(Re)constructing an international crime: law, gender, & sexual victimhood in the Rohingya genocide

This dissertation examines how international legal actors make sexual victimhood intelligible by articulating crime and gender as coherent, universal, and self-evident phenomena. My primary focus is on how legal actors (re)produce men, transgender women, and people outside the gender binary as (il)legible victims of conflict-related sexual violence. Drawing from poststructural, feminist, queer, and decolonial theories of international relations and international law, I argue that legal actors are able to (re)produce fixed victimhood and gender hierarchies by articulating binary, zero-sum comparisons between victims on a global scale. In Part One, I use a genealogical method to examine how international legal actors have (re)produced zero-sum sexual victimhood through centuries of socio-legal repetition, sedimentation, and contestation. Binary ideas from the European patriarchs of international law (chapter 3) were (re)produced by feminist activists in the post-Cold War period who were primarily focused on sexual violence against cisgender women (chapter 4); as a result, other victims of sexual victimhood were either unintelligible or intelligible only when brought into a discursive comparison with cisgender women (chapter 5). Building upon this genealogy, I conduct a case study of the Rohingya genocide. I find that pre-existing discursive expectations of sexual victimhood provided categories which international legal actors could use to articulate a dominant narrative about the genocide wherein “men were killed, women were raped and killed.” I examine three sites at which this narrative was (re)produced and contested: early investigators like journalists and humanitarians (chapter 6), experts at the United Nations (chapter 7), and lawyers before international courts (chapter 8). Finally, in my Conclusion I propose a queer and non-zero-sum approach to understanding sexual victimhood separate from law’s oppressive gender categories.