About the Book
This book explores the gendered and gendering effects of violence against women in extreme situations such as major wars, genocides, famines, slavery, the Holocaust, mass rape and ethnic cleansing. The female experience of methodical genocidal rape in the former Yugoslavia, women’s coerced participation in the Rwandan massacre, the comfort women system during World War II, the gendering of genocidal strategies during the Holocaust, nuclear testing in the Pacific and the reproduction ‘policy’ in Tibet are all integrated into a wider framework – a framework which uncovers the true consequences of identifying women as simultaneously sexual objects, transmitters of culture and symbols of the nation.
Commendations
‘One of those books that should be essential reading for students across a wide range of disciplines... an inspirational book in an area that has been neglected by the mainstream of (Northern/Western) feminist academia.’
- Irish Journal of Feminist Studies
‘Important and accessible.’
- Ethna Viney, Irish Times
Contents
Contents
PART 1: Genders and Genocides
1. Introduction: (En)gendering Genocides - Ronit Lentin
2. Genocide and Gender: A Split Memory - Joan Ringelheim
PART 2: Women in a War Zone: The Construction of Gendered Identities
3. Against the War: Women Organizing across the National Divide in the Countries of the Former Yugoslavia - Rada Boric
4. Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and National Identities in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina - Euan Hague
5. Reconstructing the Self through Memories of Violence among Mayan Indian Women War Widows - Judith Zur
6. The Mother of all Warriors: Women in West Belfast, Northern Ireland - Lorraine Dowler
PART 3: Captured Subjects: Displacing Women’s Bodies
7. A Question of Silence: Partition, Women and the State - Urvashi Butalia
8. Women Face Cultural Genocide on the Roof of the World - Yangchen Kikhang
9. A Broken Rainbow: Pacific Women and Nuclear Testing - Zohl de Ishtar
10. Women and Fundamentalism in Iran - Haideh Moghissi
PART 4: Sexualized Slaveries
11. The Comfort Women System during World War II: Asian Women as Targets of Mass Rape and Sexual Slavery by Japan - Nelia Sancho
12. Chattels and Concubines: Women and Slavery in Brazil - Yvonne Corcoran-Nantes
13. The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
14. Enslaved Black Women: The Politics of Reproduction and Infanticide - Helen Thomas
PART 5: Gendered Victimization: Migration, Poverty, Famines
15. Invisible Subjects and the Victimized Self: Settlement Experiences of Refugee Women in Australia - Roberta Julian
16. ‘I Have a Feeling of Being Exiled Here’: Women Migrants in Central Russia - Natalya Kosmarskaya
17. Ethiopian Women Immigrants into Israel: The Loss of Space and Body - Tovi Fenster
18. Woman as Famine Victim: The Figure of Woman in Irish Famine Narratives - Margaret Kelleher
19. ‘Disasters’ and Bangladeshi Women - Santi Rozario
