Fellows from the working group on Religion and the Global Framing of Gender Violence have been busy writing critical work on the politics of gendered violence in fields ranging from Anthropology to Law and Public Policy. Although we have not been meeting in person, we wanted to keep the conversations going by sharing some of the Fellows’ recent scholarship and news.
Working Group Fellows
Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology and IRWGS, Columbia University, and RGFGV Project Co-Director, delivered the 2019 Inaugural Anthropology Lecture at the University of Leuven. Titled “The Courage of Truth: Making Anthropology Matter,” Professor Abu-Lughod explores Foucault’s call for the “courage of truth” to reflect on her recent work as a form of engaged anthropology, focusing on her work on gender violence and security and on the settler colonial paradigm in Palestinian studies. In 2019-20, Professor Abu-Lughod also delivered three lectures based on her work for the RGFGV project: the 21st Annual B.N. Ganguli Memorial Lecture at the Center for Developing Developing Societies in Delhi, India, titled “Gender, Violence, Security, Circuits of Power and the Muslim Question,” “Security and the Political Geographies of Gender Violence” in the NYU Liberal Studies Global Lecture Series, and a lecture at Amherst College.
Nadje Al-Ali, Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University, co-edited a volume on Gender, Governance and Islam, to which she also contributed a chapter titled “Iraq: Gendering violence, sectarianisms and authoritarianism.” The Center for the Study of Social Difference co-sponsored the book launch, facilitated by Lila Abu-Lughod, with the editors of the volume. An interview with Deniz Kandiyoti, co-editor of Gender, Governance and Islam, can be found at Borderlines. Professor Al-Ali also published an article in Feminist Review on the challenges of discussing gender-based violence in relation to the Middle East, based on the paper she workshoped at our RGFGV confrence in New York. She co-wrote a chapter in Queer Asia (eds. Jonathan Daniel Luther and Jennifer Ung Loh) titled “Feminist and Queer Perspectives on West Asia.”
In 2019, Zahra Ali, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers, Newark, published an article for Contemporary Islam titled “Being a young British Iraqi Shii in London: exploring diasporic cultural and religious identities between Britain and Iraq.” Using ethnographic research conducted in London, Baghdad, and Najaf-Kufa, Professor Ali analyzes young British Iraqi Shiis experiences of belonging in relation to religious and cultural identities.
Qudsiya Contractor, Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, contributed a chapter to Gender, Caste, and the Imagination of Equality, edited by Anupama Rao, titled “Muslim women, caste and the beef ban in Mumbai.” For Economic and Political Weekly, Dr. Contractor critiques recent Indian Supreme Court rulings on religious freedoms and women’s rights. She expanded on this work with an article for The Wire on the criminalization of the triple talaq, which examines the tensions between religious rights and Indian Supreme Court judgements in the pursuit of protecting women.
Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, co-edited Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field, and co-authored a chapter with Libby Adler titled “‘You Play, You Pay:’ Feminists and Child Support Enforcement in the United States.” Professor Halley was interviewed by the New York Times about the Trump administration rules on sexual misconduct on college campuses.
Rema Hammami, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Women’s Studies of Birzeit University and RGFGV Project Co-Director, contributed an article to Current Anthropology titled “Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints.” She also had a chapter in Janet Halley et. al.’s Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (2019) entitled “Follow the Numbers: Global Governmentality and the Violence Against Women Agenda in Occupied Palestine.”
Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, published two articles. “Death by Benevolence: Third World Girl and the Contemporary Politics of Humanitarianism” in Feminist Theory, which examines the production of the “third world girl” through menstrual health and female genital mutilation campaigns. In “Re-animating Muslim women’s auto/biographical writings: Hayat-e-Ashraf as a palimpsest of educated selves,” published in Third World Thematics, Professor Khoja-Moolji resists dominant tropes of the 19th century Indian Muslim woman as silent and uneducated by re-purposing Muslim women’s auto/biographical writings from this time.
Vasuki Nesiah, legal scholar and Associate Professor of Practice at NYU Gallatin, contributed a chapter to Janet Halley et al’s edited volume of Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field titled “Indebted: The Cruel Optimism of Leaning-In to Empowerment.” Professor Nesiah and Dina Siddiqi, RGFGV Fellow, were both panelists for the NYU Border Talks series that explored conceptual approaches to borders and mobility.
Rupal Oza, Associate Professor in the Department for Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, who presented at our RGFGV workshop in New York in October 2018 on her study of the increase in “false rape cases” with the National Crime Records Bureau in India, is published this as an article, “Sexual Subjectivity in Rape Narratives: Consent, Credibility, and Coercion in Rural Haryana” forthcoming in the Autumn 2020 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
Sima Shakhsari, RGFGV Fellow and Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, published a book in January 2020 called The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan. The book investigates the online and off-line network of Iranian blogs, known as Weblogistan, and analyzes the politics of civil resistance, the internet as an imperial democratization project, and hegemonic impositions of gendered, sexed, and racial subjectivities. An interview with Professor Shakhsari, as well as an excerpt from their book, can be found on Jadaliyya.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, RGFGV project co-director and Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Chair in Global Law at Queen Mary University of London, published a book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding in 2019. Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s award-winning book utilizes archival, historical, and ethnographic material to examine the governance of childhood under military occupation and violations of children’s rights in Palestine. More recently, Professor Shalhoub-Kervorkian also published “Gun to Body: Mental health against unchilding” in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.
Dina Siddiqi, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU in Liberal Studies, penned an article for The Daily Star on labor organizing in the Bangladesh garment industry, and the historic tensions between trade unions and national interests. Along with RGFGV Fellow Vasuki Nesiah, Professor Siddiqi was a panelist for the NYU Border Talks series that explored conceptual approaches to borders and mobility. Professor Siddiqi was also interviewed in the Huffington Post about the Shaheen Bagh protests in opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act in India.
Aditi Surie von Czechowski, Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, wrote an article for Cultural Anthropology called “Together in the Flesh.” Dr. Surie von Czechowski draws on her fieldwork in the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania to explore laughter as an embodied practice that “engenders togetherness in the flesh.”
Shahla Talebi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, published an article in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. In “Ethnography of Witnessing and Ethnography as Witnessing: Topographies of Two Court Hearings,” Professor Talebi draws on ethnographic and archival research to examine two hearings in Iranian courts involving the persecution of Iranian dissidents in the 1980s.
Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, and Faculty Director of the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California Berkeley,published “Protecting the Nation from ‘Honor Killings:’ the Construction of a Problem” for Constitutional Commentary.
Dubravka Zarkov, Associate Researcher at the Radboud University Nijmegen and co-editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies recently wrote an editorial titled, “On economy, health, and politics of the COVID-19 Pandemic” for the upcoming issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Professor Zarkov also published an editorial on contemporary dissonance within global feminist movements, and an editorial on reading contemporary news stories as fairy tales, utopias, or critical dystopias.
Media Fellows
In 2018 and 2019, recipients of the CSSD media fellowship were supported to travel to the Middle East or South Asia to research stories that could reframe perspectives on the relationships between gender-based violence and religion. Since then, the fellows have published a range of editorials and articles.
Yasmin El-Rifae, an editor at Mada Masr and co-producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature, published a piece on the high rates of cesarean section births in Egypt. This article looks into the political and economic factors within the healthcare industry that contribute to the rise of c-sections, and uses personal testimony of women presented with the choice of a cesarean section.
Rafia Zakaria, author of Against White Feminism (2017) and The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (2015), wrote an analysis for Adi Magazine on the ways in which American anti-FGM (female genital mutilation) campaigns are harnessed to justify the legal exclusion of Black and brown people through ICE operations and executive orders. She wrote a New York Times book review of Hossein Kamaly’s new book, A History of Islam in 21 Women, as well as an article for The Nation on the dangers of “stay-at-home” orders for survivors of domestic violence.
Samira Shackle published an article in Elle UK detailing harassment and blackmail faced by Pakistani women online. The article outlines the limitations to global privacy standards on social media platforms, and the consequences that women may experience for reporting cybercrimes.
Maryam Saleh, a reporter with The Intercept, penned an article on the ways in which war and displacement have cultivated new circumstances for Syrian women to address patriarchy and sexual violence in innovative ways. On Their Own Terms investigates the onset of humanitarian programs that arose as a result of Syria’s ongoing conflict, and the ways in which they fulfill, or brush up against, the demands of Syrian women who are pushing for deeper political change.