The Cunning of Gender Violence

Geopolitics and Feminism

LILA ABU-LUGHOD, REMA HAMMAMI,

NADERA SHALHOUBKEVORKIAN, EDITORS

This book focuses on how a 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, as well as 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.

Lila Abu-Lughod is Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University. Rema Hammami is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Women's Studies, Birzeit University. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at The Hebrew University and Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University.

Archive of Tongues

An Intimate History of Browness MOON CHARANIA

This is an exploration of dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of the author's mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience and meaning-making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.

Moon Charania is Associate Professor of International Studies and Comparative Women Studies at Spelman College and author of Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up?: Empire, Visual Culture, and the Brown Female Body

August 2023

480 pages

Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women's Studies / Law / Human Rights / Anthropology / Cultural Anthropology

Rights: World

August 2023

192 pages

Gender and Sexuality / Feminism and Women's Studies / Queer Theory / Postcolonial and Colonial Studies

Rights: WorldWorld

August 2023

248 pages

Geography / Asian Studies / Southeast Asia / Environmental Studies

Rights: World