Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Working closely with women's testimonies from the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, this chapter aims to widen space in contemporary human rights discourse for discussion about sexuality--and in particular about the ways sexual violence functions as one of the forces of sovereign power. There is an intimate and largely non-visible strategy that sovereign power has at its disposal to cleave a subject from their capacity to live a human life, namely, by attacking the individual’s sense of sovereignty over her own body.