The Body At War

In The Body of War, Dubravka Žarkov analyzes representations of female and male bodies in the Croatian and Serbian press in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, during the war in which Yugoslavia disintegrated. Žarkov proposes that the Balkan war was not a war between ethnic groups; rather, ethnicity was produced by the war itself. Žarkov explores the process through which ethnicity was generated, showing how lived and symbolic female and male bodies became central to it. She does not posit a direct causal relationship between hate speech published in the press during the mid-1980s and the acts of violence in the war. Instead, she argues that both the representational practices of the “media war” and the violent practices of the “ethnic war” depended on specific, shared notions of femininity and masculinity, norms of (hetero)sexuality, and definitions of ethnicity. Tracing the links between the war and press representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Žarkov examines the media’s coverage of two major protests by women who explicitly identified themselves as mothers, of sexual violence against women and men during the war, and of women as militants. She draws on contemporary feminist analyses of violence to scrutinize international and local feminist writings on the war in former Yugoslavia. Demonstrating that some of the same essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality used to produce and reinforce the significance of ethnic differences during the war often have been invoked by feminists, she points out the political and theoretical drawbacks to grounding feminist strategies against violence in ideas of female victimhood.

A War on My Body; A War on My Rights--a profoundly personal and collaborative book led by Texas high school Valedictorian Paxton Smith, with contributions from numerous reproductive rights activists and public personalities, including renowned women's rights lawyer Gloria Allred, reproductive and immigrant justice warrior Sadie Hernandez, New York Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, victims rights attorney Judie Saunders and former Texas Senator Wendy Davis. The book will be released on January 22, 2022 --49 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to protect a pregnant woman's rights to abortion in the landmark Roe vs. Wade case.A riveting, educational, and powerful assemblage from a multitude of global leaders, entertainers, educators, medical and legal professionals spanning several generations and walks of life. A War on My Body; A War on My Rights chronicles the history of abortion rights, its role in gender equality and its cruciality to healthcare infrastructure while offering a mosaic of raw, passionate perspective of the crisis concerning women's reproductive rights and the dire impending consequences should the right to choose wane in the United States and on a global scale. It is a tribute to leadership and advocacy, illuminating the voices of those willing to take a stand on an issue that has long been cloaked in controversy and dishonor.

"This book places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war, giving embodiment and bodily issues an analytic recognition they have often been denied in the annuals and ontology of conventional war scholarship"--Page [1].

This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. This helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far its practices can be re-appropriated or even turned against it.

Stripping Bare the Body shows at close hand how terrorism works and how war looks and smells and feels. Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power...

Your Body Is War contemplates the psychology of the female human body, looking at the ways it exists and moves in the world, refusing to be contained in the face of grief and trauma. Bold and raw, Mahtem Shiferraw’s poems explore what the woman’s body has to do to survive and persevere in the world, especially in the aftermath of abuse. A groundbreaking collection, the poems in Your Body Is War embody elements of conflict, making them simultaneously a place of destruction and of freedom.

From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.