Feminization and Subalternization of the Enemy. The Construction and Destruction of Corporeality in Armed Conflict and Extreme Violence Contexts

Studying extreme violence entails a profound analysis of the individual and collective Self. Cruelty is a terrible human quality and, as such, condenses a big part of our construction as subjects in relation to the other; cruelty is usually intimate, where proximity between executioner and victim is brewed, especially in the not few cases where sexual abuses are involved in armed conflicts. Physical and psychological abuses frequently perpetrated in various armed conflicts are part of a logic where the enemy embodies a hated and threatening alterity, which must be destroyed by any means possible. Thus, the perpetrator constructs itself as an ultra-masculine subject, in the dominant position, and sees the victim as something subjugated, dominated, humiliated and feminized. The bodies involved are vessels, and deposits of symbols and representations of what is at stake, of what is trying to be destroyed and remade.