Gender, Violence and Resistance - POL00056H

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  • Department: Politics and International Relations
  • Credit value: 20 credits
  • Credit level: H
  • Academic year of delivery: 2025-26

Module summary

This module focuses on the interrelationship between violence and gender at multiple levels from the interpersonal (e.g. intimate partner violence, homophobic violence) to the global (e.g. war). It also discusses feminist anti-violence movements across both peacetime and wartime at the grassroots and the state/inter-state level (e.g. #MeToo, Reclaim the Night, No Pride in War, Women in Peacebuilding Network Liberia).

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Semester 2 2025-26

Module aims

Gender and violence are deeply interrelated social constructions which are often informed by and enacted through one another. In this course, gender is positioned both as a topic of study and as an analytical lens; and this dual approach enables us to ask different - and, perhaps, more comprehensive - questions about the nature and the practice of violence across the war-peace continuum. We will explore key feminist claims about the gendered logics which delineate how some threats but not others come to be recognised as relevant to ‘security’, about the impossibility of disentangling ‘the personal’ from ‘the political,’ and about the mutual imbrication of militarism and masculinities. We will also explore different ways that feminists have worked to resist violence: from grassroots protest on the streets and on social media and arts-based resistance movements, to the institutionalisation of anti-violence efforts at the state and inter-state level. Topics will include the “continuum of violence” across public and private spheres and across war and peace; interpersonal violence (including intimate partner violence and homophobic violence); the invisibility of male vulnerability; the co-optation of stories of GBV by the far right; how the “logic of masculinist protection” animates war and how militaries are (or are not) being “regendered”; and feminist resistances to violences across war and peace. The course will draw on work from feminist post-colonial theory and from queer studies to explore how violence and resistance are shaped by multiple intersecting axes of identity and oppression, in particular, race and sexuality.

Module learning outcomes

  • Demonstrate a critical understanding of feminist analyses of the interrelationships between gender and violence across both war and peace (PLO1).

  • Describe and interpret the multiple roles which women and men play in relation to violence and resistance, in peacetime settings, post-conflict settings, and in armed conflict (PLO1, PLO2).

  • Using a gender lens, critically analyse local, national and transnational/global structures and events relevant to violence across the full scope of the continuum (PLO2).

  • Draw on feminist perspectives to independently think through ways to resist the problem of gendered violence on multiple levels from the interpersonal to the global (PLO7).

Module content

Likely structure to include:

  1. Introduction: What is violence and how is it gendered? Different theories of violence e.g. structural violence, debunking evolutionary biology, etc.

  2. The ‘Continuum of Violence’: tracing connections between gendered violence in war and peace and across the public and private.

  3. Policing the Patriarchy: gendering ‘everyday’ interpersonal violence (against women, men, LGBT+ people).

  4. ‘Death by Culture’: postcolonial feminism and the right-wing co-optation of feminist resistance to GBV.

  5. Gendering war: the ‘logic of masculinist protection’ and the gendered distinctions between ‘the civilian’ and ‘the combatant’ (including the invisibility of male vulnerability in war and refugee sitautions).

  6. ‘Regendering the military’?: Military masculinities and non-normative soldiers.

  7. Everyday militarisms and everyday war: feminist scholarship on war/militarisms that shifts the focus away from the state.

  8. Taking to the streets and the timeline: feminist grassroots anti-GBV and anti-war movements, focused on on-street and social media protests.

  9. The art of resistance: Creative and arts-based anti-violence movements, including memorialisation.

  10. Institutionalising feminism: Exploring the pros and cons of integrating feminist anti-violence movements into state and international institutions (e.g. the Women, Peace and Security agenda, UK military’s Zero Tolerance Policy, UK’s Domestic Abuse Act).

Indicative assessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task % of module mark
Essay/coursework 100

Module feedback

Students will receive written timely feedback on their formative assessment. They will also have the opportunity to discuss their feedback during the module tutor’s feedback and guidance hours.

Students will receive written feedback on their summative assessment no later than 25 working days; and the module tutor will hold a specific session to discuss feedback, which students can also opt to attend. They will also have the opportunity to discuss their feedback during the module tutor’s regular feedback and guidance hours.

Indicative reading

  • Abu-Lughod. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  • Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2018. Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Anderson, Kristen. L. 2009. Gendering Coercive Control. Violence Against Women, 15(12), 1444-1457

  • Keys, Domale Dube (2021). Black Women’s Lives Matter: Social Movements and Storytelling against Sexual and Gender-based Violence in the US. Feminist Review, 128(1), 163-168.

  • Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarising Women’s Lives. Berkley and London: University of California Press.

  • Eriksson Baaz, Maria, and Maria Stern. 2013. Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond. London and New York: Zed Books.

  • Kelly, Liz. 1988. Surviving Sexual Violence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Serisier, Tanya. Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

  • Shepherd, Laura J. (ed).2023. Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations. London and New York: Routledge.