Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (The Feminist Imagination - Europe and Beyond)

Description

The twentieth century has been a century of wars, genocides and violent political conflict; a century of militarization and massive destruction. It has simultaneously been a century of feminist creativity and struggle worldwide, witnessing fundamental changes in the conceptions and everyday practices of gender and sexuality. What are some of the connections between these two seemingly disparate characteristics of the past century? And how do collective memories figure into these connections? Exploring the ways in which wars and their memories are gendered, this book contributes to the feminist search for new words and new methods in understanding the intricacies of war and memory. From the Italian and Spanish Civil Wars to military regimes in Turkey and Greece, from the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust to the wars in Abhazia, East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the chapters in this book address a rare selection of contexts and geographies from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which pasts, particularly violent pasts, have been conceptualized and narrated. Discussing the participation of women in war, sexual violence in times of conflict, the use of visual and dramatic representations in memory research, and the creative challenges to research and writing posed by feminist scholarship, Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories will appeal to scholars working at the intersection of military/war, memory, and gender studies, seeking to chart this emerging territory with ’feminist curiosity’. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction: Uncomfortable Connections: Gender, Memory, War PART I SEXUAL VIOLENCE: SILENCE, NARRATION, RESISTANCE Commentary 1 The Historicity of Denial: Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the War of Annihilation, 1941–1945 2 Between Silence and Narration: European and Asian Women on War Brutalities in Japanese-Occupied Territories 3 The Female and Political Body in Pain: Sexual Torture and Gendered Trauma during the Greek Military Dictatorship (1967–1974) 4 Silencing Sexual Violence and Vulnerability: Women’s Narratives of Incarceration during the 1980–1983 Military Junta in Turkey PART II GENDERING MEMORIES OF WAR, SOLDIERING AND RESISTANCE Commentary: Women’s Memories of Soldiering: An Intersectionality Perspective 5 Militarizing the Nation: Gender Politics of the Warsaw Uprising 6 The Italian Civil War in the Memoirs of Female Fascist Soldiers 7 “We Left Our Skirts to Men as We Went to the Front”: The Participation of Abkhazian Women from Turkey in the Abkhazian War 8 Militarized US Women from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: Citizenship, Homelessness, and the Construction of Public Memory in a Time of War PART III FICTIONALIZING AND VISUALIZING GENDERED MEMORIES Commentary: Unsettling Accounts: Fictionalizing and Visualizing Memories of War 9 Women’s Memory of the Spanish Civil War: The Power of Words 10 Forgotten Perpetrators: Photographs of Female Perpetrators after WWII 11 Testimonies of War and Love: The Work of the Witnessing Imagination in Eve Ensler’s Play Necessary Targets and Jasmila Žbanićs Film Grbavica 12 “Conversations in Silence”: Ceramic Installations Shaping the Visual and Political Imagination of Gendered Tsunami and Conflict Reconstruction Landscapes in Aceh PART IV FEMINIST REIMAGININGS Commentary: Interrogating Memory and Evidence: An Intersectional Feminist Perspective 13 Narrating Women’s Bodies: Storying Silences and Secrets in the Aftermath of Genocide 14 Women Living and Re-living Armed Conflict: Exploring a Methodology for Spanning Time and Place Index