ABSTRACT
A common characteristic in the narratives of mothering experiences from women who were sexually traumatized during the war is their struggle between two seemingly incompatible identities: a war rape survivor, on the one hand, and a mother, on the other hand. Despite these split identities, for many women mothering has been a crucial step toward embracing healing from the trauma. It has helped many survivors to make sense of the aftermath of the war and provided them with a reason to move on and live again. Surprisingly, very few researchers have paid attention to how mother–survivors of war rapes navigate life between their own process of healing from trauma, their struggle for restorative justice, and their role as mother, especially as it pertains to socialization in terms of gender and sexuality. The introduction presents how this book attempts to fill this gap by providing, analyzing, and critically incorporating the ethnographic evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
