IDCE30326

Description

Section information text: Reductionist analyses of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in the "Global South", that often depict women as victims and men as villains, are embedded in the imagery and discourses of International media, politics, and the realm of International development. While GBV continues to be a predicament worldwide, this problematic representation of this region has served to reinforce cultural, religious, political, and moral stereotypes of the "Other." How do we understand and critique GBV in the "Global South"? How can we acknowledge the seriousness of GBV without contributing to the stigmatization of particular communities and their representation as exceptional? How can GBV be understood and analyzed in a way that does not (re)produce the Orientalist and xenophobic stereotypes of victims and villains? This course aims to look at the politics of GBV as a highly complex and variable phenomenon, which intersects with a web of political, structural, and legal systems of oppression and power relations operating locally, regionally, and globally (Merry, 2011). The course will examine these structures of power that continue to shape and complicate the experiences of women and men in the "South" with violence. Reductionist analyses of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in the "Global South", that often depict women as victims and men as villains, are embedded in the imagery and discourses of International media, politics, and the realm of International development. While GBV continues to be a predicament worldwide, this problematic representation of this region has served to reinforce cultural, religious, political, and moral stereotypes of the "Other." How do we understand and critique GBV in the "Global South"? How can we acknowledge the seriousness of GBV without contributing to the stigmatization of particular communities and their representation as exceptional? How can GBV be understood and analyzed in a way that does not (re)produce the Orientalist and xenophobic stereotypes of victims and villains? This course aims to look at the politics of GBV as a highly complex and variable phenomenon, which intersects with a web of political, structural, and legal systems of oppression and power relations operating locally, regionally, and globally (Merry, 2011). The course will examine these structures of power that continue to shape and complicate the experiences of women and men in the "South" with violence.