ABSTRACT
Feminist criticism combines the personal and the political and insists on a kind of self-consciousness that is explicit about the origins of one's projects and the position from which one speaks. Undermining the traditional academic boundaries between professional and subjective is an example of the interaction between personal and political. I suspect that it would be impossible for any woman to write about rape without becoming emotionally involved in the work. 12
Because the biblical text remains silent about the young women of Shiloh, I shall describe some of the documented atrocities from the recent gynocidal actions in Bosnia. The parallel seems strong, for the recent atrocities were committed during an ethnoreligious civil war, a war in which men's violence was inscribed upon women's bodies. In both situations there is the strong patriarchal association of the female body with territory, so that raping one and conquering the other come metaphorically to the same thing. For those readers clinging to the "marriage" element of the Judges 21 text, let me add that what Beverly Allen calls "enforced pregnancy" 87) was also practiced by the Christian Serbs against Muslim women. The following testimony was offered by a survivor of the Susica camp in eastern Bosnia. The witness was testifying about several young WOlnen who had been selected (for enforced pregnancy):
What I would like to suggest is that after reading rape accounts such as the one quoted above from the recent in the reader will fill the gaps and silences in Judges 21 with the cries of the victims of ethnic/religious rape of massive proportions. As I have argued elsewhere (1997) we do not read in a linear fashion. Regardless of the order of one's reading, what is immediately apparent is that female readers will feel an emotional connection between the plight of the Muslim \vomen of Bosnia and the virgins ofShiloh-if readers allow themselves to dwell upon that sliver of biblical narrative. I do not mean to imply that men will not feel horror at these atrocities, but I have searched all the traditional accounts of holy war in Israel, ofwar suborned by YHWH, of war won by YHWH, and nowhere is there a mention of the carrying off of the women ofShiloh as rape, or even a hint that such a deed might have been divinely sanctioned but against their will. Much like violence portrayed in cartoons, the carrying off of the dancing maidens is accomplished without pain, without struggle, without resistance. If the narrative were focalized even for a moment through the eyes of the victims, one would be required to appropriate the female body as a sign of the violator's power. But the women remain as passive signifiers; the biblical storyteller is not interested in representing their experience. Thus, the reader must inhabit the gap, the silence, and through the power of imagination break the silence of the women of Shiloh. To leave them in silence is gynocide.
