Description
This roundtable brings together scholars for discussions on feminist perspectives on violence and war. Our current moment is host to a proliferation of violences globally – those perpetrated through colonial, imperial and neocolonial patterns; those fuelled by inner- or interstate conflict; those found within daily, intimate levels. While some forms are rendered hypervisible, others become eclipsed and fall out of common lexicon.
Feminist organising has been at the heart of struggles against different forms of violence, including state and imperial violence. Feminists have interrogated heteropatriarchal, capitalist and anthropocentric framings of conflict; drawn attention to the fluid boundaries of war and peace; exposed the violent constitution of gendered and racialised subjects and shown how violence affects them differently.
Feminist approaches have also clashed, however. Liberal feminist narratives have been used to legitimise colonial and racialised forms of (state) violence throughout the global war on terror, and, more recently, violence in Gaza. Forms of radical feminism are being channelled to undermine trans and queer lives. Feminists have also justified peacekeeper’s violence in the name of protecting national communities.
This roundtable asks how feminist approaches help us to understand ongoing violences particularly concerning how forms of violence are made visible, invisible or hypervisible, and what tools feminist approaches provide us to draw connections and solidarities between different struggles. This roundtable both draws attention to these tensions and seeks to bring us back to the role that feminisms can play in exposing violence, creating resistance and fostering transnational solidarity.
