Gender and Feminism Research Network Seminar: Bodies as Battlefields

The IAS and Gender and Feminism Research Network are pleased to welcome Dr Paul Kirby (LSE and Sussex) for a talk entitled 'Bodies as Battlefields'.

How does sexual violence come to be an instrument of war? After some decades of academic, journalistic and activist attention, it is commonly argued that sexual violence is of strategic or tactical value for armed groups, and that its use may even be increasing in sites of conflict as otherwise diverse as Syria, Myanmar, and Burundi. In this talk, Dr Paul Kirby discusses some of the under-examined implications of such a theory, with particular attention to the conversion of body parts into weapons, the role of militarism, and the porous boundary between wartime and peacetime gender orders.

Paul Kirby is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the London School of Economics and Lecturer in International Security at the University of Sussex.

Please register here.

Image: 'The Rape' by Darwin Leon (2009)