Posted in Huaren: July 13, 1998

 Maria Lugones is a feminist philosopher, activist, and popular educator who teaches at the State University of New York at Binghamton and at the Escuela Popular Nortena in New Mexico.

Pewawancara (Interviewer) (P):

During 3 days rioting in Jakarta last month, girls and women from ethnic Chinese heritage have been attacked and raped by men who suspected to be elements of the armed forced. One witness said that they observed men with "muscular builds and military haircuts and one victim said she was raped by men who had a military uniform in their car" ( New York Times, ... June 1998 and Radio Netherlands Reference?). Do you think that this phenomenon of organized attacks and assaults of women being raped by the suspected armed forced occur in other countries?

Maria (M):

Let me say that the phenomenon needs to be understood as a political one. The sexualization of violence is a form of terrorism and is a form of instilling a kind of instability. These are issues of the domination of women both by the military and also in the patriarchal culture of the society of those women who are being raped doubly dominated. It is this coincidence domination that needs to be recognized. It makes women particularly vulnerable.

As women are being violated as a form of domination by the military, they feel shamed, no longer clean. They don't feel like they can just go to the street and decry what has happened to them. Because they live in a society where sexual violence against women something is seen as shameful on the women. This is very important. The victims of the violence are themselves terribly and doubly victimized. They feel themselves as full of shame for what has been done to them.

This violence is brutal. It not only goes against their will and violates their integrity but also puts them in a dangerous position, because the members of their own society feel that they have been diminished. It is this aspect of the sexualizing of violence that is so important and that makes it such a powerful tool of domination in cases of civil war or against people trying to organize people against military regimes or tyrannical governments.

In my country-I am an Argentinian-a lot of people were disappeared during the military regime that ended in 1983. Some of the dissapeared were freedom fighters, some just simply people who expressed themselves as in opposition to the military regime. Many of these people were taken. They were incarcerated in make shift prisons and tortured chambers. Many of them were women and they were torture. Torturing was often sexualized. This adds to the exercise of power, when power is sexualized, because it means that the person who is tortured is being violated at deeper level. This is meant to send a message, a sense of terrorization of people at their most intimate level.

P: In fact, most victims were certain ethnic minority (Chinese). Do you think that this terror also affects all women in society (Indonesia)?

M: I think all women in Indonesia should feel that. This is something that can also happen to them. And if they don't feel that, they have to examine what separates them from Chinese women, what distance makes them immune when their Chinese compatriots are not. Now they have to examine how they are imagining their relationship to their Chinese compatriots when they think they are immune. But you know where I stand, it seems to me that the military is sending a message to all women.

P: Why women are being targeted by military to build terror and to intimidate society by practicing sexual violence?

M: I don't understand the Indonesian situation well enough to talk about this particular question. But I could talk a little more widely about the issue of the targeting of women. Rape has a long history accompanying war and the question of dissidence. It has a very very long history. But contemporary we can see it everywhere. In Bosnia for example there has been a very significant amount at targeting of women for rape.

Targeting women is a way of communicating that the military and its collaborators are everywhere. This is a form of building kind of very very deep kind of fear, a sense of being controlled inside of your body, sense of being controlled in your intimacy, so you know, it is not just a kind of force that you can say "we have to hide". Hide where? The sense is that it will reach you in your most intimate places. But now there is the question of how is your own sense of yourself as a sexual being, your own relationship to your body, and whether you have been marked by the military through rape. It is important that this be rejected. You have not been branded. If you believe that. It creates people who do not stand up against domination. People need to stand up, women need to stand up and men need to stand up with women against this fear. This crawling inside the women's bodies kind of fear. This needs to be rejected. This is very important because otherwise women begin to hide. They begin to feel unsafe. They begin to feel that their lives are over. Instead of feeling anger and feeling that other people need to stand up with them to fight this domination.

P: One report has said that these women are raped in front of their neighbors and families. As these women are being degraded morally and emotionally why has not the public made aware of these incidence but rather kept it a taboo to tell the incidence to others?

M: Well, this is kind of interesting. The raping of women doesn't make the news, because the kind of control and panic and terror that rape exercises in order to work needs to spread like fire. Like rumors, like you now say it in low voices. As soon as it is expressed publicly the state and the media have to to take it seriously. So it can't be an effective means of control, its force is diminished. So those who control the news don't want this in news. Because the fear needs to spread like from woman to woman like rumor, like you have a sense that now it is going to happen to you, while no body is saying this is terrible. But if you learn about it from the newspaper, there is already the declaration that this is wrong. Because whenever people talk publicly about rape they always says it is wrong, but they never say it is wrong when it is going like fire.

P: Their attacks were not only for rape but also that they ripped women's vagina and their anus, their breasts and this is also done systematically. Disfiguration both physically and mentally. How can we start help the victimized women heal themselves and begin new lives.

M: I think, first we need to think of what is the crucial question. The crucial question is to externalize the harm, not to take it in, and reject the mark of domination. Put yourself in the position of saying I am not going to hide. There was nothing wrong with me before, and there is nothing wrong with me now. I have been brutalized. I need reparation. I need other people to stand with me against this form of domination and other people need to be in support them.

Other people need to not just hear, but to anticipate that women need to be assured that they are clean. There is no way in which women will be marked in their bodies, unless other people will be respecting the mark. Other people can help women take the mark out and organize in the movement against domination.

It seems to me that it is very important always when one is raped to externalize. Don't take it in. There is nothing wrong with you, you didn't do anything, you didn't call for it. There is nothing in women that calls for it. And at the same time that there is nothing that she did, there is nothing that has marked her now. That is mythical, it is a myth that rape marks women. It is vicious, against your will, a terrible thing, brutally violent, but it doesn't leave a mark, unless people says it leaves a mark, unless she says it leaves a mark. The purpose of it is to leave a mark. The only way is to fight against this, by saying it did not leave any a mark on me. It is not going to leave a mark on me.

Other people will work with her so that it won't leave any mark. It is a myth of domination that makes rape work.

P: These victims mostly does not come forward but rather a search by pro-activators going to individual homes and hospitals. Why are these women felt that they are safer keeping their experience to themselves?

M: This is very important question. That women are not coming forward says a great deal about the society they are living in. It also says that the military understands the society that the women living, it is a society that says that the women who have been raped, are tainted. So it's very difficult for women in such society. Now to be able to feel clean, to feel without mark, they will not easily go and stand up in public. Unless it becomes a movement against the domination of women.

Part of the issue is to transform the personal into a public issue. But that requires great deal of courage, not for any other reason that the society may not support you. This is where all women and all men who are against the military, and who are against the raping of women and against the domination of people in Indonesia need to stand with the women in order for them to be able to make it a public issue. Their personal rape is a public issue of control over Indonesian people.

P: Some of these women felt so ashamed and so degraded that they take the extreme of committing suicide. What triggers this fatalistic action?

M: It seems to me this supports what I have said so far. That the women feel degraded and ashamed precisely because the society, considers them tainted.

Compare: if the woman had been mugged or injured by a thief or criminal, she would not feel ashamed. She would be feel harmed, and she would be very seriously injured and seek reparation without shame.

But on the other hand you want to say, yes, there is something important about sexuality. Because sex is the kind of thing that is very important to engage in when we want to. It's the kind of thing that is valuable that adds to one's life, a good thing to do if one has the desire to do it with another person who has desire to do with one. So this mutuality of desire is precisely what rape violates and we can all recognize that this makes rape wrong and has transformed the sexual into something brutally harmful. So that is one aspect.

The aspect I am questioning is the sense that women who are raped are not good anymore. This is what needs to be questioned. Because to accept this is to accept that the military has dominated her. And that she is no longer anything. She is worth nothing, and they can not do that, they can do that. They can't do that unless people allow it. But people who are in struggle cannot allow it. And that is still to preserve a sense that this is an egregious wrong. The society that taints raped women needs to be changed. It is important a moment of recognition that as a part of the struggle, this moment in Indonesian struggle women are being raped and include this as a part of the struggles and include the need for societal change with respect to the domination of women as a whole.

P: As more victims surfaced we realized that these problems have long continues to happen. As we can say that this might be the tip of the iceberg of women prosecution in Indonesia. Do you think will lead them open up and to speak up from the oppression and domination?

M: Again, I can't say very much because I don't know enough about the Indonesian situation, but it seems to me that it is a moment that one can seize, that one can take up against domination and say "this is the time." and say this is the time.

In another word, we have to use this momentum as starting point to fight back.

Yes, I also think that the most important thing about it is that it is not just a moment that one can seize up to make this part of the struggle, but that it is also the only way to help the women to create a different sense for the society. In that respect it is not just a sense we are all for struggle against domination, but it is important to the recuperation of the well being of the women.

P: With all of this consideration what can women do to stand up for themselves using this as a fire for women liberation in Indonesia. The most important lesson from all of this is women to be more progressive, as a movement not as partner to soothe women pains and sorrow. Using this as a fuel to spark women' movement throughout the country and bringing the meaning of women' liberation into another level.

M: I would say that in many countries the back bone of the women liberation, has been the fight against sexual violence. This is a very important thing, precisely because sexual violence is organized. It is condoned by many, many states. It is very hard to fight legally. It is very hard even to find sympathy among one's family. So it's common that a girl after being sexually molested won't say anything. Because she feels that her parents are going to say "what did you do, what were you doing, what were you wearing," assuming that it was her fault.

So the fight against sexual violence is a very important thing. Because sexual violence is one of the most important ways in which women are kept down. They are kept down to the extent that women are afraid to walk alone. A women walking in the street at night immediately feels fear, in a way that a man when a man comes after ---- may feel fear, but if a woman comes after him he won't feel afraid. This is a sense of controlling women's movement, a sense of control through fear is very important aspect of terrorism of sexual violence.

But at the same time it is important to recognize that there is a coincidence between that terrorism of sexual violence in the society that is patriarchal and the terrorism of political domination by the military of the society itself. So there is something like feminizing the whole group through the rape of the women. So noticing the link between the patriarchal domination of women in Indonesia and the use by the military of sexual violence as a political tool to feminize the society and say we can show you, we can fuck all your women. That act is something that people have to take out of their lives.

This is the backbone not just of the domination of women, but an important ingredient in the domination of the society as a whole, of keeping people down and instilling fear of inside people's heads, having a sense that one is dominated from the inside.

P: When you said feminizing all group, who are the groups?

M: Like for example in this case, it may be the Chinese, but it may be all the groups that form the backbone of the society that aren't people who are in power. But they are groups of people who are resisting or who could possibly resist those in power. So when you look in many societies, it is not just that the sexual violence is targeting certain women that are dangerous. No, it targets all women to prevent them from becoming powerful against domination. Similarly here the Chinese are being made an example. But other people should be hearing, many people who are against the regime should be listening, should be seen and stand up.

P: The target of the rape are certain ethnic women and the rapers look like label themselves are of certain ethnic groups or certain religion. What is the message they are trying to get across?

M: I think one way of understanding the message is to try to break people against to each other. Many women have not been touched and the reason why they have been touched is because they are Moslem women. So you have a sense of believing in the mark that was put on the women. It is inside you say those women are unspeakable, "0ur" women are good, "our" group is good. It works by making you to think that those in the other group from whom you are separated are tainted, impure, no good.

P: Do you have final comments?

M: Well, I want to say a little bit to the men, I remember you have asked me, what the men could do?  

It seems to me, it's time that men could tell women that they are standing with them not as master, not as superior, not as people who believe that it is alright for women to be raped. That it is the right of women to feel that they should not be raped and that they stand in solidarity with them saying loud and clear that there is no mark of domination on them. And that one should do now work with the women in getting that out of their mind and out of one's own mind. This is something most men have in their mind and part of what they need to do in order to be truly honestly able to stand in solidarity with the women: to work this is out of themselves and say to the women we stand with you.

Having a clear sense that they have to criticize themselves, change their minds. Then we would all do that through the struggle of saying "the mark of domination in the body of raped women is a myth". It is a myth.

P: Thank you Maria

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