The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media

In this chapter, the author examines newspaper articles covering the wars through which former Yugoslavia disintegrated, with the intention of showing how gender, sexuality and ethnicity constitute each other in the media respresentations of sexual violence. She begins from a somewhat unusual point: men as victims of sexual violence, not as perpetrators. It may be a surprise to many readers that men were victims of sexual violence during the wars in former Yugoslavia, which became notorious for making the rape of women one if its most effective weapons. In the gruesome reality of war, men are usually seen as rapists and not as raped. Of course, this is not only a perception. In most wars and conflicts, as well as in times of peace, the reality is that men are rapists of women. The author does not wish to deny that fact. However, she does aim to show that perceiving men only and always as offenders and never as victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence is a very specific, gendered narrative of war. In that narrative, dominant notions of masculinity merge with norms of heterosexuality and definitions of ethnicity and ultimately designate who can or cannot be named a victim of sexual violence in the press.