11:30 - 13:00
Oral session
Room: Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Stream: Gender and Sexuality
At Home and in the Bush: coercion, agency and desire amongst male ex-combatants
Holly Porter
London School of Economics and Political Science, Camden

When it comes to sexualities in war, it is common to focus on sexual violence and to hear rape spoken
of as a “weapon of war” the female body referred to as a battlefield and for forced marriages to be discussed as
the conjugal slavery of women and girls. Yet often such language does not map onto the lived sexual experiences
of men and women caught up in violence and rarely does it analyze them from the perspective of men and
boys. It assumes a level strategicness that can distort understandings of actions of fighters in armed
groups. This article centres around young men in the Lord’s Resistance Army, many of whom were forcibly
conscripted as teenagers into a group with a high level of sexual regulation — where opportunities for sex were
in one of two ways: as a reward in the form of a forced marriage — usually not with a partner of their choosing;
or, in violation of strictly enforced rules where consequences included death or castration. In this context, many
male LRA fighters came of age, often had “wives” and fathered children. It examines the interplay between
personal agency of young men seeking affirmation of manhood through their intimate relationships as well as
how desires were structured within broader masculine sexual norms in the moral spaces of “bush” and “home.”
Essentially, this paper is an exploration of male agency and desire (or lack of it) in coercive environments—
where “choices” are massively constrained, and yet still made. Based on nearly ten years of ethnographic work
in northern Uganda focused on gender, sexualities and violence and long-term participant observation with ex-
LRA it presents new ethnographic data on the little explored phenomenon of sexuality within armed forces from
men’s perspectives. It uses theoretical literature on agency commonly discussed in relation to female agency in
war to examine how these frames might be relevant to understanding male experiences in coercive settings.
Agency is always contingent, and always gendered--but particular assumptions and expectations about masculine
sexuality lead too often to an exaggerated view of their agentive power in coercive environments.


Reference:
Tu-A17 Gender 1-P-002
Presenter/s:
Holly Porter
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
11:45 - 12:00
Session times:
11:30 - 13:00