Brownmiller and The War Against Women

As a Peace and Conflict major, I spent a great deal of time in one of my classes last semester examining how women’s bodies are political spaces for carrying out war.  When my teacher first presented this idea to the class, I became particularly interested in how women’s bodies were violated in not just one specific case of war, but rather in every case of war our class covered.  In Levy’s “The Future That Never Happened”, Brownmiller takes a very strong stance on how rape and pornography exemplify the political nature of a woman’s body.  According to Brownmiller, “‘rapists were merely the ‘front-line masculine shock troops’ in the war against women, the ‘terrorist guerillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.’ And pornography was the ‘undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda’ that fed them,” (Levy 62).  Brownmiller is a bit extreme in this statement, but I think there is something to be said about the ways in which a violation enacted on a woman’s body can be linked to war, which holds the connotation of being extremely masculine.  

What I discovered in my previous class about gender dynamics and war is that women, despite the lack of their formal involvement in war, are quite crucial on the battlefield.  A woman’s body is actually representative of a political community/nation with its reproductive qualities.  If a woman’s body is violated during war, however, that woman and her community/nation immediately lose their strength and the promise of producing a strong future generation.  Although the act of war rape, for example, is an intimate and personal violation on a woman’s body, it is also seen as a highly political violation.  I think that Brownmiller is right in making the comparison between rape, pornography, and war because what better way to think of the body as political than to think of it existing in the most politicized environments.

An article from CBS News called “War Against Women” that I think is relevant to the personal VS political debate about a woman's body talks about how women’s bodies were systematically being violated in the Congo just a few years ago as a political act.  Although “The Future That Never Happened” does not really directly discuss women and war, I think that this article is useful for thinking in very explicit terms how a woman’s body can be seen as both a symbolic and physical war zone. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-3701249.html?pageNum=2&tag=contentMain;contentBody