"The Invisible Sinews of Counterinsurgency" - Laleh Khalili
Department: Gender and Sexuality Studies
Date and Time: May 7, 2015 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Social Science Plaza A, Room 1100
Event Details
“The Invisible Sinews of Counterinsurgency” - Laleh Khalili
On May 7, 2015, the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies is sponsoring a lecture by Professor Laleh Khalili, professor of Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London:
“The Invisible Sinews of Counterinsurgency”
Abstract: In this talk, I will address the gendering of practices of counterinsurgency in the US War on Terror. Where Iraqi and Afghan populations are subjected to counterinsurgency and its attendant development policy, spaces are made legible in gendered ways, and people are targeted – for violence or ‘nation-building’ – on the basis of gender-categorisation. Second, this gendering takes its most incendiary form in the seam of encounter between counterinsurgent foot-soldiers and the locals, where sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race. Finally, in the Metropole, new masculinities and femininities are forged in the domain of counterinsurgency policymaking: While new soldier-scholars represent a softened masculinity, counterinsurgent women increasingly become visible in policy circles, with both using ostensibly feminist justifications for their involvement. I will then connect these tropes -the gendered grammar of counterinsurgency- to the presentations and representations of violence in current wars and violence in the Middle East.
Bio: Laleh Khalili is professor of Middle East politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007) and Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), editor of Modern Arab Politics (Routledge 2008) and co-editor (with Jillian Schwedler) of Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Oxford 2010). She is currently working on a project on the politics of ports and transport infrastructure in the Middle East.