Claudia Brunner

Female suicide bombers – Male suicide bombing? looking for Gender in reporting the suicide bombings of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

The primary aim of this article is to bring together questions of both the gender representation (notions of femininity and masculinity) and the gender order (existing social relations and power structures) of Palestinian suicide bombing, and thereby to offer a rather unusual perspective on a sensitive topic within what is generally an overanalysed conflict. It is based on the way female suicide bombers have been represented in the media in the first half of 2002, supplemented by publications in 2003 and January 2004. Print and online articles constitute the main basis of interpretation that aims to bring gender as an analytical tool into the continuing debate on suicide bombing.The primary aim of this article is to bring together questions of both the gender representation (notions of femininity and masculinity) and the gender order (existing social relations and power structures) of Palestinian suicide bombing, and thereby to offer a rather unusual perspective on a sensitive topic within what is generally an overanalysed conflict. It is based on the way female suicide bombers have been represented in the media in the first half of 2002, supplemented by publications in 2003 and January 2004. Print and online articles constitute the main basis of interpretation that aims to bring gender as an analytical tool into the continuing debate on suicide bombing.

Expanding the Combat Zone

Abstract Although International Relations is still largely androcentric, masculinist and heteronormative, certain issues of gender and sexuality have gained currency over the last decade. At the same time, much of IR follows a Eurocentrist and occidentalist script that is systematically built into disciplinary ways of knowing. Adapting step-by-step Spivaks famous quote of “white men saving brown women from brown men” across a range of feminist and queer concepts like patriarchal genderism, embedded feminism, transnational sexism, homonationalism and queer imperialism, this article traces the flexible phenomenon of gendered and sexualized epistemic violence from British colonialism in India to imperial western politics today. It shows how the logic of who is to liberate whom for sex/gender reasons gradually shifts from heteronormativity and whiteness to more diverse patterns that contribute to a cognitive militarization of large parts of society. Introducing the notion of the occidentalist dividend that can be earned in this procedure, we can understand that some forms of sex–gender–culture talk are quite ambivalent achievements that constitute genuine challenges for antimilitarist feminist positions.

Un/Sichtbarkeiten im Terrorismuswissen. Die Sinnformel Selbstmordattentat auf Buchumschlägen der Terrorismusforschung

Erst im vergangenen Jahrzehnt ist Diskursforschung auch in (Teilen) der Politikwissenschaft angekommen (vgl. Nullmeier 2001; Kerchner/Schneider 2006a, b). Mit ein Grund fur deren lange Resistenz gegenuber diskursanalytischen Ansatzen war die Schwierigkeit, den in anderen Disziplinen bereits integrierten „linguistic turn“ mit einem politologischen Fokus auf Interessen, AkteurInnen und Institutionen zusammen zu bringen. Die Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse (WDA), die die soziale Bedingtheit sowie die soziale Herstellung von Wissen ins Zentrum ihres Erkenntnisinteresses stellt (vgl. Keller 2004, 2005), ermoglicht dies. Fur politikwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen kann sie insbesondere mit jenen Zugangen produktiv verschrankt werden, die sich dem bereits bei Foucault angelegten, aber bislang wenig ausgearbeiteten Begriff des Dispositivs widmen (vgl. Buhrmann/Schneider 2008). Dann wird nicht mehr nur nach den Regeln des (nicht) Sagbaren und dessen sozialer Kontextualisierung gefragt, sondern auch nach den strategischen Funktionen von Diskursen innerhalb spezifischer politischer Rahmenbedingungen in Zeit und Raum. Einen solchen Forschungszugang lege ich in diesem Beitrag anhand der Analyse von spezifischem Bildmaterial dar: Buchumschlage von (wissenschaftlichen) Publikationen zum Thema „Selbstmordattentate“. Ich verschranke die wissenssoziologisch-diskursforschende Analyse des Spezial- und ExpertInnenwissens aus dem Feld der Terrorismusforschung mit postkolonialer Theorie und feministischer Kritik an den Internationalen Beziehungen. Meine Perspektive versteht sich mit der Integration nicht-textlicher Materialien erstens als methodologische Erweiterung eines wissenssoziologisch-diskursforschenden Ansatzes im Anschluss an die WDA (vgl. Keller 2005) und zweitens als eine Moglichkeit, sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursforschung gerade uber die Integration einer visuellen Ebene in Richtung einer Dispositivforschung (vgl. Buhrmann/Schneider 2008) weiter zu entwickeln. Mit der theoretischen Verortung von Fragestellung, Material und Methoden wird drittens perspektivisch fur eine eurozentrismuskritische Weiterentwicklung der wissenssoziologischen Diskurs- und Dispositivforschung pladiert, die die Kategorie Raum auch als epistemologische versteht.

Critical Reflections on ‘Democracy in Crisis’

‘Democracy in Crisis: The Dynamics of Civic Protest and Civic Resistance’ was the title of the twenty-sixth State of Peace Conference held in September 2012 at the Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR). Located in the medieval castle of Stadtschlaining, the ASPR lies near the former ‘iron curtain’ or ‘cold-war’ border between Austria and Hungary. At the conference, scholars and practitioners from Austria, Germany, Slovenia, Hungary, Italy, Northern Ireland and the Ukraine came together to discuss the preconditions and challenges for civic protest, resistance and mobilization. Lilijana Burcar from Ljubljana and Magdalena Freudenschuß from Lueneburg were invited to participate in the panel ‘Feminist Critique and Resistance’, which was convened and chaired by Claudia Brunner from Klagenfurt. The following conversation features the key points of the debate that took place among the three of us: a feminist sociologist (Magdalena); a feminist political scientist (Claudia); and a feminist literary scholar (Lilijana). Our conversation began in preparation for the conference, continued on the conference panel and during the breaks, and was put into written form via email after the conference. The salient points of this discussion are shared here in an effort to link European feminist insights to international feminist debates on the multiple crises that mark contemporary global politics: the current economic and financial crisis; environmental issues such as climate change; and the crisis of reproduction and gender relations (see Demirović et al. 2011). We do not seek to offer ready-made feminist solutions to these crises, but hope to move forward the search and articulation of feminist solutions.

Das Konzept epistemische Gewalt als Element einer transdisziplinären Friedens- und Konflikttheorie

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