I HATE BOOKS
so women (and men) of troy, i have had a long day. not wanting to deprive you of your own books, i figured that my friendly local bookstore would have a copy for me, so i could parse out dialogue for everyone. this turns out to be false. other used bookstores in the neighborhood also failed me. after at least a mile and a half of wandering, i am still empty-handed. so, i have several avenues to fix this, but it's going to take a while. stay tuned....
i have, however, been marinating on the idea of common analogues to the issues raising in the play. these are just some things that came to mind as i trekked up and down the south side, so feel free to come up with your own and share it with us.
1) probably most obvious, the war in iraq, especially in a day and age when our government is attempting to rid itself of obligations set forth in the Geneva Conventions (there were four all together) regarding treatment of prisoners of war and the treatment of civilians. http://www.genevaconventions.org/
2) we discussed its relation to genocide. but, let's think about one of the less-famous acts of genocide--those committed during the war in the former yugoslavia. there was a common practice (mainly blamed on serbs, but really used by both sides) of paramilitary groups attacking villages, killing all the men and then rounding up the women. some would be killed, while those left would be taken to camps and kept as sex slaves. yet, the aim was not just for rape, it was for pregnancy. the rational for systematic militarized rape was that once these women became pregnant with serb or croat babies, they would no longer be a member of their communities, and their children most certainly would not be. thus the capturing and impregnating of women (think about cassandra and others being taken as concubines) was just another tool of ethnic cleansing. rape was also used as the mos overwhelming symbol of control and destruction of a population. http://www.icc-cpi.int/library/organs/otp/050620_Chile_presentation.pdf
3) the experience of black america--i don't have as nuanced a treatment of this idea as the one above (which was my old affirmative when i debated in college), but it seems to me that the play might have a lot to say about a society in which a disproportionately large percentage of black men are or have been incarcerated while women are popularly portrayed as little more than sex objects. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/may25/inequality-052505.html
i have, however, been marinating on the idea of common analogues to the issues raising in the play. these are just some things that came to mind as i trekked up and down the south side, so feel free to come up with your own and share it with us.
1) probably most obvious, the war in iraq, especially in a day and age when our government is attempting to rid itself of obligations set forth in the Geneva Conventions (there were four all together) regarding treatment of prisoners of war and the treatment of civilians. http://www.genevaconventions.org/
2) we discussed its relation to genocide. but, let's think about one of the less-famous acts of genocide--those committed during the war in the former yugoslavia. there was a common practice (mainly blamed on serbs, but really used by both sides) of paramilitary groups attacking villages, killing all the men and then rounding up the women. some would be killed, while those left would be taken to camps and kept as sex slaves. yet, the aim was not just for rape, it was for pregnancy. the rational for systematic militarized rape was that once these women became pregnant with serb or croat babies, they would no longer be a member of their communities, and their children most certainly would not be. thus the capturing and impregnating of women (think about cassandra and others being taken as concubines) was just another tool of ethnic cleansing. rape was also used as the mos overwhelming symbol of control and destruction of a population. http://www.icc-cpi.int/library/organs/otp/050620_Chile_presentation.pdf
3) the experience of black america--i don't have as nuanced a treatment of this idea as the one above (which was my old affirmative when i debated in college), but it seems to me that the play might have a lot to say about a society in which a disproportionately large percentage of black men are or have been incarcerated while women are popularly portrayed as little more than sex objects. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/may25/inequality-052505.html
posted by Cate Morrison at 11:43 AM
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