Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence

Abstract

Number of Pages: 299 pp. ISBN: 9781472442857 (hardback), 9781315584225 (ebook) Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence is an uncomfortable book to read, and I mean this in a very positive way. Questioning the 'given' is sometimes exciting, but it is unsettling; one needs to be open to the discomfort of critical thinking. This edited book invites the audience to question what is taken for granted in several fields including war studies, memory research and gender studies. In my view, affect studies can be added to the list as well. For me, the book shows the complexities and contradictions of silencing, it discusses the links between subjectivities and silence, unpacks several layers of silencing (and unsilencing), provides feminist self-reflections on silence, and questions the ways in which remembering, reminding and retheorising silences manifests. Currently, much of non-feminist research produced in social sciences can recognise that 'gender is significant', but they generally cannot go further and provide a complex feminist analysis. Feminist perspectives have been intervening in such understandings and Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories is a great example of such an intervention. To illustrate, war studies does recognise that women are affected by war conditions, genocide studies does cover what happens to girls and women during genocide, and research on political violence does include some gendered forms of violence. However, this book does not only bring war, genocide and political violence studies together, but it does so by providing a complex feminist analysis from the intersections of these fields. In addition to presenting a set of nuanced feminist analyses to the analysis of war, genocide and political violence; the book includes a wide range of geo-political cases written through deploying feminist curiosity. Thus, it fits very well with 'The Feminist Imagination: Europe and Beyond' series and expands horizons for imagining a feminist past, present and future. In this sense, this book goes beyond recognising that gender (or commonly only 'women') is significant in analysing war, genocide and political violence, rather it shows how gender should be central from intersectional perspectives. The book is about war, genocide and political violence; however, it is fair to claim that it is not simply a collection of book chapters on these topics, only focusing on different contexts and cases-a common trap for edited books. The chapters feel as if they talk to each other, especially through the theme of a 'politics of silence', a central problematisation of the book, investigated from feminist perspectives. The contributors of the book are well aware that the politics of silence is not limited to 'uncovering' the silence or only 'giving voice to those who