Description
In dominant global conceptions of wartime sexual violence, male survivors – if attended to at all – have thus far almost exclusively been portrayed as passive, humiliated, and indefinitely stripped of their manhood. The existing yet limited body of literature on the topic falls into a tendency of representing male survivors as silenced victims resulting in a re-victimizing narrative of voiceless, isolated, and completely marginalized male survivors without any agency. The displacement from their gendered personhood that male survivors are subjected to is therefore largely seen to also deprive survivors of their agency as a quintessential masculine trait. Yet, in our research we find that despite their gendered harms, male sexual violence survivors across different contexts also actively engage with their vulnerabilities and exercise myriad forms of agency. Drawing on empirical evidence from the former Yugoslavia and Northern Uganda, we analyse the gendered and socio-political structures that shape their agency and influence how they navigate silence and voice. We illuminate different instances in which survivors employed different forms of ‘engaged silences’ in order to navigate disclosure and to exercise control over the spatio-temporal proliferation of their testimonies. By systematically analyzing silence as a specific form of male survivors’ agency, we offer a more holistic examination of the dynamics of wartime sexual violence, contributing both conceptually and empirically to research on local/civilian’s agency in wartime and on conflict-related sexual violence.
