Gender in Turbulent Times: Sexual Violence, Bare Life and Necropolitics

Gender based violence and sexual violence in specific have reached unprecedented levels in countries in the Global North and South. Feminist scholarship and activism have contributed to different theories of sexual violence, but have also exposed the state that has the monopoly on exercising violence as inadequate or unwilling to reduce gender based violence. In many countries sexual violence and femicide have rendered women into “bare life” (such as Agamben’s Homo Sacer), especially those who are exposed to a state of exception where laws exist but are not enforced. For this project I want to extend my work on Agamben’s application to sexual violence that I have been doing for my latest scholarship. I want to connect the South African case to a broader global condition of turbulent times in which I want to show that gender based violence and the diminishing spaces for a feminist articulation of a critique of an anti-gender ideology contribute to precarious conditions for women. The project will have a theoretical dimension (working with the theories of Agamben and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics); as well as an empirical dimension which is investigating how feminist activism develops around sexual violence, and how it can be used to reinvigorate anti-violence gender work.