This panel amplifies women’s perspectives on and experiences of political conflicts in the global South. Although feminist scholars have demonstrated the complex ways in which women in the global South encounter and participate in combat, diplomacy, sexual violence, displacement, reconciliation, and peacebuilding, the popular discourse on this topic often posits them solely as victims, romanticizes their fortitude, and/or homogenizes their varied stances on conflicts. Contesting this discourse, this panel not only demonstrates women’s multifaceted roles in political conflicts but also suggests that a focus on women’s narratives may offer fresh insights about the underlying causes and possible resolutions of conflicts.

In doing so, the panel is indebted to the seminal works of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Lila Abu-Lughod, who have illustrated how gendered oppression interacts with the hierarchal power dynamics of race, class, religion, nationalism, and colonialism. Further, this panel draws inspiration from the growing scholarship on women and conflicts in the global South, exemplified by Tabea Linhard’s Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (2005), Bina D’Costa’s NationBuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (2011), Pauline Uwakweh’s African Women Under Fire: Literary Discourses in War and Conflict (2017), Marie E. Berry’s War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (2018), and Lava Asaad and Fayeza Hasanat’s In the Crossfire of History: Women’s War Resistance Discourse in the Global South (2022). This sample of titles is purposefully wide-ranging, so as to emphasize the breadth of scholarship, which has illuminated women’s varied experiences in conflicts and proposed a range of theoretical frameworks for understanding them.

Following the same impetus, this panel finds its strength in the juxtaposition of diverse narratives and foci of analysis. In addition to examining different historical and cultural contexts, the papers bring together different mediums­—non-fiction prose, tv drama, novel, and poetry—highlighting the variety of contemporary texts foregrounding women’s perspectives on conflicts.

In “Queer Ecofeminism in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades” Shazia Rahman analyzes Roy’s non-fictional text, which bears witness to ongoing environmental conflicts in India. Roy indicates neoliberal capitalism’s intersections with patriarchy, while stressing that the comrades fighting in the forest encompass all genders—exemplified by 45% women soldiers in the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army. Analyzing the visual and verbal aspects of the text, Rahman argues that Roy provides environmental and social alternatives to extractive capitalism by combining concerns for the traditions of Indigenous Adivasi peoples with concerns for embodied gender issues.

Lava Asaad’s paper “The Revolution is an Incarcerated Woman: Poetics of Dissent and Resilience in Syrian Drama” studies the 2014 television series Qalam Humra, where the series writer Yam Mashhadi explores her experience of incarceration, following her participation in a peaceful protest against the Al-Assad regime, through the main character Ward who is similarly detained. Asaad suggests that the show exemplifies the struggles of the average Syrian woman who sought agency over her body and rights to actively participate in the Arab Spring. It also highlights the Arab woman’s endeavor to redefine her identity while confronting the patriarchal and structural violence imposed on her.

In “Empathy in Conflict: A Feminist Reckoning with the Post-apartheid in The Cry of Winnie Mandela” Saumya Lal examines the novel’s staging of four ordinary South African women’s empathic engagement with the controversial figure of Winnie Mandela. Suggesting that empathy serves as an avenue of self-reflection, Lal argues that imagining Mandela’s pain enables the women to situate their personal lives within larger political discourses, while considering her abuses of power, alongside her influential leadership in the anti-Apartheid movement, prompts them to refashion their individual and collective visions for the future.

The final paper, Supurna Dasgupta’s “Intertextual Melancholia: Birangona-s, Paul Celan, and the Ethical Subject,” offers a reading of Bangladeshi-American poet Tarfia Faizullah’s collection Seams, which juxtaposes interviews of raped women from the 1971 Bangladesh War with poetic phrases from Paul Celan. This juxtaposition, Dasgupta argues, allows Faizullah to explore her own history without diminishing the complexity of memory or the distance between herself, her readers, and the birangonas. Undertaking a historical witnessing that spans different chronotopes and communities, the text necessitates an intertextually mindful and intersectionally ethical, melancholic reader.

To ensure sufficient time for discussion, the speakers will be restricted to a strict 14-minute time limit after brief introductions are made within 4 minutes. Attentive to women’s multifaceted experiences during political conflicts, this panel also speaks to the MLA 2024 presidential theme of honoring the various joys and sorrows that inhabit the world.