Gendered Violence

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

Il focus ha riguardato gli stereotipi  che dal XVIII secolo ad oggi sono emersi nelle relazioni fra i generi al fine di dimostrare che le radici della violenza non sono naturali, ma il risultato di pratiche culturali e di configurazioni storiche.Nella convinzione che la violenza contro le donne sia una questione principalmente  maschile, mi sono concentrata sulla virilità e sulla mascolinità.Nel trattare questi argomenti,i media dovrebbero tenerne conto, senza patologizzare o naturalizzare comportamenti estremi,ma puntando alla loro prevenzione.Ho analizzato le campagne di sensibilizzazione realizzate nel nostro paese in merito alla violenza contro le donne.Infine, grazie al contributo di Stefano Ciccone dell'Associazione Maschile Plurale, ho proposto nuove modalità comunicative per affrontare questo tema così delicato.

Violation by way of the distribution of sexual images or image-based sexual abuse or non-consensual “pornography”, or more colloquially and simply, “revenge porn”, entail the online, at times offline, non-consensual distribution, or sharing, of explicit images of someone else seeking revenge, entertainment or political motive. Although male ex-partners are reported as the main perpetrators, current partners, (ex-)friends of both victims and perpetrators, people known to the victim, people seeking revenge for friends, Internet hackers and trolls, amongst others, may also be involved (Tyler, 2016).

The negative impact it has on victims is significant and profound in terms of physical and psychological health and well-being, as with many other forms of gender and sexual violence and abuse. Victims report a host of negative effects: feelings of humiliation, shame, embarrassment and reputation damage with intimate partners, family, friends, work colleagues and, in public; sexual shame,  sexual problems and body image issues with intimate partners; education and employment disruptions; becoming paranoid and hyper-vigilant, and concerned for their personal safety. For example, some have reported being stalked, harassed and threatened with gang rape because of their personal information was also made public. Some victims have even taken their own lives (Citron & Franks, 2014).

In spite of the fast growing literature on indigenous peoples and self-determination, there is a striking absence of research into the gendered processes and effects of indigenous self-determination or more generally, indigenous women and self-determination. This article examines the intersectionalities between indigenous self-determination and indigenous women’s rights with a particular focus on the question of violence against women. It contends that for indigenous self-determination to be successful, it must also address the question of violence against indigenous women. The article argues for a specific human rights framework that simultaneously accounts for indigenous self-determination and human rights violations of indigenous women.

Gísla saga has often been described as “enigmatic,” and the riddles posed by Iceland’s best-known murder-mystery indeed appear irresolvable. At least equally puzzling, I suggest, is Gisli’s “confession” of his subsequent act of vengeance through an obscure bit of skaldic verse, which has not received similar attention. Setting aside the psychological and forensic approaches traditionally brought to bear on the saga’s persistent enigmas, I offer that Gisli's “confession” forms the crux of an unnoted narrative structure, made plain by the saga’s treatment of  medieval Icelandic concepts of masculinity and femininity. In so doing, I identify an undetected analogue in Norse myth to the events that precipitate the saga’s “whodunit,” as well as reexamine widely-held assumptions about the view of gender enunciated in the saga, particularly as articulated in Carol Clover‘s seminal 1993 article, “Regardless of Sex.”

In this introductory article to the special issue Women and War in Kurdistan, we connect our topic to feminist theory, to anthropological theory on war and conflict and their long-term consequences, and to theory on gender, nation and (visual) representation. We investigate Kurdish women's victimisation and marginalisation, but also their resistance and agency as female combatants and women activists, their portrayal by media and scholars, and their self-representation. We offer herewith a critical perspective on militarisation, women's liberation, and women's experiences in times of war and peace. We also introduce the five articles in this issue and discuss how they contribute to the study of women and war in two main areas: the wide-reaching effects of war on women's lives, and the gendered representation and images of war in Kurdistan.

The armed conflict in northern Mali has developed significantly  since it broke out in 2012. The overwhelming result of this study is that its respondents are in unanimous agreement that the root causes of the violent conflict in Mali are marginalization and discrimination. The conflict is nurtured by the pervasive stratification between almost all groups in the society. The cleavages run between geographic locations, genders, ethnic groups, generations and classes, and enables hierarchies between those that dominate and those that are dominated. Marginality serves as a place of resistance for many groups, also northern women since many of them have grievances that are linked to their limited access to public services and human rights. For these women, marginality is a site of resistance that motivates them to mobilise men to take up arms against an unwilling government. The Islamists have exploited the vacuum left behind by the absent government,
through their provision of services such as health care and employment. They have also used the stratification between social classes to gain the support of impoverished communities and offer some sort of social mobility to both poor women and men.

This article invites feminists to leverage the #MeToo Movement as a critical analytical tool to explore the longevity of the enduring rape crisis framing of victim services. For nearly half a century, victims have visited rape crisis centers, called rape crisis hotlines, and mobilized rape crisis response teams to provide services and support. This enduring political and social framing around rape as a crisis is opaque, has prompted a political backlash, and risks distorting hard-fought feminist legal, social, and political battles. It has yielded underreporting, underutilization, and recurring risks of budgetary cuts. This model and terminology have gone virtually unchanged for nearly half a century. Crisis language denotes urgency, decisiveness, judgment, action, and mobilization, all leading to closure. These descriptions can be problematic when mapped onto the lived experiences of certain communities.

The #MeToo Movement presents modern feminists with a powerful, productive, and timely opportunity to critique the existing crisis model of service provision and support. This article invites feminists to begin this dialogue. It presents three critiques of the current framing. First, the crisis framing risks resurrecting troublesome legal relics relating to statutes of limitations and evidentiary hurdles. Second, it risks being perceived as exclusionary and limited, thus cabining its impact. Particularly, campus sexual assault victims and marginalized communities generally may not universally connect to an opaque crisis framing. Third, crisis framing risks distorting the scope of sexual assault. It limits the expansive range of harms that are associated with rape and sexual assault and the systemic longevity of the problem of rape and sexual assault in society. While the language of crisis seems to invoke an urgent call to action, which is to be applauded, this language risks blurring the long history of sexual assault and erasing a legacy of inaction in countless institutional and political and social settings. It also suggests a beginning and an end to a victim’s recovery journey. It suggests that closure is attainable when in reality, ongoing monitoring, responsiveness, and engagement are critically necessary.

“Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain” in Scientific Masculinities, special issue of Osiris 30:1, ed. Robert Nye and Erika Milam (University of Chicago Press, 2015): 272-294.

This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.

This article examines the depoliticization of violence against women in indigenous communities. It argues that there is a pressing need to examine the ways in which gendered
violence is explained, addressed and often sanctioned in indigenous communities.
The article draws on Crenshaw’s concept of political intersectionality and examines responses to gendered violence in indigenous communities through two groups: Aboriginal women in Canada and Sa´mi women in Scandinavia.

Trolling is often enacted against women and minority groups on social media platforms, such as Twitter, as a means of limiting or undermining participation in virtual space(s). This chapter considers trolling as a form of gendered and symbolic violence. Drawing on an analysis of British national newspaper reports focusing on cases of trolling, we demonstrate that trolling can be viewed as a 'silencing strategy'. Trolling leaves its victims in a powerless position as freedom of expression for perpetrators is defended via social media ideologies. The initial promise of social media – to provide democratizing spaces – in practice creates space for the percolation of misogynist, sexist, racist, and/or homophobic attitudes. The chapter focuses on trolling in the form of rape and death threats, women as doubly deviant when deemed to be entering men's (online) domain(s), responses to trolling, and feminist activism.

In the summer and autumn of 2015, I met with activists in Athens and Thessaloniki, with the aim of collaboratively producing a conceptual mapping of LGBTQ social movement discourses. My point of entry was the use and signification of “racism” in LGBTQ discourses (and more generally in common parlance in Greek) as a superordinate or “umbrella” concept that includes “homophobic” and “transphobic” but also “misogynist,” “ageist,” “ableist,” and class- or status-based prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, in addition to that, of course, based on “race” or “ethnicity.” As a political theorist whose work over the past decade has focused on the concept of intersectionality, its origins in US Black feminist thought, and its transnational travel beyond the Anglo-American context in which it originated, I wanted to examine how this use of “racism” relates to the concept of “intersectionality” which is now emergent in the Greek social movement context, in particular in LGBTQ and feminist discourses, yet which has not been engaged by academics, neither in the nascent and struggling field of gender studies, nor in legal theory. How do LGBTQ activists define the referential scope and semantic contents of these concepts, based on what knowledges grounded in lived experiences, and on what kinds of social movement strategies? How do these concepts and their theoretical underpinnings reflect or direct activists’ political resistance to the widespread violence that they identify within and on the borders of Greek society? Do they enable coalition-building with other minoritised groups targeted by institutional and interpersonal “racism”? In approaching these questions, I wanted to trace the ways in which my interlocutors produce theories, through which social conditions of racial and heteropatriarchal power are made visible, are explained, and are contested—conditions that they identify with the institutions—“nation, religion, and family”—that make up what they termed the “triptych” or the “syntax of power.” What emerged in my conversations with activists were vivid accounts of the atmospheric violence facing LGBTQ people in Greece, its institutional and interpersonal manifestations, both banal and extreme. Indeed, many activists defined violence as the quintessence of oppression as such, and as what links various systems or forms of oppression—or, “racisms”—to one another. In what follows, I draw on these conversations not to answer the questions with which I set out, but, primarily, those that my interlocutors generated, which concern, ultimately, the unlivability of queer and trans lives—the violence LGBTQ people face and resist, particularly at the intersections of youth, poverty, disability, rurality, racialisation, criminalisation, and patriarchy.

This Article makes a feminist case for acknowledging women's acts of violence as consistent with—not threatening to—the goals of the domestic violence movement and the feminist movement. It concludes that broadly understanding women's use of strength, power, coercion, control, and violence, even illegitimate uses, can be framed consistent with feminist goals. Beginning this conversation is a necessary—if uncomfortable—step to give movement to the movement to end gendered violence. The domestic violence movement historically framed its work on a gender binary of men as potential perpetrators and women as potential victims. This binary was an essential starting point to defining and responding to domestic violence. The movement has since struggled to address women as perpetrators. It has historically deployed a " strategy of containment " to respond to women as perpetrators. This strategy includes bringing male victims of domestic violence within existing services, monitoring exaggerations and misstatements about the extent of women's violence, and noting the troublesome line between perpetrator/victim for women. This strategy achieved specific and important goals to domestic violence law reforms. These goals included retaining domestic violence's central and iconic framing as a women's issue, preserving critical funding sources and infrastructure to serve victims, and thwarting obstructionist political challenges largely waged by men's rights groups. While acknowledging that these goals were sound and central to the historic underpinnings of domestic violence law reforms, this Article considers for thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts. The author extends a special thanks to Courtney Groszhans, Annie Malka, and the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law for grant support and research and editing assistance.

This upper division/graduate course explores intersections of gender and violence in a variety of social fields in the Middle East, ranging from family life to international relations.

The Middle East region is often portrayed as a patriarchal, misogynist, and violent place in Western discourse. Terror, violence against women, and honor killings are increasingly popular topics of popular and academic interest in the region. Approaching these issues from a critical perspective this class seeks to answer: What are the power dynamics of gender relations in the Middle East? What are the gendered contours of the different forms of collective violence in the region? What are the limits and problems of the Western modes of thinking about gender and violence in the Middle East? How can we better understand the various gendered violence practices associated with the region without reproducing Orientalist and racist discourses?

Throughout the semester, we will use historical and ethnographic texts, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to address these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Course material will engage with a variety of issues, including honor killings, “female circumcision” controversy, LGBT issues, and military masculinity, in contexts ranging from Turkey to Palestine/Israel, and Lebanon to Algeria.

Theories regarding gender violence have moved beyond a simple dichotomy, where women are positioned as victims and men are perpetrators. This complexity is through a nuanced analysis of privilege, power, and oppression, drawing on intersectionality theory, as well as problematizing the gender binary itself.

This is a study of the gendered aspects of armed conflict. It explores gender relations between men and women and demonstrates how different groups of women and men experience, participate in and respond to ethnically-constructed armed conflict in southeast Bangladesh. It examines in which ways and to what extent their experiences in the conflict have been gendered. It is also a narrative about people’s longing to belong, and an attempt to understand the gendered embodiments of nationalism in a post-colonial location in the global south, Bangladesh.
The concepts of gender and ethnicity are integral to much feminist research in the field of conflict and peace studies, which has looked at the transformations of conflict, interrogating the power relations between women and men, and addressed, more recently, the added symbolic meaning and representation of gendered violence in conflict. However, studies have focused either on the ‘material reality’ or on the symbolic aspects of gender and ethnicity, and have rarely focused on the situated and contested aspects of gender relations between women and men in historically specific armed conflict. This thesis moves beyond a structural assessment of conflict and avoids a gender versus culture analysis; its aim is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of different groups of women and men in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT). The research offers a three-level investigation: it looks at whether and how structural inequalities contribute to the making of the armed conflict and gendered violence; it provides a discursive analysis of narratives of sexual violence against women; and it offers an intersectional analysis of the lived experiences of women and men in the nationalist movement and armed conflict. The study considers the spatial, material, relational and changeable aspects of the nationalist movement and armed conflict to reveal that the experiences of different groups of women and men have been gendered in heterogeneous ways.
The research demonstrates that the conflict in the CHT is a highly gendered phenomenon, yet ‘situated’ so that women and men, and Bengali and Jumma people, experience the conflict in different ways. Economic exploitation and state assimilation of the Jumma people are obvious factors in the making of the conflict; however, the phenomena of gendered violence and the subjectivity of Jumma women to sexual violence during and after the armed conflict are not merely the effects of male supremacy or the international politics of militarisation. What the Jumma women experience in the conflict is much more complex. Their lived experiences are informed by their ethnicity, nationality, culture and gender. Likewise, the responses of the Jummos and civilian Bengalese are informed by: their political goals, collective sentiment and sense of belonging; nationalist ideologies, political values and practices; a longing to demonstrate a difference and a culturally distinctive identity; performing chosen and appropriate roles; and the desire and ability to negotiate with shifting lifestyles, embodying their experience of the material situation, and the repetitions of daily life in a changing society. It is the contestations of all these factors, which illustrate the complexity of the phenomenon of gendered violence and the gendered aspects of the conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
This study recognises that the state, as a momentous social actor, contributes to the making of the nationalist projects and ensuing conflict with gendered violence. But the women and men living the conflict are agents in their own lives, and never victims per se. The findings are based on my ethnographic fieldwork, narrative interviews with Jumma women and men, semi-structured interviews with Bengali women, men, mediators and actors, and library research on the topic. Meanings in this research are co-constructed between me as a feminist researcher and my interviewees, and do not necessarily reflect any general ‘truths’.

The influence of perceived severity and sense of personal responsibility of police officers on their level of involvement in cases of intimate partner violence against women is analyzed. Three levels of police involvement are considered: low, medium, and high. The sample consists of 143 Spanish police officers. A 2 × 2 × 3 factorial design is conducted to test hypotheses. Effects of perceived severity and personal responsibility are found only at the highest level of police involvement. For low and medium levels of involvement, no differences in perceived severity and personal responsibility of police officers are found.

Published in Journal of Intercultural Studies 33 (3), 261-274 (2012).

The 'crisis of multiculturalism' discourse characterises the current political and media debates in many European countries. This article analyses how liberal arguments, especially gender equality and freedom of speech, are used to promote nationalist and racializing political agendas in Denmark and Finland. It detects the powerful emergence of a nationalist rhetoric, based on the 'politics of reversal' and a rearticulation of liberal notions, in the Nordic countries, which have been known for their collectivist welfare state models and commitments to social equality. Through an analysis of case studies in both countries, the article shows how debates about gendered violence in Muslim families turn into attempts to broaden the discursive space for racializing speech and to individualize racism.

It is within this precarious context—between bodies and institutions—that we contend feminist communication scholar–teacher–activists should commit to more expansive communication-based theorization and study of gendered violence as opposed to gender- based violence. Conceptualizing violence as gendered rather than gender based not only opens up possibilities for more expansive and intersectional analysis of gendered and racialized bodies but also centers rather than obfuscates the role of institutional and colonial violence in the production of the precarity of marginalized bodies on U.S. campuses.

Why are women of color severely underrepresented in political science, despite significant efforts to diversify the profession? Why do women of color continue to experience political science as a hostile environment, despite the discipline’s decades-long commitment to advancing diversity and inclusion? I draw on an autoethnographic tradition of feminist truth telling and extend it into political science to open up new ways of
seeing, being, and writing, which, in turn, can challenge dominant understandings of the discipline as apolitical. I share my family’s experience of racial violence in a post–September 11 environment to map my movements within and across academic institutions. I further explain my motivation to write and conduct ethnographic research, and explore the embodied lived experience of producing knowledge as a middle-class South Asian woman, as a child of authorized immigrants, and as a
woman of color in political science. In mapping my movements and motivations, I reveal multiple forms of violence—racial, gendered, and epistemic—within political science, which provides some insight into the difficulty of diversifying the discipline.

Existing legal responses to sexual assault and harassment in the military have stagnated or failed. Current approaches emphasize the prevalence of sexual assault and highlight the masculine nature of the military’s statistical composition and institutional culture. Current responses do not, however, incorporate masculinities theory to disentangle the experiences of men as a group from men as individuals. Rather, embedded within contestations of the masculine military culture is the un- stated assumption that the culture universally privileges or benefits the individual men that operate within it. This myth is harmful because it tethers masculinities to military efficacy, suppresses the costs of male violence to men, and positions women as perpetual outsiders.

Debunking the myth of universal male privilege in heavily masculinized institu- tions would advance gender equality and shift the law reform focus. It would bring sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual harassment into the same frame as the military mental health crisis and even mass solidier-on-soldier shootings. This would reveal the gender equality implications of military mental health and disen- tangle masculinities and military efficacy. Debunking the myth of univeral male privilege would yield more vigilance to how law reforms can exacerbate hyper-mas- culine violence. It introduces new entry points to gendered violence in the military, expanding the focus from incident-based responses to recruiting and training.

Despite a “spatial imaginary” which constructs Europe as a location of sexual and gender freedom (Rao, 2014), presently, twenty countries in Europe require sterilisation in order to legally recognise transgender people’s gender identities, including four of the seven countries in the INFERCIT study: Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Cyprus (but not Spain, which since 2007 does not require sterilisation for gender identity recognition [see Platero, 2008]. In Bulgaria and Lebanon no gender identity recognition for trans people is provided by law; the latter lies outside the “European” region) (TGEU, 2014). Compulsory sterilisation—classified as a crime against humanity in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (UN General Assembly, 1998: art. 7.1)—is widely in force against transgender people, who constitute “the only known group in Europe subject to legally prescribed, state-enforced sterilisation” (Hammarberg, 2009: 19). However, forced sterilisation of trans people is not generally conceptualised as a eugenicist or genocidal policy, in part because sterilisation is conflated with gender reassignment surgical interventions which, widely considered as that which brings transgender bodies into being, are in turn conflated with embodied transgender subjectivities. On this view, transgender individuals could not exist except through a medicalised process that, by design, precludes their “natural” reproductive capacities and is generally not accompanied by fertility preservation or the provision of assisted reproduction technologies (Plemons, 2014: 38; De Sutter et al., 2002; De Sutter, 2001). Sterilisation laws are justified through a pathologising discourse on transgender lives which constructs gender reassignment interventions as medical “treatment” of gender identity disorder (Suess, Espineira & Crego Walters, 2014: 73-76). Adopting a depathologising perspective enables us to contextualise compulsory sterilisation (which naturalises the sexually dimorphic, cisgender, heterosexual body) as a form of “gendercide” which has historically been instrumental in the imposition of a Euro-colonial binary gender system (Miranda, 2010; Lugones, 2007). The state-imposition of medical interventions on trans people not only has deleterious effects on their reproductive rights, “effectively undermin[ing] their right to found a family” (Hammarberg, 2009: 21; see OHCHR et al., 2014)—as “family” is hegemonically defined by a heteronormative and bio/ logical kinship order (Butler, 2002; van Anders, 2014). I argue that state regulation of transgender reproduction constitutes a form of institutionalised gendered violence inasmuch as it impedes transgender people’s ability to exercise inherent first-person authority over the materiality and meanings of their gendered embodiments (Bettcher, 2009; Spade, 2013). Efforts to renaturalise gender and kinship inextricably intersect (Kantsa, 2006) in the biopolitical attempt to regulate transgender embodiments and reproduction, which conditions the emerging legal recognition of transgender subjects as a rights-bearing minority (Stryker, 2014).

By applying terminology from trauma theory and a methodological approach from comics scholarship, this essay discusses three graphic autobiographies of women. These are A Game for Swallows by Zeina Abirached (trans. Edward Gauvin, 2012), We are on our Own by Miriam Katin (2006), and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (trans. Anjali Singh, 2004). Two issues are at the centre of the investigation: the strategies by which these works engage in the much-debated issues of representing gendered violence, and the representation of the ways traumatized daughters and their mothers deal with the identity crises caused by war.

"Ni una más" è il grido di protesta con cui le madres e gli attivisti conducono la loro lotta contro omertà e impunità che caratterizzano il fenomeno del femminicidio di Ciudad Juárez, città messicana al confine con gli Stati Uniti. Le relazioni tra violenza, misoginia, memoria e rappresentazione nella "città delle morte", sono esplorate attraverso un approccio interdisciplinare.
Francesca Guerisoli analizza le modalità con cui l'arte e le forme creative si oppongono al femminicidio, costruendo un orizzonte simbolico nel quale si colloca una battaglia culturale e politica transnazionale nel tentativo di ristabilire una memoria pubblica occultata dal sistema politico ed economico dominante. L'arte nata in relazione alla violenza e al femminicidio è indagata attraverso la descrizione delle opere e delle pratiche messe in atto da collettivi locali e da artisti che operano anche a livello internazionale, come Teresa Margolles, Lorena Wolffer, Ursula Biemann, Santiago Sierra, Regina José Galindo, Francis Alÿs.
Il progetto d'arte partecipativa Zapatos Rojos di Elina Chauvet, nato nel contesto di Juárez, è divenuto il simbolo più popolare della lotta al femminicidio nel nostro Paese. L'analisi critica mette in rilievo il significato della marcia di scarpe rosse e il valore che il progetto, nato in una realtà specifica, esprime anche in tutti quei contesti in cui la relazione asimmetrica tra i sessi porta al femminicidio.

Il libro ha ottenuto il patrocinio di Amnesty International - Italia: "Per la capacità di andare oltre i fatti del femminicidio, sapendo ispirare nel lettore un desiderio concreto di cambiamento. Un libro che non soltanto racconta, documenta alla perfezione e denuncia una piaga del nostro tempo con chiara fermezza, ma che trasforma l'arte in strumento per contrastare silenzio ed omertà".

postmedia books 2016
240 pp. 147 ill.
isbn 9788874901562

From the earliest feminist press to Twitter, women have used technology to create and sustain narratives that demand attention and redress for gendered violence. Herein we argue that the #MeToo boom was made possible by the digital labor, consciousness-raising, and alternative storytelling created through the #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed, and #TheEmptyChair hashtag networks. Each of these hashtags highlight women’s experiences with interpersonal and institutionally-enabled violence and each was precipitated by high-profile news events. Alongside an examination of Twitter networks, we consider the social and cultural conditions that made each hashtag significant at particular moments, examining the ideological and political work members of these hashtag networks perform. We find that feminist hashtags have been successful in creating an easy-to-digest shorthand that challenges and changes mainstream narratives about violence and victimhood.

Misogyny Online explores the worldwide phenomenon of gendered cyberhate as a significant discourse which has been overlooked and marginalised. The rapid growth of the internet has led to numerous opportunities and benefits; however, the architecture of the cybersphere offers users unprecedented opportunities to engage in hate speech. This book weaves together data and theory from multiple disciplines. Its data sources include a meticulously archived collection of cyberhate that I received over the course of two decades working as a journalist – has already been recognised by scholars and public figures as providing a powerful, original, and timely statement about the rapidly escalating international gendered cyberhate problem and its harms. It has also been commended for offering a major contribution to the interdisciplinary study of emerging communication technologies, contemporary manifestations of hate speech, digital citizenship, internet governance, and digital divides.

The Northeast of India is one of the most important yet most isolated regions of the country. There was a time when it was situated in the trade route and human migration of the Southeast Asian civilizations. Difficult to administer, the British left this region to its own means and methods, thus initiating the process of its “peripheralization”. Over the years, the governments in “mainland India” have not been able to assimilate the northeast into the “mainstream” while keeping intact its traditions and culture. The frustration resulting from this alienation as well as the inability of the multi ethno-linguistic communities to think of themselves in unified terms has led to a vicious circle of violence – insurgency and counter-insurgency, which has further reinforced the well circulated myths about the dangers of the northeast among the rest of the Indian population. In between the conflicts over identity, natural resources, migration, displacement, socio-political exclusion, and so on the community that becomes the worst sufferer is that of the womenfolk. Many writers from the Northeast have written about the culture and problems unique to this region and what resonates through all their works is the anguish suffered by the people, especially the women, in their tryst with violence and exploitation. Writing becomes a way to engage the voices that emerge out of this region that is both literally and metaphorically at the margin. It is a way of political intervention and opening up this alienated land bound with myths and false ideas to a more realistic and pragmatic perspective. In this paper I would like to explore the gendered nature of the violence and exploitation faced by the women of this region through some works of literature.

Resumo: A teoria social feminista propõe inúmeras formas de compreender a violência dos homens contra as mulheres em geral mas poucas formulações específicas sobre a violência letal contra as mulheres. Este artigo busca analisar como algumas das principais perspectivas no interior do pensamento feminista contemporâneo podem ser utilizadas para explicar os homicídios de mulheres. Alguns dos conceitos e argumentos mais relevantes relacionados ao tema e presentes no pensamento feminista são examinados e discutidos -violência de gênero, patriarcado, femicídio, terrorismo íntimo -com o intuito de identificar e explorar tanto suas possibilidades heurísticas quanto seus limites analíticos.

Pre-print draft of an article to be published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing

In the work of Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera, land is shown to be a complex and contested resource to which the typically abject fates of her female protagonists are inextricably bound. As she put it in a 2001 interview shortly before the publication of her final novel: " the connection between women and land in Zimbabwe is negative ". This article situates Vera's work in the context of debates over Zimbabwean land reform, and considers examples of how the " negative " connection between women and land is articulated in her fiction through contrasting leitmotifs of abjection and habitat, culminating in the cautiously redemptive conclusion of her last published novel, The Stone Virgins (2002). The discussion draws on Silvia Federici's work on women, the body and primitive accumulation and on Jason Moore's theory of negative-value in the capitalist world-ecology, to account for why, in Vera's work, the female body is invariably positioned, abjectly, at the nexus of colonial governance and what David Moore has described as Zimbabwe's postcolonial regime of " violent accumulation " .

If women “violate” the unwritten laws and codes of honor, which are supposed to “damage” the social reputation of the family in the community, they are killed in the name of honor, in order to restore the perceived “lost honor”. This paper explores the phenomenon of honor killings by examining the general discourses and scholarly critiques, regarding the implications for associating honor crimes with Islam and restricted to the Muslim-dominant societies, which of course create a binary between “superior” West and “backward” East. Scholarly research on honor crimes pinpoints the great debate on associating such crimes to culture and especially to Muslim culture. The current study attempts to identify the implications of essentialist approach of honor killings that portraits women as “helpless” and “passive” victims and men as “powerful” and “dominant” perpetrators. This paper discusses as well how cultural relativism is used to blame Muslim immigrants as responsible for honor crimes. In conclusion, the researcher argues that by holding such a view has its implication since it portraits “East” as an oppressive culture where the brutality of such crimes is justified by tradition, religion, cultural and customary norms and laws.  Therefore, in order to avoid these implications, the paper discusses another approach that considers honor killings as gendered violence, perpetuated by the kinship and marriage structures of patriarchal societies.