Carr studies a diverse and intergenerational group of twenty-first-century feminist poets: Serena Chopra (US), Khadijah Queen (US), Aditi Machado (US/India), Lisa Robertson (Canada/France), and Nat Raha (UK), each of whom address patriarchal violence in their poems. While the articulation of the wounded woman’s body is a central project of contemporary feminism (as it has been of prior feminisms), as evidenced by the #MeToo movement, so too is the corresponding and equally dynamic celebration and display of women’s bodies as sources and sites of pleasure. In so far as patriarchy’s violence is often aimed at women’s bodies’ capacity for pleasure and desire, the expression of such pleasure becomes a form of resistance. Therefore, as much as the poems Carr reads air the wounds of patriarchy, they also explore the erotic thought of very broadly as that which draws us towards one another, as that which motivates the permeation of boundaries, and as that which emphasises the vulnerability of people in relation as a response to such wounds.

This chapter explores the role that literary texts can play in articulating a feminist approach to one of the twenty-first century’s most crucial and pressing issues: migration. Against the backdrop of significant hostility towards migration in popular, media, and governmental discourses in many locations around the world, the chapter investigates the way border crossings are depicted in Valeria Luiselli’s non-fiction book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, and in two prose poems: Warsan Shire’s ‘Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’ and Vahni Capildeo’s ‘Five Measures of Expatriation’. It shows how the complex, rich, inventive use of language in the three texts works to emphasise the connections between state borders and other forms of social differentiation and oppression, including racialisation and women’s experiences of sexual violence. In this way, the texts represent the injustices and violence of contemporary bordering regimes, while also making a feminist case for the importance and necessity of migration and border crossing.

This chapter considers the experience of war from two perspectives. The first half examines the problem of literary topoi in ancient descriptions of battle and some of the ways in which scholars have tried to make sense of them. Debate about the dynamics of battle is discussed, together with the ‘face of battle’ approach. Attention is given to controversies over the application of conclusions from modern contexts about ‘ratio of fire’ and small-group cohesion. The application of ‘non-linear’ models is also considered apropos the unpredictability of battle. Finally, the battle of Busta Gallorum (43 BC) provides an intriguing case study of a battle for which, unusually, an eyewitness account has been preserved. The second half focuses on civilian experiences of war, especially in the context of sieges. Civilian involvement in the defence of cities is examined, as is the impact of food shortages, famine and disease, together with the sexual violence and enslavement that typically followed the capture of a besieged city. The impacts of raiding and of protracted wars are also considered. Late Roman evidence is particularly illuminating for the experiences of those enslaved through war.

Chapter 5 uses legal records to describe the shape of crime in the postwar East Central State – the core of the former Biafra and the last region to fall to Nigeria – where poverty, unemployment, and a variety of social and political ills caused by the war conspired to make everyday life in the 1970s very violent and precarious.

Within and across cultures, sexism derives from cultural beliefs about the superiority of one sex and predicts gender inequity. Given the persistent and striking gender inequalities across nations, the goal of this chapter is to elaborate the relation among blatant and subtle sexism, ideology, sexual violence, men’s dominance over women, and patriarchal inequities. Toward that end, we review social psychological theory and research on gender and sexism; within this context, we discuss forms of sexism and gendered ideologies at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup level. We also focus on the important aspects of construing gender as a social identity. We then compare and contrast psychological perspectives to feminist theories, which emphasize how the gender binary defines hegemonic masculinity in contrast to women; we focus particularly attention to how women negotiate gendered roles and relations given awareness of the frequency, prevalence, and possibility of gendered and/or sexual violence. After integrating social psychological and enduring principles of radical feminist perspectives, we conclude by discussing the implications of cross-cultural perspectives and potential interventions that may combat sexism that reinforces gender inequities.

Concerns about gender-equality in education persist in spite of substantial historical progress. We review some of the major issues occupying researchers today, while considering findings across cultures and nations. We discuss patterns of gender gaps based on cross-national assessments, research on gender stereotypes and biases in the classroom, women’s participation in STEM domains, and possible educational interventions. Some consistencies and many inconsistencies that emerge across cultures are discussed.

This chapter returns to the CVC study in Grenada. Faced with pressure to complete their ambitious six-country size estimation study before their grant ended and donors transitioned out of the Caribbean, CVC focused its efforts on strong engagement of community field workers, who had the trust of their peers and could accompany them in overcoming the numerous barriers to participation. Working through networks of trusted community gatekeepers, CVC and local partners strengthened the role of community-based organizations in the research. The data was difficult to get, but the work of indigenous field workers enabled the researchers to gather granular data about previously undocumented populations including transgender people, as well as documenting incest and other hidden forms of gender-based violence, and to form stronger bonds between civil society and health officials.

In early modern Europe the killing of spouses, children or servants was a serious crime, as was the physical or sexual abuse of them. Yet convictions for what today we would call ‘domestic violence’ were rare. This chapter will analyse the understandings of gender that underpinned attitudes towards intimate violence. Male heads of households, for instance, were entitled, indeed expected, to employ physical force in order to maintain discipline amongst those under their control. The use of violence was not at issue; instead questions concerned the levels and types of violence employed. But if the head had licence to use violence, the reverse was certainly not the case: violence by dependants was widely interpreted as a form of treason. Attitudes to certain forms of intimate violence shifted significantly during 1500–1800. For instance, although rape continued to be treated primarily as a property crime and remained difficult to prove, nevertheless it also emerged increasingly as a moral offence. Regulation of illegitimacy and infanticide increased after 1500, yet by 1800 communal and judicial tolerance of the latter was on the rise. The chapter will not only highlight such gradual changes, but also seek to explain why they occurred and what they meant.

Sexually-violent practices and ideologies have varied dramatically over time and geographical region. There have also been important shifts in the weighting given to its two components: “sexual” and “violence”. Sexual violence is deeply rooted in specific political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. In exploring these issues on a global-scale the first question to ask is: who is entitled to label something as “sexually violent”? Despite the incredible personal suffering inflicted on victims of sexual assault, under-reporting is pervasive: victims routinely struggle to find words for their pain. Cognitive distortions about gender, sexuality, and violence have left legacies of abuse that are difficult to counter. Perpetrators of violence are often presented as victims and, in the context of mass rapes during wartime, international law has been sluggish in responding. The chapter concludes by evaluation the attempts by victims of sexual violence, feminists, politicians, lawmakers, police, and community activists to resist and eradicate sexual violence not only in their own societies but also globally. Rape thrives in situations of structural inequality. Although women act in sexually aggressive ways (and there is some evidence that the proportion of female aggressors is increasing), in the final analysis, political attempts to reduce and finally eliminate sexual aggression must start with the main perpetrators. Eradicating rape requires a radically different conception of agency and masculinity.

This coda examines responses to Edna O’Brien’s fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and recent novels by Eimear McBride, in order to assess the changing climate for Irish women’s fiction and characterisations of the Irish woman writer. Both sets of works anatomise women’s experience at crucial junctures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but while O’Brien’s work was banned in the 1960s for its reputedly salacious content, in contrast, Eimear McBride’s sexually explicit 2013 novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (though it took years to find a publisher) was immediately embraced by critics and celebrated as an exemplar of contemporary Irish writing. The chapter discusses responses to the female bildungsroman and representations of female sexuality, sexual abuse, and violence.

An exploration of insurgency through the frameworks offered by a case study on Joseph Kony’s life and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. By understanding Kony’s life, motivations, and the operation of the LRA as an insurgency, we see how understanding human behavior and the logic of violence through an economic lens offers more insight to a solution than a rote labeling of Kony as an insurgent. The chapter also examines the operation of the Cosa Nostra to emphasize these points.

This chapter discusses examples of gendered commission and impact of sexual violence committed by government forces against Syrian women and men since March 2011. It also discusses the effect of sexual violence on the status and roles of Syrian women before and within the Syrian armed conflict. It analyses the reasons why sexual violence was used, its consequences (which are closely linked to its reasons), and the extent to which government forces achieved their goals by using violence of a sexual nature. The author’s analysis shows that the patterns of sexual violence followed the chronology and dynamics of the conflict, becoming more extreme as attempts to repress opposition failed. The author argues that while the types of sexual violence by government forces evolved, its use exploited gender roles and cultural and social norms throughout the conflict. In doing so, sexual violence was effective in fulfilling the government’s goal of terrorising, humiliating, and disempowering families and, through them, communities. In detention, it is noted that sexual violence was also used as a tool of torture to extract information and force confessions.