Hunting for Women

In 1983 Benedict Anderson famously claimed that the ethnic fraternity enabled millions of people to kill, and more so to die, over the past two centuries, in the name of their perceived community. While plenty of subsequent research focused on both the ethnic and violent part of this equation, the fraternal aspect has gone almost unnoticed in mainstream academia. In contrast, male identity, although not necessarily ethnic, and links to violence has held a prominent place in feminist research. Acknowledgement and exploration of the associations between male ethnicity identity and violence is essential to the field of ethnic and racial studies because gendered violence appears to be a crucial element of consolidating male ethnicity. If the gendered elements of ethnicity continue to be ignored, violent ethnic conflict will remain a ‘murky’ area. Supported by emerging feminist research on ethnicity and established feminist work on fraternity and violence, the following research examines one act, bride-kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, in an attempt to explore the relatively ignored links between ethnic identity, violence and gender.