During the past years Gender Studies research has increasingly pointed at the significance of gender relations and constructions of gender within military conflicts. Violence in times of war tends to be legitimized by existing arrangements of male-female-relationships, yet at the same time is differently experienced by women and men.

We would like to take up and further develop these various strands of discussion by focusing on the meaning of religion and gender in military conflicts. For this purpose, we wish to examine symbolic constructions of gender relations within the three “religions of the book”, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, regarding the representation and approach to violence in each of the respective canonical texts. Taking this as a point of departure, we would like to highlight the ways in which pictures constructed by religion, culture, and the media are being instrumentalized in military conflicts and, in this process, result in religious distortions. In this context we will raise questions concerning the relationship between sexual violence against women and an assumed social order which is legitimized by transcendental dogmas. 11-13 December 2003, Germany, Berlin, Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6, 10178 Berlin