Research

Book Project, The Global Politics of Silence: New Approaches to Wartime Sexual Violence (provisional title)

This project examines the driving mechanisms and impact of an emergent global norm to include male survivors in approaches to conflict-related sexual violence. In addition to providing the first comprehensive analysis of this once neglected issue’s newfound visibility, it intervenes in disciplinary debates and assumptions surrounding silence and (un)silencing, offering an original theoretical framework for particularly vast and unwieldy silences which span contexts, cultures, and locales. Drawing from extensive qualitative data collection and analyses, including interviews with human security practitioners and issue entrepreneurs, the central argument maintains that actors with diverse and even contradictory motivations and commitments repurposed the fungible “weapon of war” framework for understanding wartime sexual violence in ways which consequently made male survivors intelligible. However, the patchwork nature of this recognition has meant that engagement rarely goes beyond lip service, and the prevailing lexicon of “silence” for making sense of the issue makes action even more challenging. The findings hold significant implications for advocates seeking to draw attention to neglected issues in human security and beyond.

Journal Articles

Norosky, Jenna. “The many metaphors of silence: Conceptualizing silence as a collaborative structure.” International Studies Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqag053.

Norosky, Jenna. “Distignuishing between the ‘soldier’ and the ‘brute’: engraving hierarchies of masculinity in conflict-related sexual violence discourse.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 26, no. 3 (2024): 544–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2024.2345097.

Norosky, Jenna, and Charli Carpenter. “The Right to Flee the Dangers of War: Rethinking Ukraine’s Gender-Based Restriction on Civilian Men’s Freedom of Movement.” Human Rights Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2024): 461–491. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2024.a933873.

Working Papers

“Beyond ‘silent’ male victims and ‘silencing’ feminists: Rethinking narratives about conflict-related sexual violence against men and boys” (under review).

“Understanding the dual threat of transness in the ultranationalist imaginary: A reading of The War on Warriors” (under review).

Public-Facing Scholarship

Norosky, Jenna. 2026. “How debate about gender identity could undermine global efforts to protect victims of violence.” The Conversation. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAI.gkw7yhpm5.

Norosky, Jenna, 2026. “Not Just a ‘Weapon of the Weak’: Reframing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence from Past to Present,” Security in Context Policy Paper 26-07. August 2026, Security in Context. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/not-just-a-weapon-of-the-weak-reframing-conflict-related-sexual-violence-from-past-to-present.