scholarly journals Janus in the Metropole: Moroccan Soldiers and Sexual Violence Against Women in the Spanish Civil War

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 78-89
Author(s):  
Gema Varona

Approximately 80,000 Moroccan men fought on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. When the colonial wars ended, those men were recruited from very poor villages (some of them at the age of 16). Although the core collective memory that remains about those Moroccan troops (‘the Regulars’) concerns absolute cruelty, particularly towards women, they also form part of the history of the Spanish colonisation. During the Civil War, Franco’s General Queipo de Llano promised that the ‘castrated’ Republican soldiers’ women would know about the ‘virility’ of those Moroccan troops. Departing from fragmented historical data, this contribution presents a brief critical victimological analysis of grey zones and ‘Janus’ characters to better understand the complexities of victim and victimiser that overlap in the contexts of victimhood, accountability, colonisation, war and violence against women.

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 324-368
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Grantseva ◽  

For many years, representatives of Soviet and then Russian historical science paid special attention to the period of the Second Spanish Republic and, especially, to the events of 1936-1939. The Spanish Civil War was and remains a topic that attracts the attention of specialists and influences the development of a multifaceted Russian-Spanish cultural dialogue. There are significantly fewer works on the peaceful years of the Republic, which is typical not only for domestic science, but also for the historiography of this period as a whole. Four key periods can be distinguished in the formation of the national historiography of the Spanish Republic. The first is associated with the existence of the Republic itself and is distinguished by significant political engagement. The second opens after 1956 and combines the continuity with respect to the period of the 1930s. and, at the same time, striving for objectivity, developing methodology and expanding the source base. The third stage is associated with the period of the 1970s-1980s, the time of the restoration of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Spain, as well as the active interaction of historians of the two countries. The fourth stage, which lasted thirty years, was the time of the formation of the Russian historiography of the Second Republic, which sought to get rid of the ideological attitudes that left a significant imprint on the research of the Soviet period. This time is associated with the active archival work of researchers and the publication of sources, the expansion of topics, interdisciplinary approaches. Among the studies of the history of the Second Republic outside Spain, Russian historiography has a special place due to the specifics of Soviet-Spanish relations during the Civil War, and the archival funds in our country, and the traditions of Russian historical Spanish studies, and the preservation of republican memory.


1969 ◽  
pp. 655
Author(s):  
Jennifer Koshan

This article examines the issue of disclosure and the legacy of Stinchcombe through a review of the history of disclosure and production in criminal sexual assault proceedings and an analysis of judicial decisions and legislative enactments in this context. The author presents a feminist analysis of the tension between those representing the rights of accused persons who seek to access a complainant's personal records and the voices of equality-seeking and anti-violence groups that challenge stereotypes about sexual violence against women. The author presents a comprehensive review of the louver court decisions in production applications since the Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Mills. The author concludes that while Bill C-46 and Mills are positive developments, a great deal of discretion is left to trial judges to decide on the merits of production on a case-by-case basis, and such decisions are granted much deference by appellate courts. The exercise of discretion may encourage the application of stereotypes about women and sexual violence and is the reason an absolute ban on production is preferred by women's and anti- violence groups.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Crawley ◽  
Olivera Simic

The last few years have witnessed increasing discussion of sexual violence in the mainstream media and public debate in North America and elsewhere, especially with the most recent wave of sexual assault and harassment allegations in entertainment, media and public institutions, called the #MeToo campaign. Despite the view that men must be engaged in this conversation in order to be effective at preventing violence and changing deep-seated patriarchal attitudes, the place of male voices in this ongoing conversation is hotly in question. This article analyzes an unusual and controversial project by Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger, who, 20 years after Stranger raped Elva, produced a TED talk (2016) watched by over 3 million people, and a jointly written book, South of Forgiveness (Elva and Stranger, 2017), detailing their story of forgiveness and redemption. The first part of this article situates this unprecedented victim-rapist enterprise within the history of feminist anti-rape politics and men’s involvement in that politics, arguing that this project both instantiates, and critiques, an appeal to the ‘good man’. The second part analyzes the book South of Forgiveness as a survivor story that is more complex than the highly reductive format of a TED talk allows, and shows how its uneasy fit within the putative frameworks of ‘restorative’ or informal justice (as Elva and others claim it to be) is a function of the unacknowledged dimension to the performance in the form of revenge. The third part of the article turns to Elva’s and Stranger’s public performances that began with the TED talk and book tour, which we attended, to show how this function of revenge played out theatrically and implicates the spectator as bystander and witness. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of listening to male perpetrators speak against sexual violence against women and our responsibility towards these questions as feminist legal academics.


Author(s):  
Traci C. West

This chapter presents the interdisciplinary framework of the book and its core argument linking issues of racism and religion--particularly heteropatriarchal Christianity--in the cultural support for gender violence. It argues that the conjoined presence of religion, anti-black racism, and sexual violence against women in American history of slavery and colonialism compels a similarly transnational exploration of inspiration from Africana activists and scholars to address U.S. gender violence. A methodological overview describes the book’s theoretical foundations in feminist and womanist studies, and how tools of ethnography, anthropology, and Christian theo-ethics inform the its unconventional narrative approach. The U.S.-based analysis features snapshots of the author’s encounters with leaders and their contexts, not a broad survey or comparison of gender violence in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil.


Author(s):  
Anne Donlon

This essay examines the life of African American social worker Thyra Edwards, who traveled to Spain during its civil war, and returned home to fund-raise and organize. She created a scrapbook, a public-facing record of African American women’s efforts on behalf of Republican Spain, made up of photographs prepared for publication and articles about her efforts circulated in newspapers. This feminist perspective of the “folks at home” is a crucial addendum to black history of the war in Spain. Edwards’s scrapbook is a multifaceted document: a kind of autobiography that is self-conscious in its historical record-keeping, an account of a very broad black Popular Front, and a black feminist history of the Spanish Civil War.


Author(s):  
Michael Alpert

Sin pretender ser una historia de las brigadas Internacionales en la Guerra Civil Española de 1936-1939, este trabajo se propone examinar ciertos aspectos míticos asociados con las BB.II, en especial la cuestión de su eficacia la experiencia militar de sus jefes. Llega a la conclusión que, aunque el valor y el autosacrificio de los internacionales son innegables, y pese a que se les empleaba a menudo a las BB.II como fuerzas de choque, su presencia en las fuerzas gubernamentales no pasaba de tener una ejemplaridad moral.This article is not a history of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 - 1939. It tries to investigate certain persistent myths about the Brigades, in particular the question of their efficiency and the military expertise of their leaders. It concludes that, although the heroism and the self - sacrifice of the Brigades are undeniable, and despite their function as the vanguard in many of the batties, their presence in the Army of the Spanish Republic had a moral influence which far outweighed any military significance.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.


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