
who are targeted, gay men.
- I would say gay men and trans women are
probably the two most vulnerable groups,
and maybe also trans men.
I'm not sure we've seen
much data on that side.
- [Attendee] So are there case studies
in which it's actually women,
lesbians who have been
targeted, and if not,
is it literally because, as you said,
it doesn't matter because--
- It doesn't threaten patriarchy.
- [Attendee] As long as they are
also fulfilling whatever--
- Right.
To my knowledge, there
has not been the kind
of exterminatory policies
directed against that category.
Obviously, substantial
discrimination, humiliation,
abuse, violent actions,
killings, selective,
but systematic, society-wide,
large-scale campaigns,
I'm not aware of one, so I would say,
and I would be brave with you.
Make me aware of it.
I'm not clear on that.
Go ahead.
- I just had a question.
When you defined gender at the beginning,
you were were talking sort of, said that.
This is my understanding.
Correct me.
You say it's both
physiological and cultural,
that it's a combination,
and I was interested
in how the perpetrators
would define gender,
if gender's even on their radar
or if they're more
interested in the physical--
- Yeah, I think it sort
of reflects the way
that we use gender instrumentally.
People talk about the gender
gap in politics, okay.
How do you measure it
in the United States,
the supposed propensity, for example,
of women to vote Democrat
and men to vote Republican.
We call it a gender gap, but we mark it
by counting sex bodies
of women on one side,
sex bodies of men on the other.
We don't say, "Okay,
you are a somewhat" ...
We don't get into sort of
questions of masculinity
and femininity and whether
a given individual reflects
more one or the other.
We just go, frankly, on the basis
of secondary sexual
characteristics, right,
so to a certain extent,
I think genocidal perpetrators
pretty much operate
on the same basis.
These are very rarely neatly
surgical operations, right.
Genocide almost by its
nature, by definition,
has a mass character, and
the kind of designations
that are applied are often very careless,
and often very loose, and
they're often very superficial.
Tutsi-Hutu in 1994 is
another example of that,
so my sense is that there is no.
I have never seen anything
like sophisticated thinking
about gender and sexuality
among genocidal perpetrators.
Generally, they tend to
reflect the most simplistic
and usually politically
reactionary understandings
of gender and then to
apply it in a very kind
of broad brush and brutal fashion.
- [Attendee] In terms of incarceration,
I'm asking (becomes
drowned out by static).
We have black incarceration,
even when it's an attack, incarceration.
Does the image of the
woman who's now the head
of household change in society?
Is she now seen as a man?
- Well, I think there's
a pretty good literature
around war, genocide, and
other upheavals of that type
that shows that they tend
to promote or coerce women
into nontraditional gender roles,
particularly if they find
themselves as heads of household,
breadwinners, which is generally kind
of masculine constructed category,
and you can view that
to some extent, some do,
in terms of new roles and
opportunities for woman,
or you can view it from
the perspective of a kind
of necessary, desperate response
to difficult situations.
You don't wanna think that
all of these women are saying,
"Oh, good.
"My husband's dead.
"Now, I can be independent,"
obviously, right.
I think this is quite
interesting to see in the context
of race relations in the
United States as well,
and the volume that I
put up on the screen,
Gendercide and Genocide,
includes a chapter
by my colleague Augusta del Zotto
on black male gendercide
in the United States,
and she's taking very much
the kind of structural
and institutional analysis, looking
at the ways that ideological
and institutional
formations have produced the
extremely high levels of
mortality among young black men
in particular, the kind of anomic behavior
that often leads to, we
could say, self-destruction
if we didn't see the kind of
forces that are behind it,
and I think it's a kind of
framing that is worth applying.
The anthropologist Nancy
Scheper-Hughes has a phrase
that I use a lot in my writing.
She has an essay called
The Genocidal Continuum,
and I think it reflects
something of what I'm trying
to get at with this
relationship to structural
and institutional forms of violence.
She's saying look around
us at our own societies
and see the kind of
patterns of marginalization,
discrimination, persecution,
exclusion, incarceration,
deprivation of liberty,
mockery, humiliation,
these kind of tropes and see
that they are part of a continuum.
She's not saying that
they are all genocidal
in and of themselves or
that they are all genocide
in and of themselves, but they have a kind
of proto-genocidal component.
They are the kinds of ideologies
of in group, out group, worthy,
unworthy that when mapped
onto mass killing enterprises
produce genocidal outcomes
but in fact are all around
us in our daily lives.
She looks at the phenomenon
of homeless in this society,
which is also a very gendered
phenomenon, incidentally,
and our ability to not see
the vagabond on the street
and to not grant, usually
him, sometimes her,
a full measure of humanity.
They've kind of been reduced
to the status of an object,
a kind of distasteful
adornment, a violation
of the expected order and
dignity of the public space,
and when you start getting
into that kind of thinking
about human beings, you're quite far
along a genocidal continuum.
It doesn't take much for people to say ...
What are we seeing
in the American presidential campaign now?
Immigrants are trash, and therefore,
or illegal immigrants
anyway, undocumented,
therefore what are the proposal.
The mildest ones right
now seem to be a form
of ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion,
and that's being seriously discussed.
The mass expulsion of 11 million people
from this country is being presented
as a pivotal part of
the political platform
of currently the most popular contender
for the Republican nomination.
I find that sort of stuff scary,
and I think it's important
not to think of something.
It's one of the reasons
I emphasize the logic
of genocide also, not to
think of genocide as something
that always happens safely
out there, over there,
done by people who aren't like me at all,
'cause I'm so nice, right.
We need to understand that
it is very deeply embedded
in human psyches, in human societies
and that very similar
patterns of marginalization
and exclusion can not only be
part of a genocidal continuum,
but if they take the form of structural
and institutional violence
as I described can
in fact be more destructive in that form
than traditional genocides.
Thank you.
Yes.
- [Attendee] I think you mentioned before
about this kind of there was
a sympathy for lesbian women
as opposed to gay men.
- I don't know about sympathy.
- [Attendee] 'Cause they weren't able to--
- Lack of concern.
To a certain extent, I
remember reading Pauline Kael
wrote a movie review of the Godfather
and was talking about the gender
politics in the Godfather.
She described this kind of mafiosi society
as a society in which women are not
even important enough to kill,
and there's a certain element
of that, curiously and paradoxically,
that the depiction of women
as being irrelevant can
grant them a certain measure
of protection if, as a perpetrator,
your primary concern is
with those whom you do consider relevant
in the sense of being able to
pose a threat to you, right,
but to a large extent,
a lot of the exemptions
that may be granted to females
in that context are granted
in a kind of paternalistic
and infantilizing fashion,
kind of the patriarchal bargain, right.
You get that measure of protection,
but in return we keep you safely away
from the realm of full
citizenship and full rights.
It's one of the sort of
paradoxical implications
of that, I would say, and to a lot of ...
Correspondingly, a lot of
the violence that is directed
against men, particularly
by others who are also men,
has to do with the power relationships
of the elite gender
class within the society
and the intramale dynamics of that.
A man who is above others in the hierarchy
or seeks to be will tend
to view that competition
in patriarchal society
as one with other men,
in which women are secondary to the matter
if they're even considered,
and I think that does help us
to understand some of the kind
of intramale, intramasculine dimensions
of these killing campaigns.
Hi.
- [Attendee] So with regard to a long form
of sustained event as
opposed to a singular,
one-time incident, it does seem
that in the case of
these extended periods,
there is some sort of mass event that sort
of falls somewhere within this long.
In the case of the Native
Americans, massive killing,
the whole time after we ...
So is there an incident of this
long-term, sustained process
that doesn't have just
one sort of a moment.
- Let's look at female infanticide,
an interesting case, because
we also tend to assume
that genocide is committed
by the state, right,
not that it's organized
at the grass roots,
but here, infant infanticide,
the reason you have
such a high death toll is
because you have millions
of individual households
making independent decisions
to murder the girl child.
You don't have a state
campaign to go into houses
and collect up all the girl
children and kill them.
It is the result of
institutionalized patterns
of discrimination and
thinking that are embedded
in the very grass roots of the society
and are fairly constant over time.
You could say that in times
of great economic stress
or deprivation, for example, girl children
perhaps are more likely to be murdered
than in other times because
of the economic dimension
to it, but you certainly
wouldn't see a kind
of event-styled eruption
of it, I would suspect,
and even if there was, it
would only be a small component
to the overall death
toll, I would suggest.
So that would be one example,
and I think even when you talk
at the level of indigenous
peoples in North America,
there are certainly eruptions
in the United States' context related
to, let's say, the Plains
Wars of the latter half
of the 19th century.
There are times
when direct physical
killing is more prominent
than at other times,
but when direct physical
killing isn't there,
what's happening?
You're still having the constant uprooting
of populations, Trails
of Tears, death marches,
populations being consigned
to barren reservations
where they can't sustain life,
and that's actually how the majority died,
and they've died over a protracted period
of centuries of those
policies being instituted,
so we're drawn to Little
Big Horn and Custer
or Wounded Knee as being kind
of somewhat symbolic
representations of that genocide,
but I don't think anybody
studying the experience
of indigenous peoples anywhere
in the Western Hemisphere
any would suggest
that really, the majority of the killing
and destruction is being
carried out by those
in those sort of narrow,
event-based contexts.
It's much more general policies
that over time become structural,
become institutionalized I
think generate those other ones.
Thank you.
- [Attendee] Yes, you mentioned
about the indirect factors
of genocide and that it
eventually also affects females.
I was wondering if you have any work
about economic sanctions,
which unfortunately continue
to believe that it's a sufficient tool,
but certain sanctions often--
- Yes.
- [Attendee] As well.
- I think that's a great example.
I have done work on sanctions,
particularly in the case
of those imposed on Iraq in the 1990s,
in chapter one of my textbook.
I call them genocidal sanctions
because of the massive
death toll they inflicted,
and given that so much of
that death toll was related
to the collapse of health infrastructure,
you would have to assume that
in areas like maternal health
in particular there would
have been a dramatic impact
on levels of maternal mortality.
I'm familiar with a really
good gendered reading
of those sanctions regimes.
Have you come across anything?
- [Attendee] Well, I'm from Iraq,
so I'm actually very
interested in the topic.
Through my experience, I've noticed not
just throughout the economic sanctions,
but after that, through work,
I got to see all the hospitals,
where the medicines were,
and the most recent expiration
is often by 2001, 2002,
which is way before the war,
all while hundreds of children
died annually in Iraq,
so it really directly
affect children and women,
because in that period of
time, men were selected
who were often force to
remain in the country.
- Where they would have at least been fed.
- [Attendee] Yeah, exactly.
- Maybe.
Yeah.
It sounds to me like an area
that needs some really nuanced research.
I'd love to read more about
that, and of course one can talk
about the Saddam Hussein regime
and its own genderical policies against,
look at the Anfal
campaign against the Kurds
in the late 1980s.
It was quite a classic.
There was root-and-branch killing,
but most of the component sub-campaigns
of Anfal were very classic,
almost Islamic State-style campaigns
of separating out men from the
remainder of the community,
trucking the men off to be
killed and buried in mass graves,
and then you set up.
I visited actually a couple
of these Kurdistani camps
in Iraq where overwhelmingly
children and women are kind
of left to fester in really
dire humanitarian conditions,
so his method of war waging was
actually very typically gendercidal.
The consequences of it in terms
of the sanctions regime imposed
on the general population
may well have had
a discriminatory gender impact
against women in particular.
I hesitate to use this phrase,
women and children, incidentally.
I don't like it very much.
Whenever I hear it, I think
what I hear is women are children.
You're kind of creating a naturalized,
essential relationship, and you're
also doing something a little bit,
many people are doing
something a little bit sneaky
where they're kind of drawing boy children
into a broadly feminized category in order
to generate big numbers,
like 75% of refugees
in the world are women
and children. (gasps)
That's a gender issue, right?
Break it down.
50% of refugees in the world are female.
50% are male.
How is that possible?
Because the children category
includes male children
as well as female children,
typically in countries
in the global south,
children under 18 are 50%
or more of the population,
and so when you add all
of the under 18s to
adult women, you get 75%.
If you add all of the
under 18s to adult men,
you also get 75%, but we
don't hear the phrase men
and children, do we?
And I think that's actually an interesting
and somewhat manipulative rhetoric
and a phrase that kind
of rolls off our tongue
in a way that I think we need
to interrogate a little bit more.
Feminists have done that,
I think, to show it kind
of does infantilize women
by linking them to children,
but I don't think they've
sometimes quite got
to grips with the way
that that's sometimes used
to generate these inflated statistics
and to make something
into a gender issues,
a specifically gendered issue
where an inclusive framing might
actually be much more called for.
I've done some writing on that dimension.
Thank you.
- All right, well please join
me in thanking (claps) Adam
Jones for his wonderful lecture.
(audience applauding)
Thank you so much.
I just want to acknowledge
our visitors up here
in the front row.
Some of them have already left,
but this is a wonderful
group, the young students
and staff from Queens College,
the Center for Ethnic,
Racial, and Religious Understanding
who have come all this way to join in
and to be a part of this discussion,
and I hope it's the beginning
- [Adam] Thank you very much.
- Of many future chances to
collaborate and work together,
so thank you all. (claps)
- [Adam] Great.
(audience applauding)
