Snow, James. “Mothers and Monsters: Women, Gender, and Genocide”

In this article, James Snow discusses stereotypical representations of women in Genocide Studies, media narratives of genocide, and perpetrator documents. Snow starts with briefly identifying problems in genocide narratives of women. Women are mostly marginalized in or absent from genocide narratives, “both as victims and as perpetrators” (50); when included, they are constructed as innocent victims, femmes fatales or monsters. These stereotypes frustrate or preclude “a deeper, richer understanding of genocidal violence” and genocide prevention (49).
Snow then goes deeper into these stereotypes and examines the “neglected women” and four frames used in the representation of female perpetrators. “The experiences and voices of women are often marginalized in the dominant narratives of genocide, both scholarly narratives and reports that appear in the media” (51). This relates to the conceptualization of “genocide” as “defined in terms of body counts”; this definition neglects “the multidimensionality of genocidal violence” and marginalizes women’s experiences of genocide, which might take the form of rapes, mutilation and forced pregnancy (52). Therefore, an alternative conceptualization of genocide is required to bring back the voices of women. Snow refers to the term “social death” proposed by Claudia Card, who argues that “genocide is social death” (54). Social death involves the deprivation of one’s social vitality; it is “a recognition of the breadth and magnitude of genocidal violence” and its destruction of the world inhabited by both men and women.
Snow then discusses four frames which determine how women are represented in genocide narratives. They are:
Frame 1: mothers. The maternal frame constructs women as “life-givers whose very nature is to nurture” (55). This makes it difficult to see women as perpetrators.
Frame 2: women and children. Based on the maternal frame, women are often correlated with children, “the cultural marker of innocence” (59). Like children, women “are seen as lacking the capacity or agency necessary for participating in genocides as perpetrators” (50).
Frame 3: women as femmes fatales. This frame acknowledges that “women are perpetrators, but sees them as using sex as a weapon to disarm men” (ibid.).
Frame 4: monsters and worse. “Women perpetrators are labelled monsters when the evidence for their participation is undeniable” (61). This is apparent in media narratives of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.
Snow then proposes solutions to the problems in representing female perpetrators. To bring women perpetrators into focus requires destabilizing gender stereotypes and better understanding “the intersection of gender and genocide” (67). Snow brings in the idea of “doing gender” introduced by Candace West and Donald Zimmerman. Doing gender sees gender as “a social practice” that happens contextually (68); “gendered practices are varied, changing, situationally constructed in interaction, and embedded within social structures” (69). Snow then applies this framework to exploring the intersection of doing gender and doing genocide. For men, doing genocide is doing work, which is “a central part of masculine subjectivity” (70). Women do gender “in the very moment of participation in genocides and continue to do gender when talking about their participation long after the fact”. Different women do gender in different ways; “the same person might do gender in different ways in different contexts” (72).
This article facilitates the conversation between genocide scholarship and Gender Studies. It contributes to Perpetrator Studies by not only pinpointing problems in representing female perpetrators but also providing possible solutions.

Author of this entry: Runcong Liu.

Snow, James. “Mothers and Monsters: Women, Gender, and Genocide.” In A Gendered Lens for Genocide Prevention, edited by Mary Michele Connellan and Fröhlich Christiane, 49–82. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018.