In this paper, by primarily using oral histories collected over many years, I explore war and its “aftermath” for women in the two Sudan’s many conflicts—political, military, ethnic, and regional. It is clear that some Sudanese in the conflict zones see themselves as “heroically” dealing with these conflicts while others are indoctrinated to see themselves as “bystanders” or “supporters” of the heroic ones. These are all highly gendered performances in a militarized state of affairs. Public and semi-public performances of the “heroic life” are most often by men. Women’s performances are more often as “victims” or as nurturers to those living underground or in prisons. I show that the negative impact of conflict on women in the war zones may not differ significantly from the impact during “peace”-time or in the “aftermath” of war. Because Sudan is in continuous conflict, there is no dichotomy between war and peace, only a continuum in the state of affairs and in the gender performances. For women in the conflict zones of various regions of the two Sudans—especially in the contemporary conflict in Darfur—so much of the “homeland’s” past and present is written on their bodies, which sets up a situation in which men, through the position of women in the “national allegory,” make claims to their own homeland through the bodies of “their” women and attempt to defile the homeland of their adversaries in the same way. In Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and South Sudan women have been subjected to forms of sexual violence and other atrocities. In fact, in most instances of gender-based violence in the conflict zones, that violence is linked less to conquest and war booty than to the defilement of the adversary’s “homeland” through women’s bodies. To further complicate the situation for women in conflict zones, the relationship of the perpetrator and victim may be one of ambivalence (Homi Bhabha), unsettling notions of victim, spoils, and vanquisher. The fluid and ambiguous gender performances of women in the two Sudans are as unsettled in the “war zones” as in the “peace” of “civilian” life.

The paper will present the preliminary results of a research project on how political contingencies and forms of sovereignties impinge upon refugees’ political cultures in three different Palestinian locations of displacement. The research is based on around 100 interviews, which were collected in Lebanon, the West Bank and Jordan between 2009 and 2010. In particular, I would like to investigate how Palestinian refuges reconcile the right of return with strategies of political and civil integration in the contexts in which they have been forced to live over 60 years ago. Palestinian refugees are urged to integrate (but not assimilate) and are producing political narratives, which see "integration" and "return" as compatible and desirable. It could be argued that they are envisaging post-national forms of membership, where camp identity, and access to civil and social rights are intertwined with return. However, narratives and practices that sustain this type of membership differ according to gender and generation. This paper, therefore, aims at deconstructing the notion of a homogeneous Palestinian experience of displacement, by prioritising gender and generation as key variables in shaping new creative political cultures and attitudes towards membership, integration and return.

As feminist scholarship around gender and war continues to raise critical questions about agency, survival, and political mobilization, the position of domination often evades interrogation. This paper seeks to address this absence with regard to Israel and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, investigating the function of gender in the production of political apathy among Jewish Israelis. The occupation, a form of illegal politico-military domination backed by structures, systems, and techniques of control, receives popular mandate within Israel’s 1949 borders not only through public support, but also through the relative silence of dissent. While the invisibility and intangibility of the occupation may provide convincing explanations for Jewish Israeli inaction, gender analysis reveals a series of processes through which individuals actively consent to domination. Drawing from one year of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem this paper explores how conflict, occupation, and war may generate contradictory reactions, thereby maintaining the collective sanction of violence.

This paper traces Palestinian women’s understandings, practices and framings of everyday resistance (?um?d) after 2000. Women’s everyday resistance acts consist of both materially-based survival strategies and various coping strategies at the ideational level. Focussing on the latter, I investigate women’s practices of travelling to create (a sense of) normal joyful life for themselves, their families, friends and community. When pursuing some form of normalcy and joy through travelling, women often frame their acts as ‘resistance’ against Israeli occupation policies which not only fragment their living spaces, but also intend to render them powerless and devoid of agency. Doing so, women counter and reject attempts to de-legitimise and brand their striving for a normal life as a form of 'normalisation' of the abnormal situation of the occupation. Based on ca. 80 interviews conducted during 11 months field research in mainly the West Bank from 2007-2010, I outline the multiple and ambiguous meanings of Palestinian women’s mundane struggles, highlighting the growing hybridisation of women’s subjectivities. Women’s reclaiming of their occupied spaces through travelling, of course, constitutes only a tactic to temporarily circumvent Israeli-imposed mobility restrictions. On an ideational level their acts of trespassing physical borders to enjoy life, however, might be a more long-term strategy to resist the intended effects of Israeli “spacio-cidal” policies (Hanafi, 2009) by creating and maintaining own alternative cultural spaces. Finally, I argue that women going on leisure trips, besides subverting physical and ideational forms of Israeli control, also challenge and bargain, practically and discursively, with patriarchal power structures at national, community and family level. Bibliography Hanafi, S. (2009) “Spacio-cide: colonial politics, invisibility and rezoning in Palestinian territory” Contemporary Arab Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1.

The struggle against as well as the study of domestic violence remains unduly isolated from other issues in feminist debates and social sciences in general. Based on an ethnography (conducted between 2006 and 2009, consisting of participant observation and in-depth interviews with 73 women activists in 23 cities) of a women’s organization, KAMER, which operates in the context of militarized ethnic nationalisms in the predominantly Kurdish populated Eastern Turkey, this presentation draws attention to this isolation and discusses the possibilities of (re)situating the struggle against violence against women as a source of feminist theorizing and activism towards transversal politics. Using transversal politics as a framework and consciousness-raising as a method of political activism and expansion, KAMER is able to link domestic violence to other forms of violence (including militarized violence based on religion or ethnicity) and bring together women from very different political, ethnic, religious and sectarian groups to develop what can be called a “continuum of nonviolence” (to use Cynthia Cockburn's terminology). This form of activism underlines the broader implications of the struggle against domestic violence for transversal feminist politics, as well as pointing to the potentials of consciousness-raising as a means of transversal struggle against violence, war and militarization at large. The presentation also draws attention to the underexplored potentials of integrating grassroots feminist organizing into the debates on gender, culture, violence, and war, particularly with regard to the Middle East.