Engendering Violence

Abstract

This volume addresses how borders violently mark women's bodies in wars of direct and indirect conquest, and how women's agency is constituted in these times. How is gendered violence inscribed through the spectacular and in everyday life? What is the role of war or armed conflict in transforming women's spheres of agency? As we write about this issue, we are struck by the historical paradox that we women in/from south Asia inhabit. Anti-colonial struggles that achieved independence and formed postcolonial nation states have consolidated themselves through prodigious violence that defined and divided communities, memories, and futures. Promises betrayed reverberate across the very borders such violation enshrines. This violence was inscribed upon women's bodies in very specific ways, as they became, to borrow from Gayle Rubin (1975), the 'vile and precious merchandise' that was literally and figuratively exchanged as boundaries were imposed and enforced. As Veena Das evocatively states, we have been unable 'to name that which died when autonomous citizens . . . [of India] . . . were simultaneously born as monsters ' (2003: 332). This can be said of south Asia in its entirety. 16(2/3): 125-139.

The Process of Othering from the "Social Imaginaire" to Physical Acts: An Anthropological Approach

“…It is a way to differentiate the dominant cultural group from the Other. 83 "Women thus become the embodied boundaries of the nation-state." 84 Controlling women is controlling the reproduction of identity.…”