Researchers have given considerable attention to war crimes across nations. Numerous anthropologists, political scientists, and economists have conducted research on the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka; however, there is scant literature exploring violations of international law as experienced by the minorities (i.e., Tamils) from sociological and criminological perspectives. The purpose of this study is to offer an insight into how masculinity and war crimes by the military and the paramilitary forces affected the Tamils from the Northern and the Eastern provinces in Sri Lanka. I explored victimization experienced by the Tamil Diaspora populations, the construction of victimization avoidance strategies, the social forces that motivated them to leave Sri Lanka, the short and the long-term effects of victimization (i.e., sexual, economic, physical, mental), the process the refugees adopted to assimilate themselves into new space, and the resources available from Sri Lanka and place of new residence to meet their needs. Finally, I explored within gender differences and similarities of victimization as experienced by the refugees. I employed qualitative methods to collect the data, where I gathered a sample of Tamils Diaspora population from Canada and the United States of America by way of snowball sampling via advocates who worked with refugees. I used open-ended questionnaires during the face-to-face interviews. I audio-taped most of the interviews and I manually transcribed them. I took written notes of a couple of the interviews when the participants did not permit audio recording. Finally, I analyzed the collected data and present the findings. This approach informs the scientific community of how people understand and give meanings to their life experiences (Orbuch, 1997; Mishler, 1986). The findings indicate that several types of social forces contributed to how families operated during the war. For instance, the war impacted the quality of available education, the quality of available shelter, and the social and family pressures for expected roles within the community. I specifically looked at victimization experiences, the social forces that motivated them to leave Sri Lanka, the short and long-term effects of war related victimization, the process of assimilation, resources available in Sri Lanka and their new place of residence, and gender differences or similarities of war crime victimization as experienced by the refugees. The research question I explored revealed that many faced financial/economic strain, secondary victimization, sexual abuse, mental/ emotional abuse, and physical abuse. When I explored victimization avoidance strategies, the data revealed that some participants submitted while others’ social bonds allowed them to evade victimization. Next, I explored the coping strategies employed by the participants during and post-civil war. The themes that emerged to explain their coping strategies were medical/counseling assistance, deference to God, and gendered roles. I also explored the social forces that drove the participants out of the country. The data revealed that it was the impact of the internal conflict on various infrastructures that stimulated the participants’ exodus from the country. I also explored the assistance the participants received in Sri Lanka and their new place of residence. The data revealed that many of the participants received most of their help from the paramilitary. All of the participants indicated they received aid from their new place of residence. Finally, I conclude by providing theoretical discussions of the findings, limitations of the study, future recommendations, and implications. This study unveils how the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees experienced and gave meaning to their lived experiences due to the war.

This dissertation examines the role of US legal and administrative institutions in intimate partner violence (IPV) against immigrant women in two instances treated as separate in policy and scholarship: 1) women seeking asylum in the US on account of IPV and 2) immigrant women facing IPV in the US. Through an analysis of congressional hearings, relevant policies and administration, court cases, and interviews with employees at non-governmental organizations that serve immigrant women, this dissertation analyzes the ways in which immigration law intersects with ameliorative policy intended to address IPV in these contexts. In so doing, I develop a broader understanding of how state institutions, policy frameworks, and policy implementation shape the lives of vulnerable immigrant women. Contrary to scholarship that views relevant policies and institutions in the US as well-meaning though inadequate, this dissertation examines the extent to which the state may be directly implicated in IPV against immigrant women and in fostering institutional conditions under which this violence continues to thrive.

The international community has constructed a dominant narrative to explain the prevalence of gendered violence in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This dominant narrative posits regional and national antagonisms over conflict minerals as the cause of the Congolese wars that have resulted in the mass rape of Congolese women and girls. Sexual violence against women and girls is portrayed as the most significant form of violence occurring during the Congolese wars. This narrative has had a substantial impact on how the international community has represented, researched and responded to Congolese women and gendered violence. I argue that this narrative is based on problematic conceptions of gender relations rooted in white Western feminism that are incompatible with the local experiences of Congolese women and men. The misconception of gender, gender relations and gender violence has engendered misguided intervention initiatives that have failed to produce meaningful change in the lives of Congolese women. This thesis challenges dominant discourses that inform and impose specific narratives of violence and development agendas. It moves beyond them to propose an alternative analysis of gender and gendered violence. It sheds light on the historical disconnection between international and local perspectives of gender and gender violence in the Congo, arguing that to be effective, international development and humanitarian discourses must be re-examined in light of the local socio-cultural context of eastern Congo.

Currently, sexual assault is characterized as the primary threat to women’s safety on university campuses. Accordingly, many post-secondary institutions in Canada have developed specialized policies, resources, and prevention strategies to address this form of gendered violence. Although a serious concern, the narrow focus ignores university students’ vulnerability to multiple other forms of gendered violence, including intimate partner violence (IPV). In an effort to address this neglected topic, this thesis explores the way five university students experienced and navigated IPV. Adopting an intersectional lens informed by feminist work on gender roles, gendered expectations, and sexual scripts as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s work on class, this thesis examines how gender oppression and class privilege intersect to create unique experiences of IPV for university students. To that end five semi-structured interviews were conducted with women who suffered psychological, physical, sexual, and/or financial abuse while in university. The interviews facilitated open and honest dialogue whilst providing this research project with valuable insight into how IPV plays out among class privileged university students. The thesis concludes that although the participants are oppressed in terms of gender (and susceptible to IPV on this basis) their class privilege also conditioned their experiences of IPV. While affording them access to social and economic resources, the disjuncture between their self-identity as educated, smart, and independent women inhibited their ability to accept their identity as victims; as a result, the participants struggled to disclose, seek help, and address the abuse.

This essay analyses the representation of trauma and gendered violence in Colleen Hoover’s novel It Ends With Us. To do this, trauma theory and the notion of gendered violence are applied in the analysis, as well as Dorrit Cohn’s ideas of diary novels, dissonant narrator and consonant narrator. The findings show that the protagonist, Lily’s, way of coping with her trauma and gendered violence during her teenage years, was to keep a diary, effectively using scriptotherapy. When that was not enough, however, she actively suppressed her problems. The essay also shows that Cohn’s ideas of dissonant and consonant narrator play a part in how Lily’s development is shown throughout the novel.

Perhaps, under the consciousness of today, “neoliberalism” has defined our world during the previous and current centuries more than any other socioeconomic system. But the evolution of this ideology, which initially aimed to enhance, or rather, reinvent capitalism and individual freedom, has, in essence, induced an unrecognized problem. I argue that neoliberalism is the catalyst for much of the hostility in this globalized society where tensions and poverty are casualties of individual and corporate prosperity. Because of this revelation, I argue that neoliberalism inadvertently instills violence that is both unseen and gendered. In order to formulate my argument, I introduce a historical chronology to the ideological origins of neoliberalism and how it manifested its way to its socioeconomic prominence. I then concentrate my attention to neoconservatism, most notably, Reaganism, with the year 1984, which I feel is the official christening of neoliberalism. From that year, I bring forth, three films about the crisis of farming in the 20th century, Country, Places in the Heart, and The River. Through these “farm crisis films,”which centers their themes around pastoral virtues, I argue that the violence conveyed in these films critiques neoliberalism. On the surface, these films demonstrate violence through an invisible and unrecognizable antagonist. But at the heart of this violence is a gendered angle that has much more to do with neoliberalism than with feminist debates. The gendered violence of neoliberalism is, in actuality, linked to the characters’ struggle to maintain some sense of autonomy, but this possibility is always uncertain because of their failure to recognize their inevitable interdependencies.

<p>This study is the first one devoted solely to the writings of the South African black novelist Miriam Tlali. It argues that her works constitute literary resistance not only to apartheid, noted by previous scholars, but also to South African patriarchies. Examining Tlali’s novels <i>Muriel at Metropolita</i>n (1975) and <i>Amandla!</i> (1980), and several short stories from <i>Mihloti</i> (1984) and <i>Footprints in the Quag</i> (1989), the study pits these texts against the black literary tradition dominated by men and also reads them within the social context of South African patriarchies, with its social restrictions on women and its taboos concerning sexualities. To distance herself from the patriarchal values inherent in the male literary tradition and to negotiate social and sexual restrictions on women, I argue, Tlali deploys narrative strategies like generic difference, generic dialogism, a double-voiced discourse, “whispering,” and “distancing.”</p><p>Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, this study first explores “novelistic” traits in <i>Muriel</i> which function both to resist male literary conventions, like the epic mode of narrative, and to criticise their patriarchal ideology. Second, relying on Bakhtin, it analyses the generic dialogism and double-voicedness in <i>Amandla!</i>. Finally, making use of Kristeva’s semiotics and her theory of sacrifice, the study traces the development of a sacrificial discourse of gendered violence from <i>Amandla!</i> to some of Tlali’s short stories. Supported by Martha J. Reinecke’s explication of Kristeva, I show that Tlali’s texts insist that gendered violence upholds the sacrificial economies of both patriarchal apartheid and African patriarchy. The strategies of “whispering” and “distancing,” I claim, surface in Tlali’s addressing of the sensitive issues of black women’s victimisation and gendered violence. “Whispering” entails muting the criticism of the perpetrators of gendered violence, whereas “distancing” results in dis/placing gendered violence on the margins of the community. This study also examines the literary/social context of Tlali’s oeuvre: it explores specific traits of the South African black literary tradition, how the issue of rape has been addressed there, and the depiction of African patriarchy in autobiographies by South African black women.</p>

This dissertation looks at the representation and impact of gendered violence in the novel Pasos bajo el agua (1986) and in the short stories in Ofrenda de propia piel (2004) by Argentine author and former political prisoner Alicia Kozameh (b. 1953), as well as in Jamás el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne (2010), two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit (b. 1949). By examining the particular expressions of physical and psychological pain in the aforementioned texts, I demonstrate that Kozameh and Eltit write the female body to simultaneously represent a corporeality that, until recently, has rarely been expressed in literature, and reconstruct a body that has been traumatized by state-sponsored violence and by what could be considered economic violence. Both of them denounce violence, torture, disappearances, exile, and indifference to justice as painful events that not only damage the spirits of the victims, but that are also inscribed upon the physical body. I also show how each author addresses the overlapping of individual and collective traumatic memories and how these are felt in the body as well. Finally, I argue that writing the materiality of the lived body, from its vulnerability to its resilience, provides for Kozameh and Eltit valuable insight into the ways in which female bodies are able to resist and reassess the meaning imposed on them by legally-endorsed and non-official systems of oppression. Their work thus has direct viii social relevance that goes beyond feminism's countering of male dominance and women's rights. Yet, I also show that they manifest their feminist commitment by using the voice and body of female subjects to incorporate marginalized Chilean and Argentine bodies into the linguistic realm in order to provide a fuller understanding of female corporeality in Latin America. / text

This study is the first one devoted solely to the writings of the South African black novelist Miriam Tlali. It argues that her works constitute literary resistance not only to apartheid, noted by previous scholars, but also to South African patriarchies. Examining Tlali’s novels Muriel at Metropolitan (1975) and Amandla! (1980), and several short stories from Mihloti (1984) and Footprints in the Quag (1989), the study pits these texts against the black literary tradition dominated by men and also reads them within the social context of South African patriarchies, with its social restrictions on women and its taboos concerning sexualities. To distance herself from the patriarchal values inherent in the male literary tradition and to negotiate social and sexual restrictions on women, I argue, Tlali deploys narrative strategies like generic difference, generic dialogism, a double-voiced discourse, “whispering,” and “distancing.” Drawing on the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, this study first explores “novelistic” traits in Muriel which function both to resist male literary conventions, like the epic mode of narrative, and to criticise their patriarchal ideology. Second, relying on Bakhtin, it analyses the generic dialogism and double-voicedness in Amandla!. Finally, making use of Kristeva’s semiotics and her theory of sacrifice, the study traces the development of a sacrificial discourse of gendered violence from Amandla! to some of Tlali’s short stories. Supported by Martha J. Reinecke’s explication of Kristeva, I show that Tlali’s texts insist that gendered violence upholds the sacrificial economies of both patriarchal apartheid and African patriarchy. The strategies of “whispering” and “distancing,” I claim, surface in Tlali’s addressing of the sensitive issues of black women’s victimisation and gendered violence. “Whispering” entails muting the criticism of the perpetrators of gendered violence, whereas “distancing” results in dis/placing gendered violence on the margins of the community. This study also examines the literary/social context of Tlali’s oeuvre: it explores specific traits of the South African black literary tradition, how the issue of rape has been addressed there, and the depiction of African patriarchy in autobiographies by South African black women.

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