May 2, 2008
Gender of "Terror"
9:15am to 6:00 pm
California Room, UCLA Faculty Center

Co-sponsored by the Division of Humanities; the Division of Social Sciences; School of Theater, Film, and TV; School of Law; Center for India and South Asia; Department of Anthropology; Asian American Studies Center; Department of Women's Studies; Department of Comparative Literature; Department of Asian American Studies.

The conference is free and open to the public. Lunch is $10 and requires
preregistration and prepayment. Those interested in attending the lunch
should RSVP to Jessie Babiarz at jbabiarz@women.ucla.edu, by Friday,
April 18, and send a check for $10, made out to: UC Regents, by Friday,
April 25. Our mailing address is:

UCLA Center for the Study of Women
Attn: Gender of Terror Conference Lunch
1500 Public Affairs Bldg
Los Angeles, CA 90095

Mail Code: 722203

Article in DAILY BRUIN

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GETTING TO UCLA/PARKING

INFO FOR PANELISTS and RESPONDENTS

Schedule

8:45 – 9:15 Breakfast

9:15 – 9:30 Opening Remarks by Purnima Mankekar

9:30 – 11:30 am Session 1

The State/Civil Society

Focusing on the role of states, civil societies, and NGOs in the politics of terror, counter-terrorism, state-endorsed terror, and peacekeeping

Panel Chair: Susan Slyomovics
Respondent: Akhil Gupta

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS
Race, Gender, Terror, and The End of an Era:
National Elections in the Global Public Sphere

MALATHI DE ALWIS
Politicizing Grief in the Wake of Atrocity

INDERPAL GREWAL
Gendering Domesticity, Security and Terror

Speakers/Descriptions

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS

Race, Gender, Terror, and The End of an Era
National Elections in the Global Public Sphere

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of Government, and a member of the graduate fields of German Studies and History of Art at Cornell University. Her training is in Continental Theory, specifically, German Critical Philosophy and the Frankfurt School. She is currently researching and lecturing on politics and religion, theories of sovereignty, legitimacy and faith, and economies of political vision.

MALATHI DE ALWIS

Politicizing Grief in the Wake of Atrocity

Forced disappearance is one of the most insidious forms of violence as it seeks to obliterate the body and indefinitely extends and exacerbates the grief of those left behind. In this paper, I consider how such chronic mourners ‘reinhabit the world’ in the face of continuously deferring loss, and seek to theorise what might be its political outcome(s). Arguing that this re-inhabiting is a constant tracing of traces given the ambiguous nature of the disappeared’s status of absence, and thus presence, I explore a particular ‘identification with suffering’ that is embraced and embodied by Sinhala women whose children were ‘disappeared’ during the second People’s Liberation Front (JVP) uprising (1988-1993). In such a context, visual and tactile objects such as photographs and clothing, I suggest, become especially meaningful by reasserting the presence of the disappeared. In conclusion, I engage Judith Butler’s contention that grief is a tie that binds and thus enables the imagining of alternative political communities to reflect on how such a conceptualization might be helpful to re-invigorate political communities in Sri Lanka.

Malathi de Alwis is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo and a member of the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Colombo. She is the co-author, with Kumari Jayawardena, of Casting Pearls: The Women's Franchise Movement in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Social Scientists' Association, 2001), editor of Cat's Eye: A Feminist Gaze on Current Issues (Colombo: Social Scientists' Association, 2000) and co-editor, with Wenona Giles et al., of Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003) and of
Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South Asia (Delhi: Kali for Women/London: Zed Press, 1996), with Kumari Jayawardena.

INDERPAL GREWAL

Gendering Domesticity, Security and Terror

A great deal of feminist theorization of militarism has examined the connection between militarism and masculinity. Feminist international relations theory has more recently pushed beyond this formation to probe at the relation between war and global politics, using Foucault and Agamben to examine theories of war, security and sovereignty. In the current "War on Terror" being waged by the US, feminist theorizations of militarism and security need to be rethought to understand how "terror" becomes both a mode of securitization of populations and a technology that rearticulates gendered subjectivities. This paper addresses both the need for such retheorization and the problematic of feminist subjectivity at the present time.

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women’s Studies in the School of Humanities and the Director of the PhD program in Culture and Theory at UC Irvine. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley. Her current research interests include transnational and postcolonial feminist theory; feminism and human rights, NGO's and theories of civil society and citizenship; law and subjectivity; travel and mobility; and South Asian cultural studies.

11:30 – 1:00 Lunch in Hacienda Room

1:00 – 3:00 pm Session 2

Mediation

Investigating the representational practices that construct terror

Panel Chair: Kathleen McHugh
Respondent: Purnima Mankekar

LORI ALLEN
Who Speaks the Nation’s Suffering
Mothers of Martyrs in the Palestinian Intifada

PAOLA BACCHETTA
The Construction of "Terror" in the Bush Regime's Discourses

JENNIFER TERRY
Shock and Awe on the Internet
Viral Video and New Tactics of Terror

LORI ALLEN

Who Speaks the Nation's Suffering
Mothers of Martyrs in the Palestinian Intifada

Mothers of martyrs or bad mothers. Heroic munadilin (literally, strugglers) or lascivious suicide-bombers awaiting 72 virgins. Brave girl bombers or depressed divorcees.

These are some of the dichotomous gender tropes that have framed local and international representations of the second Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation since it began in September 2000. Moral values, ethical evaluations, and political perspectives embedded in these categories span and connect the occupied Palestinian territories, the Arab world, and “the West” through a transnationally mediated and politically charged conversation about what women (and men) should be and do. Grieving mothers of martyrs (those killed as a result of the occupation) became the predominant Palestinian national icons, spokes-people for the Palestinian plight, their images dominating media representations and visual culture in Palestine and beyond. This paper shows how these women’s stories of suffering were meant to create relations of shared outrage and sympathy among the people under occupation, as well as between them and “the international community.”

A Lecturer in Contemporary Middle Eastern Politics & Society at the University of Cambridge, Lori Allen is an anthropologist whose primary research interests center on human rights, nationalism, violence, visual culture, political emotion, and the Middle East. Allen's work investigates the ways in which understandings of pain and suffering and the ethics of violence play out in Palestinian politics, in particular through the activities and discourses of human rights in the occupied territories. The results of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine among human rights activists, other former and current political activists, victims of rights violations, and refugees during the height of the second intifada are being publishing in a number of articles that explore what happens when violence becomes routine, part of the everyday.

PAOLA BACCHETTA

The Construction of "Terror" in the Bush Regime's Discourses

This presentation engages with constructions of "terror" and "terrorizing"
subjects in the discourses and practices of the Bush regime. It addresses
these constructions contextually through their genealogies in: U.S.
racial, sexual and gender formations; U.S. orientalism; U.S. discourses of
internal U.S. "multi-culturalism"; U.S. discourses on "Third World"
cultures and "development"; and transnational flows and blockages of
representations of Muslims and the Middle East beyond the U.S. The paper
asks: what is primarily at stake and for whom in these constructions? How
do they contribute to or produce a shifting, nationalnormative
self-identity for the U.S. at this particular junction in time and space?
The primary materials for this paper are the speeches of George W. Bush
and, albeit to a lesser extent, certain key commentators in his
administration, and related U.S. government practices, from 9/11 until today.

Paola Bacchetta is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. She is also Director of the Beatrice Bain Research Group (BBRG), a research center for gender, sexuality, and race based on the Berkeley campus. She earned her PhD in Sociology from The Sorbonne, Paris, in 1996, with highest honors. Her geographic areas of specialization outside the US are India and France.

JENNIFER TERRY

Shock and Awe on the Internet
Viral Video and New Tactics of Terror

With the advent of affordable video cameras, easy to use editing software,
and internet sites that allow users to circulate videos they create, the
relationship of war to visualizing technologies has changed significantly
in the first years of the 21st century. Through an analysis of massively
circulated footage of violent conflict, this paper argues that the camera,
the computer, and internet hosting sites constitute an important apparatus
not only in the mediation of asymmetrical war, but in the waging of it.

Since January 2003, Jennifer Terry has been an associate professor of Women’s Studies with formal affiliations in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, the Art, Computation, and Engineering PhD Program, and the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine. Terry is now working on a project presently titled Killer Entertainments: Militarism, Governmentality, and Consuming Desires in Transnational America. The project focuses on the history of military morale management in the US during the expansion of the nation into an international empire by theorizing the dynamics of governmentality and sentimentality as they manifest in the mutual provocations between entertainment forms, hygienic technologies, and militarism.

3:00 – 3:30 Break

3:30 – 5:00 pm Session 3

The Law/Citizenship

How legal discourses and practices of citizenship constitute the very category of terror.

Panel Chair: Saloni Mathur
Respondent: Juliet Williams

SUNAINA MAIRA
“Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens
Feminists, Terrorists and U.S. Orientalisms

SHERENE RAZACK
Racial Terror and the Trade in Mythologies

5:15 – 6:00 pm Closing Remarks/Reception

SUNAINA MAIRA

"Good" and "Bad" Muslim Citizens
Feminists, Terrorists and U.S. Orientalisms

This paper will examine the production of “good” and “bad” cultural citizenship for and by Muslims in the context of the U.S. War on Terror. It will examine the gendered constructions of the “militant” or fundamentalist Muslim male through the case of Hamid Hayat, a young Pakistani American arrested by the FBI in Lodi, California, and the writings of Irshad Manji and Asra Nomani, South Asian Muslim women in North America who focus on “reforming” Islam from within. The paper explores the complicity of liberal feminisms with U.S. Orientalisms and the ways in which neoliberal multiculturalism and “women’s rights” work in tandem with practices of pre-emptive detention and pre-emptive denunciation of radical dissent.

Sunaina Maira is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis. Her research focuses on youth culture, popular culture, immigration and transnationalism, citizenship, and empire. She is the author of Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (2002). She co-edited an anthology, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (1997), which received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and is co-editor of Youthscapes: The Popular, The National, The Global (2005). Maira received a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation to do an ethnographic study of South Asian Muslim immigrant youth in the US and their notions of cultural citizenship after September 11, 2001, which is the basis of her current book project.

SHERENE RAZACK

Racial Terror and the Trade in Mythologies

This presentation will be based on Razack's new book, Casting Out: The Evication of Muslims from Western Law and Politics.

Sherene Razack is Professor of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests lie in the area of race and gender issues in the law. Her courses include: ‘Race, Space and Citizenship;’ Race and Knowledge Production’ and ‘Racial Violence and the Law.’ Her most recent book is entitled Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims From Western Law and Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2007). She has also published Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004), an edited collection Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping A White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998,1999, 2000) and Canadian Feminism and the Law: The Women’s Legal and Education Fund and the Pursuit of Equality (Toronto: Second Story Press, 1991).

GETTING to UCLA

From the LAX airport

By public transportation:
Many local bus lines (MTA, Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, Culver City Bus) serve the UCLA campus.

By car:
If you are driving to UCLA from the 405 North Freeway, exit at “Wilshire Blvd. East.” Turn left onto Westwood Blvd. Take the first right onto Lindbrook Drive, and then turn left onto Hilgard Ave. Go up the hill until you reach Westholme and take a left to enter campus at the Westholme parking information kiosk.

PARKING:
Daily parking permits cost $8 and only cash is accepted.

You can also click on this link http://www.ucla.edu/map/ to find more detailed driving directions and a campus map.