Chapter One
Introduction
Gender and Conflict in a Global Context
Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman
The events and aftermath of September 11 ineluctably dissolved the already
precarious distinction between domestic sovereign space and more global
space where transnational networks, international relations, multilateral
institutions, and global corporations operate. Feminists have long argued
that private/public distinctions serve to depoliticize the private
domestic spaces of "home" compared to more public domains. The attacks
have exposed the limits of understanding the United States as a "domestic"
space, somehow bounded and separated from the processes and politics of
economic, cultural, and political integration. Likewise, boundaries
between combatants and civilians, battlefronts and civilian spaces, cease
to have much meaning in light of 9/11. Such distinctions, however, have
long ceased to exist in conflict zones beyond U.S. borders.
Throughout much of the world, war is increasingly waged on the bodies of
unarmed civilians. Where it ... read full excerpt from Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones ebook
