This essay examines how rape of women and girls by male soldiers works as a martial weapon. Continuities with other torture and terrorism and with civilian rape are suggested. The inadequacy of past philosophical treatments of the enslavement of war captives is briefly discussed. Social strategies are suggested for responding and a concluding fantasy offered, not entirely social, of a strategy to change the meanings of rape to undermine its use as a martial weapon.

In this essay I argue that war is not “above” gender analyses. I question in particular whether the concept of “postmodern war” is adequate to explain the intersections of gender with ethnicity and nationality, which underlie the sexual violence against women in wartime. The poststructuralist concept of the “fluidity” of the category of gender needs to be modified by an analysis of how “non-fluid” configurations of gender are entrenched in material conditions of existence.

Although my position is in basic agreement with the notion that war and militarism are feminist issues, I argue that approaches to the ethics of war and peace which do not consider “peacetime” military violence are inadequate for feminist and environmentalist concerns. Because much of the military violence done to women and ecosystems happens outside the boundaries of declared wars, feminist and environmental philosophers ought to emphasize the significance of everyday military violence.

This is a review of historical developments in international criminal law leading up to the inclusion of rape as a “crime against humanity” in the current war crimes tribunal for the ex-Yugoslavia. In addition to the need to understand the specificity of events and their impact on women, the laws of war must also be understood in their specificity and the ways in which even the humanitarian provisions of those laws privilege military needs.

This essay considers the social effects of the strategy of “speaking out” about sexual violence to transform rape culture. I articulate the paradox that women's identification as victims in the public sphere reinscribes the gendered norms that enable the victimization of women. I suggest we create a more diversified public narrative of sexual violence and sexuality within the context of the movement against sexual violence in order to deconstruct masculinist power in feminine victimization.

Domestic violence discourse challenges cultural acceptance of male violence against women, yet it is often constituted by gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchies. Transformative efforts have not escaped traces of these hierarchies. Emancipatory ideals guiding 1970s feminist activism have collided with conservative impulses to maintain and strengthen family relationships. Crime control discourse undermines critiques of dominance through its focus on individual men. Domestic violence discourse exemplifies both resistance to and replication of hierarchies of power.

Theories of discursive genres provide the philosophical and theoretical framework for the empirical examination of the ways in which immigrant women construct their cultural identities in contexts of violence. The claim of the paper is that the analytical genres of confessional and testimonial discourse enable the examination of the particular ways by which immigrant women both reproduce and resist power and violence.

Self-mutilation is generally seen only as a negative response to trauma. But when trauma cannot be expressed, other forms of communication become necessary. As gestural communication, self-mutilation can reorganize and stabilize the trauma victim's world, providing a “voice on the skin” when the actual voice is forbidden. This is a plausible extension of Merleau-Ponty's gestural theory of language, and an interesting comment on his notion of “reversibility” as essential to linguistic communication.

In this essay, I write memory across the public-private divide as a commemorative response to the Massacre of Women at École Polytechnique. Through five layers of remembering, I explore the creation of an analytic space that simultaneously considers traumatized subjectivity, bearing witness, and feminist pedagogy.

Scant attention given to gender in Latin American prison experiences implies that men and women suffer similarly and react according to their shared beliefs. This essay explores the prison memoirs of four Latin American women. Each account uses a standardized prison narrative adjusted to suit the narrator's own purpose and hints at how sexuality and motherhood, which shape women's experiences in prison, have been removed from sight.