Gender and Catastrophe

This book explores the gendered and gendering effects of violence against women in extreme situations such as major wars, genocides, famines, slavery, the Holocaust, mass rape and ethnic cleansing.

Case studies include: the female experience of methodical genocidal rape in the former Yugoslavia; women's coerced participation in the Rwandan massacre; Japan's comfort women system during World War II; the gendering of genocidal strategies during the Holocaust; nuclear testing in the Pacific; and China's reproduction policy in Tibet.

All are integrated into a wider framework, which uncovers the true consequences of identifying women as simultaneously sexual objects, transmitters of culture, and symbols of the nation.

Ronit Lentin is former associate professor of sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has published extensively on Palestine-Israel, racism and immigration in Ireland. Her books include: Conversations with Palestinian Women (1980), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Women's Narratives of Dislocation (2002), Racism and Antiracism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Race and State (with Alana Lentin, 2006/8), After Optimism: Ireland, Racism and Globalisation (with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Thinking Palestine (2008), Post-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012).

Dr Ronit Lentin, senior lecturer in Sociology, is the director of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the coordinator of the Global Networks project at the Institute of International Integration Studies, Trinity College Dublin. She has published numerous articles on racism and immigration in Ireland, gender, the Holocaust, and Israel-Palestine. Her books include Conversations with Palestinian Women (1982), Gender and Catastrophe (1997), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Racism and Anti-racism in Ireland (with Robbie McVeigh, 2002), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Gendered Narratives of Dislocation (with Nahla Abdo 2002), Re-presenting the Shoah for the 21st Century (2004), After Optimism? Ireland, Globalisation and Racism (with Robbie McVeigh, 2006), Race and State (with Alana Lentin, 2006), and Performing Global Networks (with Karen Fricker, 2007).