Transnational Feminist Interventions on Gender-Based Violence During the Bosnian War: Representational Dilemmas in Activism, Advocacy, and Art

During the Bosnian War (1992–1995), mass rapes were used as an instrument of ethnic cleansing and received extensive local and transnational media coverage. The paper examines transnational feminist art interventions that strive to give voice to rape survivors and to contest the dominant local and international media representations of women victims of violence, namely Šejla Kamerić’s poster and art installation Bosnian Girl, Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, and Jasmila Žbanić’s fiction films Grbavica and For Those Who Can Tell No Tales. These interventions touch upon a variety of ethical issues, such as the power imbalances between Western and local actors, the risk of reproducing discursive victimization and ethnic essentialism, and the contested interpretations of rape as an instrument of genocide or as an expression of universal patriarchy.