In Chapter 7 of The Curious Feminist, Enloe begins by describing the life of Borislav Herak, a Sarajevan man with a pretty normal, yet unsuccessful life. Herak worked in a textile industry, pushing a cart in the early 1990’s. He did not have a very good romantic life; it mostly consisted of reading pornographic magazines in his room.
In 1991, Herak’s life changed because of the war that arrived in Sarajevo. He was forced to flee to the surrounding mountains of the city and join the militia due to his current circumstances, whose intent was to pursue ethnic Serbian territorial control. This militia also committed many crimes against women and other citizens. By late 1992, he was captured by Bosnian forces, who would try him for murder and mass rape.
The story of Borislav Herak leads Enloe to question how a “nobody” can transform into someone whose face is the icon for the “Bosnian rapes”. She look to examine “How ethnicity gets converted into nationalist consciousness, how consciousness becomes organized, and how organized nationalism becomes militarized” (Enloe 101) by first exploring gender. Because Herak was a man raised to think of himself as needing to be masculine, he was more likely to follow orders such as the command to rape and murder women. If he denied such demands, his masculinity would be called into question. When Herak was interviewed, he told how he was ordered to rape young women, and did so because it was what he had been trained to do. This scenario that Herak was in (willingly or unwillingly), was one in which there was a social expectation that men be not only aggressive, but sexually aggressive. This reading reminded me of the DKE incident, in which pledges for this fraternity paraded around campus reciting a chant that was sexually aggressive and supported rape. Enloe's examination of Borislav Herak is very representative of the cultural dynamic that coincides with abnormalities in society, such as political, social, economic or sexual struggles.
I thought it was really great that Hanna related the DKE incident to the readings that we had for today. I think that both the story of Herak and the DKE pledges deals with the idea of men banding together, and no one being willing to step up and disagree with what the group is doing. Its like Enloe said, no man wants to appear weak in front of his peers. Also, I think that another good point that Hanna's blog is getting towards is the concept of men acting on their own accord or if they are just following orders. I think that a big concept that we have to consider when dealing with war crimes, is the fact that these men have been dehumanized in their training. This way they can act as "real soldiers" and they then less likely to question the authority. If this is the case then we have to wonder who it is that was giving men, like Herak, the order to rape and murder women. I thought that Hanna did a nice job of summarizing Enloe's chapter and I thought that it was really good that after summarizing she was able to relate it to something more recent and not directly associated with the military.
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