ABSTRACT

When we first embarked on a project of discussing gender and violence in today’s world seven years ago we were painfully aware that any such discussion would necessitate the summoning of a great number of hard-to-resolve questions. We identified, on that occasion, that contemporary dialogues on gender and violence raise a number of problematic issues across a variety of contexts-the most significant of which are related to, on the one hand, the struggle of scholars in women’s and gender studies to theorize femininity in a manner that can address the particularities of an individual’s experience as well as what are considered to be women’s universal experiences across global economic divides; and, on the other hand, the gay rights activists’ challenge to frame sexual rights as purely antithetical to, and, therefore, readable only in the context of heteronormative ideologies. These concerns are even more relevant today given the insecurity that much of the world is facing with regard to Islamist terrorism, historically against non-Muslims and now increasingly against the majority of Muslims globally, as exemplified by the rise of Al Qaeda’s splinter group, the Islamic State.1 Yet it is important to acknowledge that the accelerated pace of globalization and its resonance with Western (neo)imperial strategies in the recent era, the striking development of information technology and its remarkable appropriations by militant groups globally, and the creation of new models that sustain common and perpetrate new forms of gender violence, have also impacted upon these gendered dynamics: they have acquired new meanings, new relevance, and new modes of inquiry. These changes have also added more issues to consider to the stock. Notably, the extreme usability of and increasing global access to the Internet, specifically social media, necessitate a rigourous discussion about the Internet-related discourses and practices of violence-how they may influence the sensationalism that is inextricably linked to terrorism (particularly against women and increasingly executed by women); and how they may reposition questions

of security2 and accountability (personal, communal, and global). But these developments also demand renewed attention to the use of the World Wide Web in a more positive vein to empower women and to promote transparency in the cases of the violation of human and women’s rights, ranging from violations against individuals to those of communities.