2021-2022: Feminist Approaches to Theorizing Genocidal Violence, Wars and Occupations

In this series, we discuss the genocidal violence of everyday life. In the spirit of collaboration, feminist scholars will gather to present virtually on works in progress on the theme of genocidal violence.

The continuous sexualized targeting and killing of Indigenous women, the disposability of populations through wars and occupations, the genocidal fury aimed at racialized populations everywhere, institutionalized anti-Blackness resulting in police killings, a prison industrial complex and an unrelenting assault on Black and Latino communities: Feminist scholars know that a historicized analysis of race, class, gender and sexuality that is deeply attentive to imperialism, colonialism, the afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade and continuing racial capitalism, remains crucial for understanding the necropolitics we see everywhere. This workshop considers Genocidal violence across diverse contexts from North America to Palestine, India, the Middle East, Turkey, Armenia and elsewhere.

  • Those of us who write on violence wrestle with a number of issues including:
    • How to think about the politics of genocidal violence and the interconnections between its different registers
    • How to consider the transnational links between genocidal states
    • How to write about racial violence without spectacularizing it and trading in pain and suffering
    • How to minimize harm to the families and communities of those we write about
    • How to understand the specific context of racial violence, its geopolitical coordinates and its relationship to history
    • How to understand the operation of interlocking systems of oppression in each case
    • How to understand resistance

We hope to develop our thoughts about genocidal violence and its interconnected, global dimensions and deepen our scholarly and personal ties as feminist scholars, sustaining each other in our writing, teaching and politics. We will share resources and each other’s minds as we discuss the specificities of each research context.


Opening Event: October 19, 2021

Traffic in Asian Women: Categorical Violence and Innumerable Loss

Dr. Laura Hyun Yi Kang is Professor and former Chair of the Department Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press 2020) and Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Duke University Press 2002).

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Event 1: November 5, 2021

The Racial Politics of Settler State Genocide in Palestine


The (Racial) Question of Palestine: Zionism, Anti-Palestinian Racism and the Politics of Translation 

Dr. Shaira Vadasaria is a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies in the Sociology Department within the School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh.

What explanatory power does the concept of race and racism yield for the question of Palestine? Further, upon what epistemic centers should critiques of racism be used to understand the centrality of land struggle in Palestine? Treating race as a conduit of power that travels through Zionism in Europe to Palestine allows us to track the specificities of what race means as it is renewed under Israel’s settler colonial regime and the multitude of ways that racialization and race as a social category is refused by Palestinians in the quotidian struggle to remain on land. This talk considers how we might understand the question of Palestine as a racial one, while also considering what it means to approach race and racism in Palestine on its own terms, rather than through a mode of critique imposed by Euro-American scholarship. excerpted from abstract

Swarming Racial Violence, Affective Politics and the Israeli Occupation of Palestine

Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London. 

Violence inflicted on Palestinians in Occupied Jerusalem is embedded in genocidal logic. The genocidal logic in the studied context is a state organized multi-agent systems, that motivate the swarming power to amplify military and intelligent technology and work collaboratively biopolitically, spatially, and necropolitically, to erase the native. It is conceptualized as a collective state actions, incited by racial sacralized intent. This paper will explore swarming, as a network of interlocking violent collisions against the colonized, and its genocidal ramification. I consider swarming as a form of organizational accumulation, that involves dispossession to subjugate life to the power of death (Banerjee, 2008; Mbembe, 2003) and maintain an activated regime of organized terror over body and land, to reach an affective demolition. I end by explaining how thinking through genocide, and resisting the ongoing uprooting and psychic demolitions, can aid us in building global solidarity. excerpted from abstract

Commentator. Dr. Lana Tatour is a Lecturer in Development at the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney. 


Event 2: December 3, 2021

Genocide Management: Carceral Reformism, Policing, Sexual Violence and the Role of Law in North America

Co-sponsored by UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society


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Reformism as Genocide Management:
Abolition and (Reformist) Counterinsurgency in the Historical Present Tense”

Dr. Dylan Rodríguez is an abolitionist teacher, scholar, and collaborator. He was named an inaugural Freedom Scholar in 2020 and recently served as President of the American Studies Association (2020-2021). He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside since 2001 and recently became the Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society.

As a form of soft counterinsurgency, reformism has the corollary effect of criminalizing efforts to catalyze fundamental change to an existing order. It cultivates this criminalizing effect through dogmatic and simplistic mandates of “nonviolence” and incrementalism, while often encouraging a general comportment of compliance and respectability in relation to dominant and hegemonic regimes of power. Finally, reformism limits the horizon of political possibility to that which is presumed to be achievable within the limits of existing institutional structures and power relations (including electoral politics, racial capitalism, heteronormativity, the political and geographic unit of the nation-state, etc.). It is urgent, in this historical moment, to situate the politics and consequences of reform and reformism within the long present tense of United States and modern hemispheric policing regimes. Abolitionist analysis, which is simultaneously archival and emerging in real time, deals with policing, criminalization, and incarceration as the institutional and systemic expressions of long historical relations of domination and normalized (state and extra-state) violence. A stream of abolitionist analyses and narratives illuminates the antiblack, colonial, and generally (proto-)genocidal premises on which state formations rely for the fabrication of their ostensible social-political legitimacy. excerpted from abstract

Gray Zones in Law: Sexual Terror and Genocide

Dr. Sherene H. Razack is a Distinguished Professor and the Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies in the Department of Gender Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on racial violence. She is the founder of the virtual research and teaching network the Racial Violence Hub (RVHub). 

Writing of police killings of the residents of Rio’s Black favelas, Denise Ferreira Da Silva argues that raciality lies at the basis of the state’s decision to kill certain persons. Bodies and territories come to acquire the status of those not included in the ranks of the human, “nobodies” in Silva’s terminology, who always already signify violence and against whom violence is authorized. Such persons and territories occupy a negative relationship to law; their annihilation secures the security of the state. I would like to consider (again) whether we might think of missing and murdered Indigenous women as “nobodies” and locate the underpinnings of genocide in law’s response to the lethal sexual violence that is directed at Indigenous women by white men. In this paper I expand upon my previous work on the trial of Bradley Barton for the murder of Cindy Gladue, an Indigenous woman with whom Barton had contracted for sexual services. I consider whether sexual annihilation changes how we understand raciality in the law and the spaces that law preserves for genocide.

Commentator. Dr. Leslie Theilen-Wilson is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the Gender Equality and Social Justice at Nipissing University.

Commentator. An academic and practicing artist, Dr. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work addresses the ethico-political challenges of the global present. She is currently Director and Professor at the Social Justice Institute-GRSJ at the University of British Columbia. 


Event 3: January 7, 2022

Imaginaries of Dissent: South Asia


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“‘These Are Our Sincere Dreams:’ Sexuality, Caste, Dissent”

Dr. Anjali Arondekar is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, and founding Co-Director, Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean Studies and South Asia.

How do subaltern imaginaries of dissent rupture the incorporation of caste and sexuality into the Hindutva/homonationalism corpus? How can such histories of sexuality be forms of gathering and feminist hope, instead of forces of dispersal and attenuation? What I offer here are scenes of andolan/protest , meditations that move between the heady inspirations of current protests and the stultifying violence of state practices. Andolan, after all, is also a movement in Hindustani music, an alankar (combination/ornamentation of notes), to be specific, that oscillates between one fixed note and its counterpart, touching, suffusing, all that lies in between. If Indian authoritarianism relies on the unholy triumvirate of white supremacy, islamophobia and Hindutva, such a nexus finds it most malleable, toxic and incommensurate avatar in the evolving management of histories of caste/sexuality and its subjects.

“De facto statelessness through Administrative Violence: The coloniality of bordering through the National Registry of Citizens in Assam, India”

Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan is an Associate Professor in Social Work of Assamese descent at the University of Toronto. Dr. Bhuyan’s research examines how immigration policies contribute to gendered and racial forms of structural violence, with a focus on collective action with and by migrants who seek dignity and human rights.

Abdul Kalam Azad is an independent researcher-activist based out of Assam, India and a PhD candidate at Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam. Currently, Mr. Azam is working on multiple projects exploring the citizenship crisis in Assam where nearly two million people are excluded from National Register of Citizens.

Anupol Bordoloi is an independent researcher living in Guwahati, Assam with an MSW from Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Mr. Bordoloi currently works with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Guwahati, Assam and is involved in the formulation and implementation of development programs relating to poverty alleviation, healthcare, governance and climate change.

This paper examines the legal and administrative procedures by which an estimated 1.9 million residents in the state of Assam, India have been excluded from the National Registry of Citizens (NRC) and thus are at risk for de facto statelessness. Since India’s independence from Great Britain, the struggle to determine who is a citizen or “illegal migrant” has fueled heated conflicts among the Assamese ethnic majority, Bengali speaking Muslims and Hindus who originated in what is now Bangladesh, and the Indian government’s authority over migration (Barua, 2009). Building upon scholarship on the structural violence of bordering through political and social processes where belonging, identity, and rights are negotiated, we consider how the ascendence of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government and new technologies in population surveillance contribute to a shift from liminal to precarious citizenship in this border region. We review how Supreme Court of India decisions and regulations issued by the Government of Assam outline the legal requirements to verify the citizenship. We then contextualize this policy analysis with ethnographic interviews with residents of Assam who were excluded from the NRC and secondary sources on the impact exclusion from the final NRC list published in August 2019. While the NRC’s official purpose is to differentiate between citizens and “foreigners,” we argue that bordering practices associated with the NRC’s implementation produce de facto or administrative statelessness among racialized and gendered “others” who already face long-standing systemic inequality including women, trans people, and religious and ethnic minorities.

Additional author credit: Dr. Madhumita Sharma is an independent researcher based in Calgary, Canada with a PhD in geography from the University of Adelaide. Dr. Sarma’s PhD research focusses on migration from Bangladesh to Assam and its impact on the region’s social, political, and economic status.

Commentator. Dr. Inderpal Grewal is Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program. She is one of the founders of the field of transnational feminist studies, and known for her prolific work on transnational feminism, cultural theory, feminist theory, and her extensive research of post-colonialism, South Asian cultural studies, mobility and modernity, nongovernmental organizations, human rights, and law and citizenship.


Event 4: February 4, 2022

“Stories of dreadful iniquities and unutterable suffering:” Feminist Voices on Violence, Memory and Displacement


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“‘Stories of dreadful iniquities and unutterable suffering:’ Theorizing Arshaguhi Teotig’s Indigenous Feminist Voice in relation to Mass Violence against Ottoman Armenians”

Dr. Melissa Bilal is the Associate Director of the Armenian Music Program and Lecturer in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA.

My talk will focus on Armenian feminist writer, journalist, educator, and activist Arshaguhi Teotig and her monograph Amis Me I Giligia (A Month in Cilicia) which is a historic text testifying to the aftermath of the 1909 Cilician massacres against Armenians and presenting the political voice of an Ottoman Armenian intellectual woman. Arshaguhi Teotig visited Armenian political prisoners who were unjustly convicted by false accusations by the Young Turk government and the local Ottoman authorities. She questioned the legitimacy of a legal system that worked for the benefit of the sovereign power. Documenting in detail what she heard from the participants of the Dört-Yol resistance, she offered her philosophy on people’s right to self-defense. Arshaguhi Teotig was one of those women whose husbands were arrested, deported, and murdered during the Armenian genocide of 1915-1922. She joined the Armenian Women’s Association which was founded to make women active agents in the post-war, post-genocide campaigns for orphan relief, collecting abducted women, reviving the communal life, and documenting women’s and children’s suffering during the war…Founded in 1879 with a dedication to advance female education, this organization was already dismantled during the genocide by the Turkish authorities and its 50 schools were destroyed, students, staff, education board, and parents were deported and killed…During my talk, I will raise questions about how to theorize Arshaguhi Teotig’s indigenous feminist voice in relation to the genocidal/colonial structures and feminist silences in Turkey today. excerpted from abstract

Commentator. Dr. Zeynep Korkman is an assistant professor of Gender  Studies at UCLA. Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminisms; cultural politics; gender, labor, and affect; and religion, secularism, and the public sphere, with a regional focus on Turkey and the larger Middle East. Her primary scholarly agenda is to explore how gender and sexual minorities survive, resist, and even thrive within neoconservative and neoliberal encroachment upon their life worlds.


Event 5: March 4, 2022

Genocidal Violence in the Americas


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“Sepur Zarco, Guatemala: “Bodying Forth” and forensic aesthetics of witnessing in the courtroom and beyond”

Dr. Silvia Posocco is a reader in social anthropology in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interdisciplinary research interests are in gender and sexuality studies and violence, conflict and genocide studies. She has studied ethnographically insurgent movements in Guatemala, the archives of transnational adoption across sites and temporalities, and most recently, forensic archives, bioinformation and cultures of evidence.  

Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q’eqchi’ woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. ‘Bodying forth’ is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. It challenges the epistemologies underpinnings of law and science to re-center the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice.

“The Slow and Sudden Carceral Violences of the Canadian Colonial Project”

This presentation engages with an archive of prisoner writing and visual art to show how the Canadian correctional system functions as a tool of settler colonial governance. Specifically, Canada’s mass incarceration of Indigenous and racialized diasporic populations continues the longstanding colonial project of geographic reorganization in the service of white supremacy. Then those confined to carceral space are marked for death. The carceral techniques that shape and blunt the lives of people kept in federal prisons include force, a readily recognizable form of violence. Potentially more insidious, though, are techniques of abandonment where prisoners are left to die, signaling they are not worth saving. This presentation will unpack prisoner experiences of these varied techniques.

Commentator. Dr. Shannon Speed is a tribal citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is Director of the American Indian Studies Center and a Professor of Gender Studies and Anthropology at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for the last two decades in Mexico and in the United States on issues of indigenous autonomy, sovereignty, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, social justice, and activist research. Her most recent book, Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State, won the Best Subsequent Book Award of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2019 and a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award in 2020. 


Event 6: April 1, 2022

Land, Climate Change, and Genocidal Violence in North America and South Asia


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“Protect the Nation, Defeat the Threats”:  Colonial Violence and the Securitization of the Canadian Northern Border in the Wake of Climate Catastrophe

Dr. Jaskiran Dhillon is an Associate Professor in Global Studies at The New School. Her scholarship, organizing, and teaching aims to work in the service of political movements advancing decolonization, justice, and freedom across the world.

This talk explores the current militarization and securitization of the Canadian northern border in the wake of climate change and the accelerated melting of the Arctic— closely examining historical patterns of settler colonial violence and border control in the region as well as contemporary formulations of this violence. I draw out a number of implications for Indigenous peoples living in the high North, communities continuing to struggle against land dispossession and state infringements of Indigenous sovereignty, and begin to think through ramifications for a politics of migration as it relates to a growing, global rise of climate refugees in the coming decades.

“Neocolonial De-Development in the Indian Occupied Kashmir”

Dr. Ather Zia is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.

The Indian government frames the 2019 removal of Kashmir’s autonomy as a matter of “development” for the region. This paper will trace how the Indian settler-colonial policies in Kashmir are poised for de-development of the region in order to further dispossess the Kashmiri people and complete India’s neocolonial project in Kashmir.

Commentator. Dr. Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis. Her new community-engaged project is focused on Yemeni Americans in Oakland and the impact of the pandemic, the Muslim Bans, and the war in Yemen. Her ethnographic research highlights the experiences of Yemeni corner store owners and their families who have been essential workers on the frontlines of the pandemic. Maira produced digital stories with Yemeni and Arab Americans in the Bay Area that highlight alternative narratives of the Covid “crisis,” the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and community organizing.


Closing Event: May 6, 2022

Feeling Genocide: Matrifocality and Black Church Arson


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Dr. Todne Thomas is Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. She has co-edited New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions (2017) with Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman. Her latest book, Kincraft: The Making of Black Evangelical Sociality (2021), explores the internal dynamics of community life among black evangelicals, who are often overshadowed by white evangelicals and the common equation of the “Black Church” with an Afro-Protestant mainline. Her current research examines the familial and spiritual experiences of black evangelicals and the neoliberal displacement of black sacred space.