Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) tried and convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who raped and sexually enslaved Muslim women and girls, it broke new legal and philosophical ground. In addition to identifying genocidal rape as a crime against humanity, the court, in finding that the rapes violated the women’s right to sexual self-determination, created a new human right – the right to sexual integrity. In grounding this human right in a woman’s body, a body traditionally gendered and stigmatized as vulnerable, this book argues, the ICTY transformed vulnerability from a sign of shame into a mark of our humanity. Doing this, the court directs us to challenge current meanings of bodily integrity and human dignity insofar as they define human rights as protecting the invulnerability of the body rather than as guaranteeing the dignity of the vulnerable body.