Good Soldiers Don’t Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence
Nov 15, 2023 — 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Presented by the Centre for International Policy Studies
Event information:
In this presentation Megan MacKenzie will draw out the key contributions of her recent book, Good Soldiers Don’t Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence. The book uses feminist theories of ‘rape culture’ and institutional gaslighting to identify the key stories, myths, and misconceptions about military sexual violence that have obstructed addressing and preventing it. It includes an analysis of nearly thirty years of media coverage of military sexual violence in three case countries – the US, Canada and Australia. MacKenzie will relate her book to the recent scandals and high profile cases of sexual misconduct that have plagued the armed forces over the past three years.Stéfanie von Hlatky will offer a response and insights from her book Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operations. This will be followed by an exchange between these two scholars that focuses on gender, militarism, and broader questions of cultural reform in the Canadian Forces.
Speaker:
Megan MacKenzie is a feminist scholar interested in war, security studies, post-conflict recovery and reconstruction, and military culture. Her work is broadly focused on the ways that gender matters in understanding war and insecurity and the ways that experiences of war and insecurity are shaped by gendered norms and sexism. She has been studying and writing about military culture for over a decade and is the author of Good Soldiers Don’t Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence (Cambridge 2023) and Beyond the Band of Brothers: the US military and the myth that women can’t fight.
Discussant:
Stéfanie von Hlatky is a Full Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University and Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Science. She’s held positions at Georgetown University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Dartmouth College, ETH Zurich and was a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of Southern California’s Centre for Public Diplomacy. In 2020, she was awarded the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Security, and the Armed Forces for her work on women in the military, gender in NATO operations, as well as the Women, Peace, and Security agenda more broadly speaking. Her 2022 book, Deploying Feminism: The Role of Gender in NATO Military Operations, published with Oxford University Press, provides the most comprehensive account of NATO’s implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, with over 100 interviews from strategic-level headquarters to the missions in Iraq, Kosovo, and the Baltics. Dr. von Hlatky has also published widely on military cooperation, alliance politics and deterrence, including American Allies in Times of War: The Great Asymmetry (2013), The Future of Extended Deterrence(2015), Going to War? Trends in Military Deterrence (2020), Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism(2020), Transhumanizing War (2020) and Total Defence Forces in the Twenty-First Century (2023).
Chairs:
Dr. Alexandra Gheciu, the Director of CIPS and a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
Dr. Anna Bogic, CIPS Research and Program Coordinator