Redefining Disembodiment: The Body of Woman as Script and Function in the Ukrainian War

"Redefining Disembodiment: The Body of Woman as Script and Function in the Ukrainian War" explores the appropriation of women’s bodies as a mediating entity without power whose total destruction parallels the radical exclusion of the Ukrainian people through military force.

The recent horror stories from the Ukrainian war involve countless rapes of women and, in their wake, the added trauma of unwanted pregnancies. An uncanny déjà vu, such atrocities provide an appalling palimpsest of the early 1990s Bosnian wars whose crimes against women were recorded in Visniec’s, "The Body of Woman as Battlefield in the Bosnian War." The legacy of Visniec’s staging of the body of woman as a modality of political engagement embedded in the violent Bosnian wars rests on the powerful message it communicates: a way of thinking about the body’s imprint in the fabric of the war.