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PAST PROJECTS• Feminisms and
Global War
PAST EVENTSIAFR FACULTY WEB
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UPCOMING EVENTS A Multi-Campus Research Group Conference on Which types of individual and collective justice models are circulating within current international legal frameworks? What are the ways in which these international legal frameworks (re)formulate our relationships to violence, justice, and each other? How do the histories of academic and activist struggles bare upon the ideas and practices of gender justice? How and why can the epistemologies of critical race studies and transnational feminism contribute to multiple possibilities of transformative justice? These are a few of the questions the Transnationalizing Gender Justice?: International Criminal Law and the Movement for Prison Abolition (TGJ) conference will explore through multiple lenses. The conference builds upon the vast literatures of social justice feminisms to investigate an increasing challenge of reconciling two vectors of this work, namely feminist calls for decarceration and feminist contributions to international criminal law. TGJ stages a conversation between these two strains of feminism by bringing together scholars and practitioners from several geopolitical sites, including Australia, Brazil, Brussels, Canada, England, Nigeria, Turkey, South Africa and the United States, to provide a space of dialogue within a global political order that increasingly works to foreclose collective opportunities. Over the course of three days, the conference participants will: (1) familiarize each other with the particularities of their regional contexts; (2) engage with feminist interventions in international law that have expanded the purview of punishment by holding state actors accountable to the reproductions of gendered violence; and (3) consider the challenges the movement for prison abolition poses to notions of justice found in the international legal arena. TGJ seeks to negotiate tensions between feminist challenges to the prison industrial complex and the necessity to address gender violence at an international level. International feminist jurisprudence has developed a vocabulary for thinking gender violence as crimes against humanity through an understanding of such crimes as superceding state-bound legal paradigms. Consider the case of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal where prosecutors demonstrated that “comfort” stations were systemic productions of state sanctioned gender violence. The Japanese government depended upon and mandated the sexual exploitation of Korean, Chinese, Filipina and Indonesian women during the Second World War through its foreign policy and national security objectives. This focus importantly exposes state participation in the production of violence. Punishing the state architects of the comfort stations is seen to redresses people’s experiences with gender violence on interpersonal and systemic levels. Prison abolition perspectives argue that producing and institutionalizing justice through the means of punishment extends the reach of liberalism and the domain of criminal law. Feminist arguments around decarceration work to expand this purview of punitive solutions to ideas that social problems potentially reinforces the set of relationships between state governments, corporations, “correctional communities” and cultural outlets now referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” Feminist epistemologies of decarceration, decriminalization, and abolition focus on the entanglements of economic, political and cultural ideologies in the formation and sustenance of a global punishment culture that is deeply gendered and linked to the international persistence of racism. Feminist prison abolition work thus calls into question frameworks for justice that potentially reify the gendered and racial logics of criminal law. The structure of the conference aims to bring these two conversations together, such that the consequences of the feminist work done in both contexts can be considered. By bringing these two moments together, TGJ provides productive environment for the exploration of a vexing political problem in transnational feminist theory, where challenges to liberalism often confront the institutionalization of feminist approaches to violence. While cognizant of extensive histories of collective work that have addressed different moments of international law, gender violence and feminist thought, supporters of this conference have found that the opportunities to discuss the intersections and complexities of these moments are few and difficult to convene. TGJ materializes a critical space of intellectual exchange in an effort to build and sustain multiple communities of knowledge seeking global transformations and justice. PAST EVENTS Saba Mahmood This paper analyzes the semiotic assumptions and juridical norms governing recent debates about the proper place of religious symbols in Europe. Through a close examination of the Danish cartoon controversy and recent decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, the paper tracks distinctly different conceptions of moral injury at play in these debates and contrastive understandings of the labor that religious signs perform in what is often assumed to be a secular world. Saba Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which received the Victoria Schuck award in 2005. She works on issues of secularism, religious politics, gender, and postcoloniality. This past year she was the recipient of the Carnegie Scholar's Award and the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Presented by The Department of Feminist Studies and the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research. Co-sponsored by the Graduate Division, UCSC Diversity Funds, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. "Capitalism Part III: What is Neoliberalism?" Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations
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