Rebel Sex: male combatants and desire in coercive circumstances

This article is about the relationship between environment and desire, focusing on male combatants in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. Most LRA fighters were forcibly conscripted as teenagers. Their opportunities for sexual encounters were tightly controlled: either through forced “marriages” or strictly forbidden interactions with punishments including death or castration. Drawing on evolving international legal perspectives on “coercive circumstances,” I propose extending this concept to understand the experiences of all actors and viewing it as a violent affective space shaping everyone’s desires. Three ideas for theorizing desire are introduced: para-subjective desire, mimetic desire, and transgressive desire. While predominant narratives about sexualities in war center on female victims or male perpetrators of sexual violence, this study offers a counter-narrative to the preponderance of carceral thinking and proposes an ethnographically grounded approach to theorizing desire and affect in coercive circumstances, in war and beyond.