#MeToo, the ICTY, and Intersectionality in Postsocialist Global Capitalism

Abstract

In this essay, we theorize and analyze (some of) the intercultural and intersecting structures that undergird rape and its representation in #MeToo via testimonial examples from rape survivors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). While we recognize the importance of the ICTY’s ruling and of #MeToo, we remain critical of the conditions that necessitated them and that continue to mark women’s bodies as vulnerable. Utilizing both postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theory as a lens, we specifically look to how bodies are articulated both as capital/property and, in the same international judicial frame, vessels for punishment and justice. We focus on how the ICTY defined justice for rape on a mediated international stage, how identities and cultures were situated discursively in the trial, and the implications for thinking through justice for intersectionality in #MeToo. Our claim is that the symbolic and material equation of women/women’s bodies as property is foundational to the operations of capital. With this framework in mind, it may be useful to consider how undoing capital may in turn challenge the normalization of women’s precarity, victimization, and therefore, experiences of sexual violence.