While the two cases of Rwanda and Germany were quite different, along with the experiences of the female perpetrators within the regimes, perhaps the most striking similarity is the societal emphasis and resulting images emerging after the genocide. Despite evidence that thousands of ordinary women were participants in the genocide in both situations, society, and to some extent academia, has fixated on the sensational story. This is not too surprising considering the fascination their specific cases present and the media’s emphasis on and dramatisation of their stories in order to sell within their media outlets. Yet it is perhaps revealing that although cases involving extraordinary or sadistic males certainly exist and are well known, male perpetrators are still largely regarded as ‘normal’ people who reacted to situational pressures and even acted under normalised behavioural expectations.103 Female perpetrators, on the other hand, continue to shock and confound. Instead of interpreting their behaviours as the product of extraordinary situations and the ultimate result of human agency, portrayals tend either to cast them as deviants and aberrations or to quietly grant them impunity for their perceived powerlessness concerning the events.
The psychologist Steven Baum concluded, ‘[M]ost evil is the product of rather ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances.’104 His findings largely support the theory that cultural influences, rather than character traits or mental deficiencies, contribute to the participation and escalation of genocide, but this analysis has not been extended to female involvement.
While studies of male Nazi perpetrators have tended to focus on situational circumstances or a combination of situational and dispositional influences, rather than simply dispositional forces, to understand and explain perpetrator behaviour, the current discourse concerning female perpetrators has relied almost entirely upon dispositional understandings. While social and historical discourses have tended to present SS men as complex characters influenced by a variety of factors and motivations, SS women have been
103 For more information on the historiography concerning Nazi male perpetrators, see Claus-Christian W Szejnmann, Perpetrators of the Holocaust: A historiography’, in Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W Szejnmann, eds, Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 25–54. For a social-psychological perspective, see Leonard S Newman and Ralph Erber, eds, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 43–67.
104 Steven K Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 170.
portrayed as sexually depraved monsters or wayward, easily manipulated females. In a similar fashion, male participants in the Rwandan genocide have also largely been deemed to be ordinary men caught up in an extreme situation.105 The image of a singular crazed, sexually driven male Hutu soldier simply does not exist, despite evidence that particular individuals certainly did behave that way. Instead, the Interahamwe frequently are portrayed as a group,106 and are rarely singled out and defined as individual cases, unlike their female counterparts.
While academic fields have made strides in addressing and correcting the situation, popular culture still struggles with the portrayal of an ‘ordinary’
female perpetrator. In the 2008 film The Reader, based upon the 1995 novel published under the same name by the German law professor and judge Bernhard Schkink, an ordinary, illiterate female concentration camp guard meets and attracts a teenage boy in postwar West Germany. The film concludes with her trial, guilty verdict and subsequent suicide, which occur decades after the crimes. The movie is notable in that it features and centres upon an ordinary female perpetrator – a stark departure from previous Hollywood films focusing solely on male Nazis or the sexually perverse and sadistic female Nazi.107 Despite this Hollywood novelty of a
‘Holocaust film’ starring a female Nazi, and the fact that the film portrays a nameless, ‘ordinary’ female perpetrator, the story still presents a very sexual and sensual being who seduces an innocent adolescent. In other words, she might have been undereducated, poor and desperate, but she was still oversexed and immoral.
By studying examples of scholarship and media stories, I have identified three prominent discourses that many authors and audiences turn to in order to explain female perpetrators. These theories, or patterns of discourse, are powerful influences shaping the image, perception and overall social identity of this distinct group, which in turn inspire societal reception and understanding.
105 Lee Ann Fujii. Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
106 Simpson, ‘Africa Interahamwe’,1999.
107 For more information on Hollywood and Nazism, see my paper ‘Normal men or sadistic killers: An examination into the rise of the evil Nazi in Hollywood during the 1990s’, presented in part along with Michael Geheran and Jan Taubitz at the public symposium ‘Holocaust Memory Legacies of Disaster or Lessons of Cosmopolitanism, at Clark University on April 29, 2010.
Also see David Sterritt’s article, ‘The one serious subject Hollywood doesn’t avoid’.
The Christian Science Monitor. November 22, 2002.
The first stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of the women, arguing that all humans, regardless of gender, are capable of evil due to various social and psycho-log ical pressures.108 Nearly every study that has promoted this thesis has focused on males, leaving only brief remarks concerning females. While the genders are not complete opposites, they are also not identical, as women app roach and respond to similar situations differently from their male counterparts. This difference in response does not make them mad or ‘un-ordinary’; rather, it highlights the fact that we currently have little under-stand ing of how women, due to both social constructions and biology, re-spond to violence and the unreg ulated use of violence.109 How did women in Nazi Germany and Rwanda interpret and navigate their new positions and access to violence and power? Did women feel the need to ‘prove’ themselves in front of male audiences and a patriarchal administration? Were they ashamed and conflicted about the transgression of traditional gender roles?
Did they embrace the freedom and power provided by the situation? The current focus on the disposition of women severely limits inquiry into these pertinent questions.
The second discourse asserts that female perpetrators were manipulated, used and then scapegoated by their male counterparts in order to support the status quo of a patriarchal society in which females and males have separate (and largely unequal) roles within that society. Some scholars claim that women perpetrators ‘served mainly as instruments of masculine aggression, pawns in the game, responding to orders and encouragement by men who often held positions of authority over them.’110 When females did partake in violence, it was often merely an attempt to join the dominant community of males. Thus, during extraordinary situations, such as outbreaks of genocide and war, females who wanted or were pressured to participate were required to ‘join in a macabre male-bonding ritual in which cohesion was established
108 Feinman, ‘Shock and Awe: Abu Ghraib, Women Soldiers, and Racially Gendered Torture’, in Tara McKelvey, ed., One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers (Emeryville, Cal.: Seal Press, 2007), 57–80, 63.
109 For more information concerning cases that have touched upon this issue, see Susanne Heschel, ‘Does Atrocity Have a Gender? Feminist Interpretations of the Women in the SS’, in JM Diefendorf, ed., Lessons and Legacies VI. New Currents in Holocaust Research, (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004); and Jana L Pershing,
‘Men and Women’s Experiences with Hazing in a Male-Dominated Elite Military Institution’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 8, No. 4, 470–492 (2006).
110 Barbara Finlay. ‘Pawns, Scapegoat, or Collaborator?” One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers. Ed. Tara McKelvey. (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 199–213, 204.
through acts of violence and humiliation’ toward the enemy-other.111 This explanation supports the argument that many feminists have long supported which ‘saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and the male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice.’112 Indeed, many women attested to feeling intimidated in both Nazi Germany and 1994 Rwanda. Both groups came from traditionally patriarchal societies in which women’s roles were limited. These women were conscious of their new opportunities and positions within a traditionally male realm and they likely experienced some feelings of trepidation or fear for breaching these gendered boundaries.113 Furthermore, many women were threatened, or felt threatened, into participation.
This discourse also incorporates the allegation that women, due to their sex, are viewed as ‘destabilising forces’ within male communities such as military environments, because they are unable to control their passions and their reproductive, biological needs.114 Women who indulge in violence are seen as being corrupted by their recently recognised sexual freedoms.115 In turn, not only are the women’s actions interpreted as sexually driven, but the women themselves are viewed as sexually depraved. This idea, which has been popularly supported by the media, has also been adopted and indulged by many pornographic representations leading to an underworld culture of perverted misogynistic images of sexy female SS officers and other violent females appearing in pornographic films and in adult costume shops.116
This discourse not only objectifies women, but it completely denies their independent human agency. Instead, it reverts back to historically constructed gender roles in which women are merely fragile vessels that can be used by males as instruments to do their bidding.117 After the carnage is over and the atrocities are made public, those in power (through force or reinstatement) are able to point to specific ‘out-of-control’ females as the cause and root
111 Finlay, ‘Pawn, scapegoat, or collaborator?” 204.
112 Tara McKelvey, ‘Introduction’, One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed.
Tara McKelvey, (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 12.
113 Nelson, The Psychology of Prejudice, 230.
114 Barbara Ehrenreich, ‘Foreword: Feminism’s assumptions upended’, One of the Guys:
Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara McKelvey. (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), 7–16, 2.
115 Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores, 147.
116 Lynn Rapaport. ‘Holocaust pornography: Profaning the sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Vol. 22, No 1, (Fall 2003), 53–79. Also refer to footnote 26.
117 Finlay, ‘Pawn, scapegoat, or collaborator?’ 210.
of the abuse.118 In doing so they are able to disparage the threat of female encroachment into the male realm, while simultaneously re-establishing the status quo. Intractable women are singled out, allowing societies to re-establish under ‘the blanket cover of innocence’ that women at home provide and maintain.119 The nation’s alibi is fashioned, conventional order is tentatively restored and a façade of healing and reconciliation is installed, while blame is dumped at the feet of the wayward few. In the cases of both Rwanda and Germany, societies were somewhat successful at hiding behind the traditional image of the innocent wife and mother who had not sullied her hands partaking in the carnage. This situation not only identifies gender transgressions, but also supports the notion that male violence is considered normal, while female violence is attributed to misconstrued social roles or manipulation by males. In either case, the female’s actions are interpreted as disruptive and threatening to the traditional understanding of the world.
The final discourse labels these women as extraordinary individuals whose characters are deficient and flawed. This path tends to be the most common rhetoric indulged in by the popular media to approach and understand these women. It is also the simplest and perhaps least distressing explanation for people to see and to accept. By labelling these women as freaks, society somewhat alleviates the ‘deep revulsion felt towards women who step out of a nurturing role by behaving in a violent manner’.120
The image of the extraordinary female is not only interpreted as awry, flawed and dangerous, but has also become representational of any and all female perpetrators. Female genocidaires are not real women; they are wrong and outside of humanity, leaving true women pure and unscathed. This interpretation allows us to ignore the phenomenon of female perpetrators because they are not considered normal, ordinary occurrences worthy of deeper investigation.
Conclusion
The prevailing image of the female perpetrator hinders further studies by engaging and binding us to particular patterns of discourse. This chapter not only identified the most prominent critiques, but also demonstrated that they are not limited to particular groups or cases in history. The image of the sexually depraved, sadistic and transgressive woman appeared after 1945
118 ibid., 205.
119 African Rights, ‘Rwanda: Not so innocent’, 3.
120 McKelvey, One of the Guys, 8.
and again in 1994. This chapter has looked beyond these images in order to present an accurate account of the ‘ordinary woman’ involved in genocide.
While popular culture and the media play a large role in shaping and pub-licising these images, often in order to shock and sell, their effects are felt through all layers of society. Justice attempts to be ‘blind’ and academics strive for objectivity, yet social norms and pressures still manage to trickle in and determine the treatment of subjects and outcomes of study. The desire to explain female perpetrators’ dispositions, rather than to examine the situational and social pressures influencing their behaviours, severely limits scholarship and understanding of how women come to actively support and participate in genocide.