Gender-related and sexual violence against both men and women has long been part of a wide array of techniques to subdue “inferior races” and to enact the supremacy and dominance of “superior”, often white, ones. As explained by Connell (2000, 25), colonial empires were highly gendered institutions, which not only destroyed local gender orders, but also applied violence to impose a new hierarchy dominated by the colonizers’ violent masculinities: “This process was the beginning of a global gender order, and the colonizers’ masculinities were the first globalizing masculinities”. Colonial order was maintained through the use of various kinds of gender-related violence, including feminization (Krishnaswamy 1998). This gender order was subsequently contested and disrupted during decolonization and national liberation wars, which sometimes entailed the adoption, by indigenous communities, of Western-inspired militarized and violent masculinities. By the same token, in societies characterized by a racial-based order like the pre-1994 South Africa or the United States before the abolition of slavery, social control was frequently implemented through male sexual brutalization. Nancy Dowd (2010, 47) shows, for instance, how in the United States black masculinities were debased through the practice of lynching: “Manhood was at the core of lynching, a violent response to the perceived threat of black men being equal to whitemen. Lynching commonly included castration, and it was a public event”. The political performativity of sexual violence against men, enhanced by its public nature, enacted the subordination of the whole group to which the victim belonged. Similarly, Ross has demonstrated how, in the context of African Americans’ slavery, sexual violence against men including castrating and raping had been used in order not only to violently enforce a racist domination project, but also to establish the superiority of white masculinities upon the willingness of white males to commit such acts: “In symbolizing racial domination through rape, it is the act of genital dismembering rather than penetration, that signifies masculine supremacy. Proper manhood is defined not only by the normativity of the impulse towards masculine violence but more subtly by an injunction not to fear enacting such violence on others. The male who fears beating up a faggot cannot be truly masculine, must be a faggot himself” (Ross 2002, 315).
The use of sexual violence against men, and especially of sexual torture, during more recent international wars and interventions has been amply documented, like in the Congo by Belgium, in Kenya by Britain, in Vietnam by the Unites States and in Algeria by France. In Israel too, as explained by Weishut (2015, 79), recent examples of sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners can be interpreted as both a political and a cultural project: “Put in a broader context, sexual violence toward Arab men by non-Arabs can be viewed as a way to superimpose one culture over another and break down social codes”. But the example that has probably been the most commented on and discussed is that of the torture perpetrated in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. US soldiers and personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency have used sexual abuse, sexual humiliation but also rape and sodomy as part of interrogation techniques. “Militarized and masculine presumptions about the oriental other were at the heart of the acts of sexual domination at Abu Ghraib”, remarks Nusair, stressing how the simultaneity of sexualization and racialization of the Arab/Muslim prisoner epitomized the domination over a feminized (inferior) Other (Nusair 2008, 183). Pictures and videos in which male prisoners were “sexually dominated, degraded and forced to simulate homosexual acts” marked off the perpetrators’ “position as well as the nature of their domination over Iraqi others” (p. 184) through their hypermasculization and patriarchal authority. Guantánamo male detainees have reported similar practices. In all of these cases, feminization, racialization and subjugation of the “enemy” have been implemented through violence exerted on sexual organs, and/or through sexual means. As explained by Patricia Owens, what is primarily asserted through these practices is a hierarchy of masculinities, and the superiority of the masculinity of American combatants: “The hegemonic masculinity of American combatants, for example, is made possible through a continual effort to define its sexuality relative to the sexuality of inferior others, setting it apart and protecting it” (Owens 2010, 1042). Though the use of the concept of hegemonic masculinity should, here again, be qualified,[7] a clear mechanism of subjugation of non-militarized masculinities is at play. As such, the use of sexual torture on political prisoners is an instrument of power that glorifies the masculinity of the winner, and that prolongs other tactics of subjugation. Such practices are underpinned by colonial stereotypes and build, among other assumptions, on the supposedly specifically homophobic male culture among Muslims. Their main aim is to (re-)assert the international security order by reaffirming the superiority of some combatants (mostly Western) on others, thanks to a demonstration of their alleged stronger masculinity. But, as observed by Butler, the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo did not just aim to debase their masculinity, it also ambitioned to compel them to adopt their assumed “Arab” identity (2008, 16). In that perspective, sexual torture was doubly performative, by feminizing prisoners/empowering perpetrators and by coercively creating a Muslim figure along the lines of its assumed abjection and backwardness. Looking at the full repertoire of horrors that were committed in these prisons indeed demonstrates a wish to deprive Iraqi prisoners of their dignity, to treat them as trash—which echoes dehumanization practices described in the previous section. Prisoners have been urinated upon, forced to stand with human excreta smeared on their face, neck, chest and stomach, threatened by dogs and snakes and so on. Here, humiliation clearly conveyed a message of super/subordination. In all these examples, sexual violence against men belonging to other nations, as part of a wider repertoire of coercion, builds upon and perpetuates what Quijano has called the coloniality of power, which is “based upon racial social classification of the world population” (Quijano 2007, 171).
Episodes involving international peacekeepers as perpetrators of sexual violence against men confirm the idea that sexual violence is both an emanation and an enactment of the international security order. Peacekeeping and international interventions can even be described as colonial encounters that are often underpinned by rampant racist practices (Brodeur 1997). The recent example of sexual violence against men perpetrated by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic, involving French, but also Chadian and Equatorial Guinean soldiers (Deschamps et al. 2015) is very interesting in this respect. It suggests that the nationality of origin is less important than the actual positioning of perpetrators. By embodying a certain type of internationally dominant and even, arguably, hegemonic masculinity, peacekeepers enjoy privileges that are beyond local populations’ reach. In that sense, sexual violence exerted by peacekeepers, what Paul Higate has called “exploitative social masculinities” (2007), can also result from a mixture of impunity, and of cultural and socio-economic privilege. Further, it is worth remembering that UN blue helmets have been socialized and trained in national armies, and, therefore, often exposed to, and pushed to adopt violent and militarized models of masculinity.
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It should first be noted that, as the work of Frank Barrett (1996) on the US Navy has demonstrated, there is not one but several constructions of military masculinity. It is also quite clear that the masculinity “model” of those who perpetrated atrocities in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo was never celebrated as an example for other soldiers to emulate (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 58–87), and can, therefore, not be called “hegemonic”.