By: Maya Barillas Mohan, Staff Writer
Content warning: mentions of intimate partner violence and war.
SFU’s Harbour Centre talk, Sex and the War on Terror at 25, hosted by the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, is set exactly 25 years after the attacks of September 11. The talk extends debates around the “war on terror”(the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following 9/11) by explaining how “gender and sexuality function as technologies of governance and securitization, and sites through which terror is produced, rendered legible, and mobilized.” To help the general public better understand this intersection of gender and war, feminist and queer scholars from University of California Los Angeles, Oregon State University, Rutgers University, and the University of British Columbia will be presenting their research at this event. This upcoming intersectional discussion is a great opportunity to read some research authored by a couple of the featured scholars.
Maya Mikdashi, a Rutgers professor whose research focuses on the crossroads of state power, politics, and secularism, is also the author of Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. Sextarianism explores how deeply patriarchal values yield gendered laws in Lebanon. The book uses a variety of archival sources like court records, public records, and ethnography of the Court of Cassation (highest civil court in Lebanon), to determine the steepness of the issue, and examine how far-reaching misogyny is in Western Asian systems. Sextarianism is also esteemed for analyzing regional and global sociopolitical patterns that “will force everyone to rethink how religious and sexual differences work at the nexus of states and citizenship,” as succinctly stated by a review from American anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod.
Sextarianism is complemented by Mikdashi’s article, which similarly explored “social acceptability of female vulnerability to violence.” This article displays how intimate partner violence can extend from structural conditions of violence. Understanding how gender ties into each level of social connection compounds the tragedy covered in Sextarianism. These ideas can be extrapolated across the world in places such as South Korea, where rising militarism and conservatism among young men is leading to negative perceptions and violent sentiments against women today, for instance, through protests that aim to downplay or criticize feminist movements (such as 4B Movement) throughout the country.
Razan Ghazzawi is an assistant professor and former political prisoner whose research focuses on queer theory and political revolutions along the “war on terror.” One of Ghazzawi’s most notable works is an article about the “war on terror” and the erasure of local struggles by leftist movements in the West. The “war on terror” is contained by quotation marks in Ghazzawi’s work because of the narratives that perpetuate the victimization of marginalized peoples, especially towards Muslim women and queer people. Rhetorically, quotations are used to signal that a word is operated outside of its normal use. The title is demeaned to showcase that the war, for the offending party, is a social construct. By delegitimizing such Western narratives, Ghazzawi strives towards “self determination” for queer and marginalized populations, resisting patriarchal militarization (a process where military values such as domination, hierarchy, and obedience feed into a belief that men are superior) especially in Western Asia.
Sex and the War on Terror at 25 is very timely with the ongoing issues of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy associated with American interventionism, defined as the US involvement in other nations’ affairs, both overtly and covertly.
Sex and the War on Terror at 25 is a very timely event, considering the ongoing issues of sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy associated with American interventionism, defined as the US involvement in other nations’ affairs, both overtly and covertly.
Attend Sex and the War on Terror at 25 at SFU Harbour Centre on September 11 at 6:00 p.m.
