Transnational Feminisms and Categories of Sexual Violence

This project explores the ways categories of sexual violence challenge or consolidate activist and state power.  How, when, and why are systematic modes of sexual and gender-based harm, including those systems that institute sex, gender, and sexuality as categories, are named, recognized, and redressed as sexual violence?  How, when, and why do various categorizations of sexual violence set in motion regimes of sex, gender, and sexuality that may inflict as well as mitigate ongoing harm?  Categories such as rape, sexual assault, harassment, child sexual abuse, violence against women, trafficking, and femicide (to name only a few) do differential work by generating hierarchies of value for various social and political projects.  Such categories are produced and circulate in ways that mediate relations among multiple actors and sectors, often establishing geographies of intervention and protection that territorialize lands and waters as domains of activist and state agency. This project centers interdisciplinary feminist scholarship to consider how both enactments and recognitions of gendering and sexualized harm as violence are used to (re)produce polities and sovereignties, as well as how we might better insist on broader scholarly and public engagement with these realities.