Palestinian Studies

Seminar | The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism

The Cunning of Gender Violence Poster

Friday, February 25, 2022

12:00 - 1:30 p.m.

Virtual Event
Registration required.

About the Seminar

Organized by Brown University Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies Rema Hammami, Birzeit University; Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University; and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Queen Mary's University. With generous support from the Darwish Chair in Palestinian Studies.

Over the course of two decades, violence against women (VAW) and subsequently, gender-based violence (GBV) have emerged as powerful agendas within international governance and law, increasingly folded into state sovereignty and global security. What was once a marginalized and silenced feminist concern around the urgency of addressing gender violence, now sits firmly at the nexus of powerful global networks of institutions and practices that have recast governmentality, development, humanitarianism, and even human rights, in line with post-9/11 global security regimes. How did this happen? What are the politics, ideologies, and geographies of this feminist agenda? What are the modes and channels of operation of the master category of GBVAW as both a technology and apparatus of rule? And most urgently for feminists, what effects is this convergence on GBVAW having on those who are the subjects of violence, experiencing it inscribed on their bodies, psyches, lives, and relationships, whether through silence or hypervisibility? 

This seminar is based on the findings of a three-year collaborative research project between feminist scholars of the Middle East and South Asia that explored these questions across a range of intersecting local, national, and global contexts, in the process uncovering the ways in which religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run deeply through the international governance structures of GBVAW, even when insistently disavowed. The collaborative project entitled, "Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence" was generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

The three seminar speakers are co-editors and contributors of chapters to the forthcoming book (Duke University Press, 2022) that is the outcome of this collaboration.


About the Speakers
Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University.

Rema Hammami, Birzeit University; Spring 2022 Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies, Brown University.

Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Queen Mary's University.