In the wake of war and violence in Ukraine and other countries around the world, I am proposing a panel on the issues of war, gender[ed] violence, and the discourse of resistance. Even though not focused on Ukraine, the overarching theme of this session will invoke and provoke critical dialogues regarding the violence of war and gender. The panel intends to reapproach the issues of women’s agency, empowerment, and the emergence of new challenges confronted by the women in the war-inflicted countries in the Global South. The panel will highlight women’s resilience rather than their victimization, situating the topic within the ongoing discussion on global and transnational feminism and the depiction of war-struck female bodies in literature and films. The speakers question historical accuracy and politics of representation that usually undermine women’s role during conflict. They also go beyond the traditional view of women’s victimization to represent the multiple definitions of resilience and include alternative discourses on resistance like the insurgencies of Syrian women and the female fighters of Kurdistan, strategies for resistance in the Argentine war, and the representation of violated female bodies of the Bangladesh War in the media.

While the topic of women and resistance discourse in literature seem to be a natural pairing, critics have not fully devoted their attention to how representations of women’s resilience are multifaceted and diverse in the Global South.Also, the concept of ‘empowerment’ is debilitating in context of women in the Global South because it puts an extra pressure in women to outperform men. Empowerment transforms a woman into an object of disempowerment until she proves to be worthy of the power and agency ‘given’ to her. In order to be free from such debilitating ‘power-trap,’ she has to defy the romanticized notion of empowerment and redefine it in accordance with the structure of equal division of power and labor. Empowerment is futile if it does not give a woman the power to be strategic about her choice of options and instead dumps on her a (socially/culturally/ideologically) regulated list of options to choose from. This panel intends to reevaluate this issue of female empowerment and examine how women in the warzone challenged, sacrificed, and vehemently opposed war discourses that tend to obliterate women’s role in shaping resistance movements.

In “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” Lila Abu-Lughod speaks against the “tendency to romanticize resistance,” asking us “to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and of the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated” (42). In Decolonizing Universalism, Serene Khader refuses the generic solution offered by the privileged/first world feminists to the unprivileged/underrepresented women of the Global South, referring to it as “missionary feminism.” Khader also warns against the tendency to over-celebrate women’s “agency,” calling it “an insufficient feminist normative commitment”(18). Barbara Harlow also critiques the Western concept of feminist resistance in the Global South and advocates for different types of resistance without Othering these forms of defiance. Showing solidarity with these critics, the panel will introduce new areas of “geographies of pain” mapped by Francoise Lionnet that are more private and more susceptible to poor representations. Each member will use their 12-13 minutes time slot to critically discuss the issues of victimization, empowerment, and resistance in context of women’s bodies being trapped in wars of various kinds. Titled, “Disorienting the mousetrap: Empowerment, Agency, and the women of the Global South,” my paper will critique the romanticization of women’s resistance and explore the critical discourse of women’s empowerment and agency in the Global South in context of wartime sexual violence. Lava Asaad will further the discussion by analyzing the women’s movement and the body politic in the Middle East in her paper, “Body Politic: The Dialectic of Structural Violence and Revolutionary Movements.” Lucia Garcia Santana’s “Guns in Print: Female Resistance in Testimonies and Narratives against Feminicides in Argentina” will explore the writings of women prisoners of Argentina during the Argentinian military dictatorship, while Farzana Akhter’s “Resisting the Politics of Representation: Women, war, and Bangladeshi War Movies” will relocate the body politic in context of visual representation of the raped women of war Bangladesh during the liberation war of 1971.

Over all, the panel will situate the rising women’s movement in the Global South within the parameter of feminist discourses of resistance and decolonization that continue to struggle against an overwhelmingly androcentric socio-political structure.