In her deeply engaging book, Laura Sjoberg documents how the invisibility of women perpetrators limits our understanding of sexual violence during war. Although they are a small fraction of wartime perpetrators, Sjoberg uses the existence of these “impossible women” (p. 58) as a lens to probe the gender dynamics that underlie sexual violence and war. She is careful to explicitly recognize that women are victimized disproportionately and to clearly state that Women as Wartime Rapists is not a study of women perpetrators. Rather, it is an analysis of how their “conceptually significant” (p. 93) existence—and also the neglect of that uncomfortable fact—reflect misleading misconceptions about sex, gender, women, femininity and sexual violence. Among those misconceptions she dispels: Women are easily discernible as such, have more in common with each other than with other social categories, are more peaceful than men, do not commit sexual violence (and on the rare occasions that they do, do so for reasons different from men); sexual violence is incidental to war; and because males are sometimes victims and women occasionally perpetrators, sexual violence is not gendered. Moreover, the book offers provocative insights into the gendered nature of violence in general, not just sexual violence.
The first two chapters introduce Sjoberg’s approach to gender as an organizing principle of social life, distributing “not only roles but power, regard and privilege” (p. 35). In any society, there is a spectrum of masculinities and of femininities that is hierarchically ordered. The violence of sexual perpetrators—both men and women—is structured by that hierarchy. To the fundamental question “what happens?” during sexual violence, she argues that it masculinizes the perpetrator—that is, it affirms and valorizes the perpetrator (irrespective of sex)—and feminizes the victim—that is, it devalorizes the victim (irrespective of sex). Much of the literature, however, constructs female perpetrators as “discursively impossible” (p. 54), relying implicitly on assumptions that women are “beautiful souls,” a cause to protect, whose essential role is to support those fighting wars. Sjoberg further asserts that “[g]ender orders in global politics . . . are central to understanding the meaning, causes, and dynamics of violence in global politics” (pp. 57–58). In short, gender and war are “co-constituted”: traditional gender orders are a “condition of possibility” (p. 41) for warfare; militarisms and violence are masculinist; and strategies of war rest on gendered structures of devalorization. One need not concur with all these claims—because, for example, some effective armed organizations rely on non-masculinist militarisms—to benefit from her insights into sexual violence during war.
In the third chapter, Sjoberg documents participation in sexual violence by female perpetrators in Sudan, Armenia, Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda against girls and women, as well as (in a few cases) against sexual and gender minorities. Participation takes a variety of forms, including singing as male perpetrators rape, condoning sexual slavery, delivering victims to perpetrators, planning rape, ordering rape, and raping with objects.
The fourth chapter, the work’s core, lays out a theory of violence that is not limited to men as perpetrators and women as victims. Sjoberg argues that the gendered orders of social and political life “incentivize masculinism in self and feminization of the Other, individually and collectively, in war and conflict—in men and women” (p. 145; emphasis in original). Those incentives are as strong for people identified as women as for those identified as men, but “access to the tools of gender subordination is not equally distributed,” and thus men are more likely to be perpetrators than women (pp. 144–45). The chapter culminates in Sjoberg’s conceptualization of wartime sexual violence as a “gendered, embodied, intimate, and iterated social practice, enacted within the context of the background knowledges of normalization, repetition, and gender subordination” (p. 156). Because it is socially patterned, it “produces social recognition, by perpetrators, by victims, and by targets” (not necessarily the victim, but her/his community, or the perpetrator’s peers or allies; p. 152), perhaps communicating different messages to distinct audiences. For the author, sexual violence during war and peacetime are not the same, but sexual violence in peacetime legitimates and makes possible gendered and sexual practices during war. Because gender hierarchies are power relationships, however, they are malleable, and the “interruption of gendered orders can be used as a weapon in conflict” (p. 144; emphasis added).
In the following chapters, Sjoberg traces the implications for criminal jurisprudence: The approach would lead to more just processes by legally recognizing more victims and also more perpetrators. Acknowledging women as rapists through paying “as much attention (if not more) to the gendered dynamics of perpetration and victimization as to the sex, gender, or sexuality of the perpetrator(s),” she concludes, forces us to reconsider “what women are, what men are, what sexual violence in war and conflict is, what conflict is, what perpetration is, what victimization is” (p. 210).
The achievements of the book are many: In a coherent, consistent theoretical framework, Sjoberg accounts for the perpetration of wartime sexual violence by women, the targeting of boys and men by both men and women, and the deployment of specifically sexual violence to denigrate and humiliate. With further elaboration, it should account as well for the targeting of sexual and gender minorities, an emerging theme in the literature, and also for women targeting men, a topic little developed in the book.
It is not clear, however, that Sjoberg’s theory can account for the absence of wartime rape on the part of many armed organizations (see Elisabeth Jean Wood, “When Is Wartime Rape Rare?” Politics and Society, 37[1], 2009, and Amelia Hoover Green, “The Commander’s Dilemma,” Journal of Peace Research, 53[5], 2017). While acknowledging that conflict may interrupt gendered orders, she overlooks that interruption may take the form of absence rather than innovation. In emphasizing the “everyday” nature of wartime sexual violence, Sjoberg underemphasizes the capacity of some armed organizations to resocialize combatants to new gender norms and hierarchies—sometimes toward more frequent sexual violence against new types of victims with innovative brutality, but sometimes toward much less frequent sexual violence.
Relatedly, it is important to ask: Under what conditions does sexual violence against those above the perpetrator in the hierarchy occur? Upward violence to devalorize the victim is often more accessible, conceptually as well as materially, in conflict than in peacetime.
More fundamentally, this reader found that Sjoberg’s sophistication in analyzing the gendered social dynamics of perpetration would have been enhanced by a similarly sophisticated analysis of the complex variation in patterns of sexual violence in general and of rape in particular. That well-documented variation in form, frequency, and targeting raises a question not much explored by the author, whether the same gendered social dynamics drive the sexual enslavement of Yazidi girls and women by the Islamic State, rape during operations of Vietnamese girls and women by U.S. forces in Vietnam, sexual torture by the Syrian government, and forced abortion within the ranks of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). She rarely disaggregates sexual violence into its distinct forms, which may be driven by distinct mechanisms. Similarly, Sjoberg recognizes that sexual violence is sometimes strategically deployed as a weapon and is sometimes the result of “disorder and lawlessness” (p. 177), but she does not explore the conditions under which each occurs (on these themes, see Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape as a Practice of War: Towards a Typology of Political Violence,” forthcoming in Politics and Society. My use of “practice” is narrower than Sjoberg’s: Rape occurs as a “practice” when it is tolerated but not ordered or authorized by commanders.)
These limitations notwithstanding, Women as Wartime Rapists advances an important argument—that gender orders are complex hierarchies that legitimize and structure sexual violence during conflict—with compelling implications. It should be read by all scholars of violence, not just those who work on gender. Readers who are not versed in the concepts of feminist theory may find some of the prose difficult, but it is well worth the effort as there is much to learn from this powerful work.
