A place of pain: Voids and silences around Vilina Vlas

Keywords: Bosnia-Herzegovina, gender, sexual violence, post-war, victimhood,
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 25

Abstract

The hotel Vilina Vlas in the small town of Višegrad in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina was a location for one of the infamous rape camps in the Bosnian war –an event unfolding within the extraordinary event of the war itself. The violence and hurt of the past event is under contention and part of ongoing negotiations of power concerned with acknowledgement, reparation and other processes of exclusions/inclusions in the present. By reading the local event of the rape camp as linked to the emblematic image of the “raped war victim” in transnational narratives of victimhood, this paper will help unpack the power generated from this image. Taking the atrocities in the hotel Vilina Vlas and the loaded yearly commemorations as a point of departure, we will trace the silent trail of this event of gendered violence into the present as it is remembered and forgotten. We will analyze the voids and silences around this event, read the gendered space of post-conflict Visegrad and access hidden agencies; the whispers in the margins, the silent performance of bodies, and the easily ignored actions by informal agentive subjects. These local, gendered meaning-making practices will be analyzed in relation to the production of new narrative(s) of the nation in the frictional process of nationbuilding and peacebuilding in the post-conflict space of BiH. Finally, the global narrative and legal practices around conflict-related sexual violence that both empower and circumscribe women’s agency will be unpacked, foregrounding the temporal connections between practices of sexualized violence across the war-peace continuum.