What is Sexual about Sexual Violence?

Abstract

Responding to the wider concern with how to understand the connections between sex and violence in the context of conflict-related sexual violence, this article examines how international criminal law constructs what is sexual about sexual violence. The article adopts a narrative expressivist approach to the knowledge generating effects of international criminal proceedings, using a discourse analysis of judgments and trial transcripts to demonstrate how ‘the sexual’ in sexual violence emerges in the judgments of international criminal courts primarily as a social question, in how sexual violence injures the conjugal order of the community to which victims belong. Drawing on the concept of sexual subjectivity, the article nevertheless reveals how some testimonies during the proceedings of international criminal trials go beyond this dominant narrative, offering instead a perspective that captures the specifically sexualized harm inflicted on individuals by sexual violation. The article ultimately exposes how the dominant narrative of sexual violence that emerges through the judgments of international criminal courts tends to overlook the injury to individual sexual subjectivity inflicted by sexual violence and, in doing so, functions to discount victims’ full subjectivity, including in their sexual lives.