Call For Papers: Genocide is a Feminist Issue

As we write this in early December 2023, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which has already resulted in the killing of over 15,500 people, is about to go into its third month. Widely described by experts in International law and politics, as well a by scholars from across disciplines in the social sciences, as an act of genocide and ethnic cleansing, this massacre is, for Palestinian communities and scholars, an effect of the ongoing and continuous nakba (Abu Hatoum, 2021; El Shakry, 2021). It is an intensification of the catastrophic process of dispossession and elimination that began in 1948, and established conditions of settler colonial apartheid across historic Palestine. Palestinian and Global South feminists have long drawn attention to the fact that Zionist settler colonial violence is necessarily a feminist issue. In a recent blog post for the Review of African Political Economy, Rama Salla Dieng (2023) argues that the genocide in Gaza operates by constraining and destroying the conditions for Palestinian social reproduction. By starving Gazans, cutting off their access to water, and electricity, the Israeli state makes the everyday work of making life impossible. Within this context still, the reports pouring out of Gaza draw attention to the everyday work of community-building that continues: in rescue operations, in adults gathering to play with children, in the work of medical care. This focus is made ever more significant because, as in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the narrative of saving women and queer Palestinians from Hamas is increasingly widely touted as justification for the ongoing genocide. A rich scholarship exists that critically dismantles this genderwashing and pinkwashing discourse (Puar 2007, Alqaisiya 2018). This moment demands further attention to this conversation to unpack the material effects of this imperialist erasure of Palestinian women and queers’ anticolonial agency at a moment of spectacular violence. Palestinian feminists have also drawn attention repeatedly to the ‘Palestine Exception’ – the exclusion of anti-Zionist discourse from definitions of liberal free speech – that operates within Global North feminist and progressive discourse (Abdo 2022, Jadaliyya Reports 2023). The Palestine Exception criminalises and stigmatises pro-Palestinian political speech, often reiterating narratives of colonial modernity’s conception of itself as marching towards progress, and of its others as backward remainders. The biopolitical abandonment that this entails is squarely a concern for a feminist praxis that centres decoloniality.

With this in mind, we call on feminist scholars who are able at this moment to contribute short Intervention pieces that engage with some of the themes above, through the lens of their work. We also welcome papers which challenge the way the conflict has been configured in geopolitical terms, and instead explore how gender relations are entangled with justifications for and weapons of conflict (Cockburn 2010) or how the ‘everyday’ and ‘so-called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict’ (Mac Ginty 2021). Intervention articles are short pieces of no more than 5000 words, and are typically structured as commentaries, offering a feminist geographical lens on topical questions. They could, but need not contain original research. For further information on Intervention submissions, please see here.

Please send your paper to Managing Editor lena.grip@kau.se for a first editorial decision if the text can be included in the interventions section. The selected contributions will be sent for peer-review. Paper submissions will be accepted until the 25 March 2024.

References

Abu Hatoum, N. (2021) Decolonizing [in the] future: Scenes of Palestinian temporality. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 103(4): 397–412.

Alqaisiya, W. (2018) Decolonial queering: The politics of being queer in Palestine. Journal of Palestine Studies, 47(3), 29-44.

Cockburn, C. (2010) Gender relations as causal in militarization and war: A feminist standpoint. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12(2): 139-157.

El Shakry, H. (2021) Palestine and the aesthetics of the future impossible. Interventions, 23(5): 669–690.

Mac Ginty, R. (2021) Everyday peace: How so-called ordinary people can disrupt violent conflict. Oxford University Press.

Puar, J. K. (2007) Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Salla Dieng, R. (2018) Why Palestine is a feminist and an anti-colonial issue. Review of African Political Economy. Blog. Nov 21, 2023, https://roape.net/2023/11/21/why-palestine-is-a-feminist-and-an-anti-colonial-issue/