An article and book by Professor Jelke Posten and co-author Peruvian anthropologist Lurgio Gavilan have received awards from the Latin American Studies Association, the largest professional organization for those who study Latin America. Professor Boesten is Professor of Gender and Development in the Department of International Development.
The Intimacies of Violence research, funded by the British Academy, explored how soldiers who participated in and witnessed sexual violence in war understood such violence, and how they built intimate lives after the conflict ended. The researchers studied these themes through interviews with former combatants in the Peruvian army about their experiences during internal armed conflict from the 1980s to the 2000s.
An article based on this research, “Military Intimacies: Peruvian Veterans and Narratives of Gender and Violence,” published in the Journal of Latin American Research (LARR), received a Best Article Award from LARR University of Florida.
The authors also published a book on the subject, Perros y Promos: Memory, Violence, and Affection in Peru [Dogs and mates: Memory, violence and affect among Peruvian veterans in postconflict Peru] Which received an honorable mention for the LASA Iberoamericano Book Award.
Based on analysis of in-depth interviews, the book argues that the military shaped the intimate lives of conscripts through sexual socialization, humiliation and violence. Soldiers were exposed to institutional racism and sexual assault, and were exposed to ideas about military masculinity that helped them sexually control the bodies of others. Learn more about this book.
The authors also have a forthcoming article from this research titled “The Debris: Autoethnography, Feminist Epistemology, Ethics, and Sexual Violence” which will be published in a special section on “Intimacies of Violence” in the International Feminist Journal of Politics. It examines the collaborative nature of research and its ethical implications.
The awards will be presented at the annual LASA conference in Bogotá in June 2024.
