Rejecting Angelina: Bosnian War Rape Survivors and the Ambiguities of Sex in War

Abstract

Before Angelina Jolie's 2011 filmIn the Land of Blood and Honey, about the rape of women in the Bosnian war, was filmed, a group of Bosnian women war rape survivors persuaded local government officials to revoke Jolie's onlocation filming permit. The survivors’ objections were based on a rumor, subsequently refuted, that the plot was a love story between a Bosnian Muslim woman and her Serb rapist. This paper analyzes these objections, their subsequent permutations, and the film itself in light of the relationships between gender and sexuality, nationalist ideologies, and the logics of war. I contextualize the objections raised and argue that the film ultimately fails to challenge conventional patriarchal and nationalist assumptions about wartime rape, sex, and gender roles in war, despite its seemingly provocative focus on violence against women in war. Ultimately, as I show, the film reinforces clear-cut ethnonational narratives of victims and perpetrators while leaving the gendered logics of sex and power unexamined.

The (in)visibility of violence: Jasmila Žbanić’s post-war cinema

“…The common invisibility of their memories, even when they become public through verbal recollection, makes explicit the problematic ‘limits of [Žbanić’s] knowledge’ and the complex position of her subjectivity within the gendered geopolitics of war (White, 2015: 182). In this way, the representation of violence through its invisibility and its consequences for the survivors unhinges conventional Western narratives about the Yugoslav wars (Helms, 2014; Phillips, 2013; Simić and Volčić, 2014), bringing the discourse back towards a global interrogation about the biopolitics of violence and strategies of resistance.…”

“… 11. Many commentators have underlined the difficulty of coping with violence from outside the communities involved in a conflict (see Helms 2014; Phillips, 2013; Simić and Volčić, 2014). …”

In the Land of Blood and Honey: A Cinematic Representation of the Bosnian War

“…With very few exceptions, the film and the director were highly praised for the result. 16 A comment often made about the film concerned its "authenticity": it was argued that the film showed the violence against civilians in the city and in the camp "the way it really was." The media also reported Jolie's accounts of her thorough research and many conversations with women, including actual war camp survivors: she wanted the scenes in the camp to resemble real life as closely as possible.…”

Working with survivors of war rape and sexual violence: fieldwork reflections from Bosnia-Hercegovina

“…Even though Serb soldiers carried out the largest number of rapes, it is important to underline that there were perpetrators and victims on all sides. 9 The dominant focus on the rapes of Bosniak women, however (see, for example, Allen, 1996; Helms, 2014; MacKinnon, 1994; Stiglmayer, 1994), has marginalized the experiences of Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats. This was one of the reasons why it proved so difficult to gain access to these survivors.…”