Violence and Gender: Problematizing Familiar Gender Distinctions

To register for the workshop, please contact Luise Bendfeldt.

Research on the various interconnections between gender and violence is conducted within a wide range of fields across contexts on the continuum of “war” and “peace”. Yet, regardless of empirical focus, a crucial challenge in such research is to keep the connections between gender and violence as an open question. This is a challenge not only given familiar storylines in society at large which tend to reflect well-known gendered distinction, but also as our own understandings of the workings of gender and violence as scholars inevitably are shaped by certain theoretical assumptions about ‘what gender is and does’. Hence, any critical efforts to attend to the various interconnections between gender and violence inevitably raise questions around how such assumptions might shape the questions we ask, and do not ask and the things we see and do not see.

The workshop aims to bring together scholars from various fields addressing the interconnections between gender and violence across contexts on the continuum of “war” and “peace”. In particular, it gathers scholars whose research in some way has troubled familiar gender distinctions, either through the questions posed (e.g. men’s vulnerability or women’s violence) or through the empirical results they have produced. In addition to discussing concrete research results, the aim is to provide a venue for exchange of
experiences of the difficulties sometimes encountered in such research, both in relation to the reactions and reception of the research among other scholars and policy circles, but also in terms of one’s own theoretical and ethio-political desires.

An open lecture by Laura Sjoberg will take place in Ostromsalen, 4573, Östra Ågatan 19, which doesn't need registration. The title of this lecture is “The Violences of the Portrayal of Women’s Violence”.