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With the ‘War on Terrorism’, the perception of war is changing and we ought to think about its implications on gender roles. Today warfare is mostly regarded as deeply rooted in the religious traditions of cultural ‘Others’ and therefore appears to have a cultural dimension.
During the past few years, gender relations and constructions of gender within military conflicts became increasingly significant. Violence in times of war tends to be legitimized by the existing arrangements of sex and gender.
Christina von Braun (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Avital Ronell (New York University) will discuss the meaning of religion and gender in military conflicts. They will take a look at the consequences of new definitions of ‘warfare’ for the symbolic gender order and for sexual relations. What are the symbolic constructions of gender relations within the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - regarding the representation and approach to violence in each of the respective canonical texts?
Christina von BRAUN is both a Professor of Cultural Theory at Humboldt-Universität and a filmmaker. In her work she focuses primarily on gender, media-theory, the history of religion and anti-Semitism. Professor von Braun was founder of the interdisciplinary Department of Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität and is now director of the PhD-Research Program ‘Gender as a Category of Knowledge’.
Avital RONELL is chair of the Department of German and Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at New York University, where she taught annual courses with Jacques Derrida. She is director of Research in Trauma and Violence Studies and appears in a number of films and videos on and around her work. Professor Ronell contributes regularly to ArtForum (New York) and Vacarme (Paris).
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