ex-Yugoslavia: Publication: "The Body of War"

Žarkov proposes that the Balkan war was not a war between ethnic groups; rather, ethnicity was produced by the war itself. Žarkov explores the process through which ethnicity was generated, showing how lived and symbolic female and male bodies became central to it. She does not posit a direct causal relationship between hate speech published in the press during the mid-1980s and the acts of violence in the war. Instead, she argues that both the representational practices of the “media war” and the violent practices of the “ethnic war” depended on specific, shared notions of femininity and masculinity, norms of (hetero)sexuality, and definitions of ethnicity.

Tracing the links between the war and press representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Žarkov examines the media’s coverage of two major protests by women who explicitly identified themselves as mothers, of sexual violence against women and men during the war, and of women as militants. She draws on contemporary feminist analyses of violence to scrutinize international and local feminist writings on the war in former Yugoslavia. Demonstrating that some of the same essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality used to produce and reinforce the significance of ethnic differences during the war often have been invoked by feminists, she points out the political and theoretical drawbacks to grounding feminist strategies against violence in ideas of female victimhood.

“Theoretically sophisticated and passionately argued, The Body of War shows how women’s (and men’s) bodies are implicated in the war in former Yugoslavia and its aftermath. Dubravka Žarkov courageously goes where others have feared to tread, rejecting too-easy assumptions that this was just a conflict between ethnic groups. Her book is a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the ways gender and sexuality intersect to produce differences in ethnicity, thereby creating the pretext and the context for conflict and war.”

—Kathy Davis, author of The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders

“Dubravka Žarkov’s remarkable book brings new insights to bear on the feminist theorizing of war. Nuanced, complex, lucid, and empirically grounded, Žarkov’s powerful combination of the insider’s understanding, passion, and emotional attachment with the academic’s distance and rigor, makes this a hard-to-put-down read.”

—Urvashi Butalia, author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

Dubravka Žarkov is an Associate Professor in Gender, Conflict, and Development Studies at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She is a coeditor of The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities, and International Peacekeeping and an associate editor of Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology. See Reviews