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?