11:30 - 13:00
Oral session
Room: Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Stream: Gender and Sexuality
"I used to be a strong man, but now I am not - Examining male sexual violence survivors' gendered harms and vulnerabilities"
Philipp Schulz
University of Bremen, Institute for Intercultural and International Studies, Bremen

During the early stages of the war in Northern Uganda, sexual violence against men was widespread
enough for the local population to invent a new vocabulary to describe these crimes as tek-gungu. In Acholi
language, tek-gungu translates as 'to bend over' (gungu) 'hard' or 'forcefully' (tek), or as 'the way which is hard to
bend'. Across the conflict-affected region, this terminology became widely used among the community because
of the numerous cases of male rape perpetrated by government soldiers of the National Resistance Army (NRA)
against Acholi civilian men. Although largely silenced and marginalized, these crimes are locally perceived to
'turn men into women' and to 'strip survivors of their manhood'. Yet how exactly the compromising of survivors'
masculinities unfolds, and what it entails, remains only insufficiently explored.
This article addresses this gap, by empirically deconstructing the impact of wartime sexual violence on male
survivors' masculine identities in Northern Uganda. This analysis is rooted in thick descriptions of locallycontingent
constructions of gender identities and relations in Acholiland, where a normative hegemonic model of
masculinity rests at the top of the gender hierachy. While most existing studies treat the effects of sexual
violence on masculine identities in static terms and as one-time events, the empirical findings underpinning this
article demonstrate that the impact of wartime male rape is a dynamic and compounded process. In the context of
Northern Uganda's patriarchal gender order, physical acts of sexual violence - and in particular penetrative anal
rape - subordinate male survivors along gendered hierarchies and thereby communicate gendered victimhood.
These processes get further exacerbated through a myriad of layered and gendered harms that further
disempower male survivors in a gendered manifestation, demonstrating their inability to protect (themselves and their families), provide and procreate, as is expected of them according to local masculinities constructions.
Emphasizing that male-directed sexual violence thus directly strikes at multiple levels at what in many societies
means "to be a man", I thus offer an empirically-grounded examination of male survivors' vulnerabilities and
harms, which remains largely missing from existing research on wartime rape.


Reference:
Tu-A17 Gender 1-P-004
Presenter/s:
Philipp Schulz
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Aston Webb – Lecture Theatre WG5
Date:
Tuesday, 11 September
Time:
12:15 - 12:30
Session times:
11:30 - 13:00