The Cunning of Gender Violence: Securitization and the Violence of Law
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The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke 2023) focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Because religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run so deeply through the institutional structures of the agenda, the contributions explore ways it may be affirming or enabling rationales and systems of power, including civilizational hierarchies, that harm the very people it seeks to protect.
About the speakers
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University where she teaches anthropology and gender studies. Her scholarship, strongly ethnographic and mostly based on long-term research in Egypt, has focused on the relationship between cultural forms and power; the politics and ethics of knowledge and representation of the Arab and Muslim worlds; and the dynamics of gender politics and the international circulation of women’s rights talk. She has written many books, including Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (1986/2006/2016) and Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (2013). She is the Co-Editor with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of The Cunning of Gender Violence: Feminism and Geopolitics.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji is the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Associate Professor of Muslim Societies at Georgetown University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests in the fields of Muslim studies, feminist theory, South Asia, and migration. Professor Khoja-Moolji is the author of award-winning books which include Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan. Her latest book, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality, was recently published by Oxford University Press.
Karen Engle is Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law and Founder and Co-director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Women’s and Gender Studies. Professor Engle writes on the interaction between social movements and law, particularly in the fields of international human rights law, international criminal law, and Latin American law. She is author of numerous scholarly articles and of The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict: Feminist Interventions in International Law (2020) as well as The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (2010), which received the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association Section on Human Rights.
Janet R. Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW). Her most recent book is The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics (2020), which was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. With Ann Pellegrini she co-wrote Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2003) and coedited Secularisms (2008), and with Elizabeth Castelli she coedited Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence (2004).
Vasuki Nesiah teaches human rights, legal and social theory at NYU Gallatin where she is also faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights. She has published on the history and politics of human rights, humanitarianism, international criminal law, reparations, global feminisims, and decolonization. Nesiah was awarded the Jacob Javits Professorship (2022), Gallatin Distinguished Teacher Award in 2021 and the NYU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Faculty Award in 2020. Her current book projects include International Conflict Feminism (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press) and Reading the Ruins: Colonialism, Slavery, and International Law. A founding member of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), she is also co-editing TWAIL: A Handbook with Anthony Anghie, Bhupinder Chimni, Michael Fakhri, and Karin Mickelson (forthcoming from Elgar).
Rafia Zakaria is an author, editor, and attorney. She is a fellow at the African American Policy Institute and is a weekly columnist at The Baffler in the United States as well as for dawn, Pakistan’s largest and oldest English language daily, since 2009. Her column is syndicated in newspapers all over the world and is regularly republished in the Deccan Chronicle, The Wire India, Kathmandu Post, Sri Lanka Guardian, and New Straits Times, among others. Her latest book Against White Feminism (2021) was one of NPR’s “Most Favorite Books of 2021” In Fall 2016 she was part of the “How Should Journalism Cover Terrorism” Project at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Rafia is also the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (2015) and Veil (2017).
Accessibility
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