Transnational Feminist Responses to Violence: Building Movements for Genuine Security

This course is structured around the campus visits of two respected scholars of transnational feminist responses to violence and war: Rana Jaleel and Margo Okazawa-Rey.  Jaleel is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis and author of The Work of Rape (Duke, 2021), an interdisciplinary theorization of the “work of rape” as a transnational mode shaping recognition and redress of sexual and gender-based violence.  Jaleel’s scholarship tracks the ways law and human rights regimes translate more activist approaches into a state-based politics of evidence across sites including the wars and genocides in Latin America to the US War on Terror. Margo Okazawa-Rey is Professor Emerita of Social Work at San Francisco State University. She is a founding member of the Combahee River Collective and numerous anti-military organizations. For the last three decades, Okazawa-Rey has engaged in international feminist anti-military movements, theorizing a vision for feminist peace and security. In this course, graduate students will read and learn about transnational histories of resistance and the historical complexities of gender and safety. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to articulate the pioneering theoretical work of Third World feminists and learn how to methodologically engage gendered, racialized violence in their own work.