Tuesday, February 15, 2022
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Register here to join the webinar, or watch live on Watson's YouTube channel.
About the Lecture:
Organized by the Spring 2022 Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies, Rema Hammami.
Under siege and international sanctions, while enduring massive and recurrent Israeli military aggression, since 2008 Gazans have become subject to a powerful assemblage of humanitarian actors and aid flows that have instantiated the prevention and treatment of gender-based violence (GBV) as the exclusive gender concern in Gazan society. Due to the international boycott of Hamas authorities, this humanitarian agenda has relied on local Palestinian NGOs and women’s rights organizations, in the process completely colonizing their previous activisms with the exigencies of treating Gaza’s “GBV problem." This talk takes up critical analysis of humanitarianism as a “politics of care," but shifts the focus away from the exclusionary “whom” of care to the actual content: the “what” of care. By focusing on the modalities of normative GBV interventions in Gaza and how they operate on the ground, their role as a technology of rule within contemporary projects of global securitization becomes apparent, as does humanitarianism’s wider complicity with the ongoing immiseration of Gaza’s population.