Robin May Schott

War rape, natality and genocide

Feminist philosophy can make an important contribution to the field of genocide studies, and issues relating to gender and war are gaining new attention. In this article I trace legal and philosophical analyses of sexual violence against women in war. I analyze the strengths and limitations of the concept of social death—introduced into this field by Claudia Card—for understanding the genocidal features of war rape, and draw on the work of Hannah Arendt to understand the central harm of genocide as an assault on natality. The threat to natality posed by the harms of rape, forced pregnancy and forced maternity lie in the potential expulsion from the public world of certain groups—including women who are victims, members of the ‘enemy’ group, and children born of forced birth.

‘What is the sex doing in the genocide?’ A feminist philosophical response

This article reviews the literature on Holocaust and genocide studies to consider the question, ‘what is the sex doing in the genocide?’ Of the three answers usually given: (1) sexual violence is like other forms of genocidal violence, (2) sexual violence is a coordinate in genocide and (3) sexual violence is integral to genocidal violence, the author argues for the third position, but takes issue with Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that sexual violence destroys women as a group, thereby destroying the ethnic, racial, religious, or national group to which women belong. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the author argues that sexual violence is an attack on a fundamental condition for the possibility of the existence of human groups. When political violence is used to force biological birth in the service of death, it is a form of thanatonatality.

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (review)

To quote Freeland: “And what of evil? Evil was obvious in Murnau’s Nosferatu. It dwelled (sic) in the vampire who brought plague wherever he went. It was simply death, but no conversion or seduction” (275). In what way is death simple? As Ziarek suggests, death can never be recovered. Its location is contingent; it is “the outside as the irreducible residue of social formation” (21). Similarly, Freeland reduces the notion of the Kantian sublime to a duality de ned by the dichotomy, sublime/anti-sublime (236). She by extension reduces the uncanny to the anti-sublime—by implication again creating a stable dichotomy between the uncanny and something that might be terms the “canny.” Freeland’s method pushes her to create a set of rhetorically stable dichotomies. She attempts, in other words, to arrest the “becoming” of feminism as it seeks to articulate a position that by de nition must move beyond speci ed sets of binary oppositions. Finally, then, in spite of the rich analysis that Freeland offers, her method, or perhaps more accurately the claims that she makes about her method, “undoes” what might have been a signi cant contribution to feminist lm theory.