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- Volume 12, Issue 1, 2018
International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 12, Issue 1, 2018
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Gender violence and the spirit of the feminine: Two accounts of the Yazidi tragedy
More LessAbstractThis article examines two contrasting accounts of the Yazidi tragedy and IS enslavement of Yazidi women. Through victim testimonies it brings to light how the violence and rape perpetrated against Yazidi women in IS held territory morphed from an IS-sanctioned war crime into market-driven rape and enslavement by individuals, and how the gender violence was intensified in this privatization process. By juxtaposing oral history accounts against a fictional retelling of the tragedy the article investigates different ways of documenting the traumatic experiences of Yazidi women.
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Iraqi women die too: Exploring Iraq’s invisible female casualties
By Nazli TarziAbstractIn questioning the lack of gender-specific casualty data, this analysis helps to reveal the reasons responsible for the invisibility of Iraq’s female dead. Iraqi women, gleaning from existing casualty counts, are noticeably neglected, dwarfed by other female heroines: the foreign service woman, the suicide bomber and – not least – men in combat boots. The hierarchy that places occupying forces at a higher rank than occupied populations has long rendered Iraqi life inconsequential, or the death of its people ‘inevitable’, and therefore, ungrievable. However, this alone does not account for the absence of Iraq’s female dead. More fundamentally, what purpose does their exclusion from death counts serve, and when and why are female wartime casualties logged?
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Women’s political activism in Iraq: Caught between NGOization and the struggle for a civil state
By Zahra AliAbstractThis article explores Iraqi women’s political activism since 2003. It focuses on an in-depth ethnography of women’s political organizations conducted mainly in Baghdad, and in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Najaf-Kufa, Karbala and Nasriya. I will start by considering the relationship between gender and the notion of NGOization in Iraq. Secondly, I explore some of the aspects characterizing the post-2003 context and its concrete impact on women’s lives and activism. I look specifically at the issue of the funding of civil society organizations and the ways in which Iraqi women activists deal with the political situation imposed by the US-led invasion and occupation. Finally, the article presents the different forms taken by women’s political activism from their NGOs to their participation in the recent protest movement launched in the summer 2015 questioning the ethno-sectarian and dysfunctional nature of the post-invasion Iraqi regime.
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Many women on many journeys: Haifa Zangana’s Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London in Arabic-English para/translation
More LessAbstractLike many Iraqi writers, activist-writer and artist Haifa Zangana took the decision not to write fiction after the 2003 war in Iraq. Her 2001 Arabic novel (Women on a Journey) nonetheless was translated into English by Judy Cumberbatch and published in 2004 by US-based Texas University Press under the title Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London. Zangana’s decision to publish her 2001 Arabic novel as an English translation in the United States raises interesting questions on how the novel was presented to post-2003 US receptions and by whom. To explore these questions, I analyse how (Women on a Journey) journeys into post-2003 US-English translation, drawing on analytical frameworks of feminist translation that assume that gendered and geopolitical relationalities underpin all acts of writing and translation. The aim of my analysis in this article is to re-visit and highlight the importance of this novel in Arabic and English publication as an innovative genre of (translated) Iraqi women’s literature. My analysis also invites engagement and debate on how feminist translation analytical approaches can help us revisit both versions of the novel as connective kaleidoscopic expressions of inter-weaving voices which mediate both Haifa Zangana’s evolving contexts of activist writing on Iraq and Iraqi women as well as the dynamic politics of Iraqi women’s literature in Arabic and English translation.
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