'Voglio Una Donna!': on Rewriting the History of International Criminal Justice with the Help of Women Who Perpetrated
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Jan 18 2019, NEWGEN 10 C7 7 ‘Voglio una donna!’: On Rewriting the History of International Criminal Justice with the Help of Women Who Perpetrated International Crimes Immi Tallgren C7.S1 ‘Voglio una donna!’ C7.P1 Like Uncle Teo in Fellini’s Amarcord, I cried out for women. Not to embrace them like Teo, but to include them in a chapter which critically examines histories of international criminal law. Where should I begin the search for samples of ‘women who perpetrated international crimes’? In his Monsters: History’s Most Evil Men and Women Simon Sebag Montefiore addresses very few women in its extensive portrait gallery: Yezebel, Empress Theodora, Empress Wu, Isabella the She- Wolf of France, Catherine de’ Medici, Bloody Mary, and Elena Ceausescu.1 (One might reasonably ask were there any more in his Heroes: History’s Greatest Men and Women2?) Reading about past national and international criminal trials for conduct we would now- adays call ‘international crimes’3 in the search for ‘women perpetrators’ takes some perseverance. Whether ‘academic’ or ‘popular’ histories, or histories written by law- yers, few women appear in their pages. When they do, it is as direct victims—killed, raped, tortured, enslaved, persecuted, detained— or their mothers, wives, daugh- ters, other family or community members. In terms of criminal procedure, women figure as victims, victim- witnesses, or witnesses; not as the accused, convicted, or acquitted. C7.P2 Why would one search for ‘women perpetrators’, in particular? I acknowledge at the outset the challenges of attempting any research ‘about women’ today— decades after the post- structuralist questioning of identity, agency, power, and C7.N1 1 And a couple of others, see Simon Sebag Montefiore,Monsters: History’s Most Evil Men and Women (Quercus 2008).
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