4 results
10 - Gender, Agency and the (In)Visibility of the Dead and the Wounded
- Edited by Lia Kent, Rui Graça Feijo
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- Book:
- The Dead as Ancestors, Martyrs, and Heroes in Timor-Leste
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 15 April 2021
- Print publication:
- 07 October 2020, pp 243-262
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Summary
Abstract
The official memorialisation in Timor-Leste of those who died in the struggle for independence has been a visibly masculine one, giving pride of place to those men who died in the armed struggle. This has been replicated at the private level, with new memorials to fallen ex-FALINTIL family members being erected across the country. While this memorialisation of fallen heroes is understandable, it invisibilises many other victims – women across the board and those of diverse gender identities, unarmed men, those on the ‘losing’ side, as well as the wounded and disabled. Apart from causing grief and concerned to loved ones, these invisibilisations hide the messy complexities of the occupation and undermine the state's own claims of establishing an inclusive narrative.
Keywords: gender, militarised masculinities, women, invisibilisation, memorialisation, narratives
Introduction
Two decades after the last Indonesian troops pulled out of Timor-Leste, at a point in time when the average East Timorese citizen has been born several years after independence, the fallen dead of the 1975-1999 struggle are visually more present than ever before. The valorisation of the heroes and martyrs of the independence struggle has been made official state policy. New, massive statues have been erected in Dili to commemorate dead leaders of the independence movement and the wounded demonstrators of the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991, and heroes’ cemeteries have been built for the unearthed remains of fallen FALINTIL (Forças Armadas para a Libertaçao Nacional de Timor-Leste – the armed wing of the East Timorese independence movement) fighters (cf. Leach 2017 and Leach, this volume, for a broader discussion of official memorialisation processes, national identity, and state-building).
In parallel with these state-led efforts, families have used their increased incomes to build elaborate and very visible graves for family members who died during the struggle – especially for those who participated in the armed struggle. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, this trend in private commemorations has been so great that the central government felt the need to intervene through the nation-wide Kore Metan Nasional. The dead heroes of the independence struggle are also routinely evoked in political speeches, especially as an admonition to the younger generations born after independence, who are now demographically in the majority.
17 - Unexpected Grey Areas, Innuendo and Webs of Complicity: Experiences of Researching Sexual Exploitation in UN Peacekeeping Missions
- Edited by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Aberystwyth University, Morten Bøås
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- Book:
- Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 12 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 June 2020, pp 243-256
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Summary
Researching sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict-affected situations and in relation to peacekeeping operations (PKOs) is a delicate undertaking. It is fraught with a range of challenges and sensitivities, from the ethical to the practical, the political to the legal. It is also a field that is problematically seductive in many ways (Henry, 2013a), one that seemingly allows for easy categorizations and for the researcher to side with the right side of history. Certainly, some issues are quite straightforward: cases of sexual abuse and violence, at times horrific, are unequivocally illegal and criminal. As discussed in this chapter, however, the issue of what constitutes exploitation and how to react to it is far less clear-cut. What is also evident is that efforts to end SEA/SGBV in UN or UN-mandated PKOs have been unsuccessful in spite of decades of knowledge of the issue and numerous action plans (Dahrendorf, 2006; Martin, 2005). The reasons for why this is so, however, are less evident. The academic and policy fields are also divided and highly politicized: while there is broad consensus on the need to end SEA/SGBV, and most academics and policymakers are working in the same direction, there are major political fights. Issues such as which categories of victims/survivors should be recognized, what the best way to address prostitution/commercial sex work would be, or how to deal with consensual sex are all highly, and acrimoniously, contested.
I will focus here less on the issue of SEA/SGBV and the responses (or lack thereof), and more on some of the murkiness and dilemmas, gaps, methodological issues and ethical challenges that I encountered in conducting research on these issues. I focus, in particular, on sexual exploitation rather than SGBV or sexual abuse, as it is here that I felt the greatest challenges lie. After a brief digression to my experiences starting out on researching SEA/SGBV in Timor-Leste, I will examine some of the grey areas related to the theoretically black-and-white issue of SEA in PKOs. This is followed by a discussion of methodological challenges of conducting research on these issues, especially on dealing with unverifiable data and the risks of collusion with interlocutors.
5 - Death Becomes Him: The Hypervisibility of Martyrdom and Invisibility of the Wounded in the Iconography of Lebanese Militarised Masculinities
- Edited by Catherine Baker, University of Hull
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- Book:
- Making War on Bodies
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 22 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2020, pp 121-147
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Summary
Walking through the streets of Lebanese cities or driving through the countryside, one is confronted with diverse images of people: male and female models in advertisements living up to the latest conventional Western and/or Arab beauty standards; Christian and Shi’a holy men and the occasional Virgin Mary or Christian woman saint; revered Arab singers, both male and female; as well as international football heroes, powerful political leaders and their foreign, regional backers – these latter categories all being exclusively male. Depending on where one strolls or drives through, one might also encounter depictions of men – and very occasionally women – in uniform, sometimes armed and sometimes not, some looking serious, some laughing, some shy, some defiant. These are, for the most part, the war dead – though some military men (but not women) may be revered in a similar way even if they do not die on the battlefield, as discussed further below.
The pictures of the dead, of the martyrs, mingle with those of the living, occasionally creating juxtapositions that at times seemed odd for me with my Western gaze. A photo of a recent casualty of the Syrian Civil War next to an advert with Lionel Messi touting Pepsi; a commemorative portrait of a Lebanese army officer on a wall, flanked by a poster in honour of the famed female Lebanese singer Fairuz (Nouhad Wadie’ Haddad) on the one side and Ashoura flags depicting Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, carrying a massacred child at the seventh-century Battle of Karbala on the other; a wall of photos of recent martyrs around the corner from a men's hair salon sporting adverts of metrosexual male models and the slogan (in English) ‘between heaven and earth’. The walls are a palimpsest onto which memories of different wars – wars of the early Islamic age, the Lebanese Civil War, the wars with Israel, the Syrian Civil War – are projected, mingling with civilian messages. However, in spite of visiting Lebanon several dozen times and actively seeking out these posters of martyrs, I have yet to see any depictions of the visibly war-wounded or war-disabled. Even the dead, in these representations, are able-bodied.
This chapter seeks to explore the hypervisibility of some war dead in Lebanon and the general public invisibility of the war-wounded and disabled, who in fact should be more numerous than the dead.
Vignette 2 - ‘Packing for Kabul’
- Edited by Althea-Maria Rivas, University of Sussex, Brendan Ciarán Browne, Trinity College Dublin
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- Book:
- Experiences in Researching Conflict and Violence
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 08 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 January 2018, pp 95-98
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Summary
I was in the midst of packing my rucksack for next day's departure for Kabul when I received the email asking if I would write this short piece on emotions and fieldwork. As always before a trip to Afghanistan, I had spent the previous days and weeks emotionally charged, questioning the wisdom of my trip. My pre-trip feelings circled around, if not fear, then at least very strong apprehensions around safety and security. In my head, I played through time and again what to do in potential situations of car bombings, kidnappings and targeted attacks against guesthouses for foreigners, which had all markedly increased in Afghanistan over recent months and years. Apart from my own concerns, I was also keenly aware of the price that I was also making others close to me pay through their own apprehensions regarding my safety. Although they might not always voice it, I knew that my parents, siblings, friends and colleagues would be worried, each inevitable piece of news of yet another attack in Afghanistan putting them on edge. Agreeing to write this piece, however, also raised apprehensions of a different sort, both around opening up publicly about emotions and around the risk of navel-gazing. Nonetheless, I wanted to write this piece and own up to my own fears and weaknesses.
I chose voluntarily to go to Afghanistan and many other conflict zones over the years. Unlike most of the local Afghans, I have a European passport, a variety of credit cards, travel and health insurance, access to embassies and the ability to buy a plane ticket in minutes. I am also white and a male, both of which are identities that unfortunately still, or perhaps increasingly, give me unfair and undeserved advantages in terms of mobility and access. Therefore, I can go into, move around and also leave conflict zones when it behoves me, as soon as I start feeling too uncomfortable. Thus my apprehensions are, to a degree, of my own making and choosing, and wallowing in them at times seems like a luxury, a self-made Western problem, and a perverse self-indulgence.