Negotiating (In)Security: Agency, Resistance, and Resourcefulness among Girls Formerly Associated with Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: War has traditionally been regarded as a masculine phenomenon and tends to be inherently linked to male aggression, violence, and brutality. In direct contrast, and perpetuating a misleading binary, depictions and representations of women and girls during war have tended to focus on their passivity as victims, peacemakers, wives, and mothers, or as appendages to males who are regarded as the true participants in war. Moreover, as the above quotation clearly illustrates, although men have been perceived as the primary agents in war, women have been rendered largely as silent and invisible victims. Although there is little question that girls and women endure profound violence during armed conflict, their roles within the context of armed conflict are increasingly fluid and diverse.1 In fact, women and girls are involved, often simultaneously, in myriad aspects of armed conflict as perpetrators, actors, porters, commanders, domestic servants, spies, bodyguards, human shields, and sex slaves. Their roles are multidimensional and often contradictory and require that women and girls negotiate and renegotiate their security and well‐being in a context that is anything but stable (Moser and Clark 2001). In the case of girls, the chronic quest for safety and security, regardless of the nature of their roles, may be even more challenging because of their vulnerability, which is exacerbated by their gender, age, and relative physical disadvantage (Fox 2004; Denov 2006). [...]
Source: Signs
DOI: 10.1086/512488
Authors: Myriam Denov, Christine Gervais
Institutions: University of Ottawa, McGill University
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2176352117