event
Gender Seminar Series
Thursday
20
October
Sélima Kebaïli

Gendering transitional justice: a racialized construction of victimhood in post-revolutionary Tunisia

Sélima Kebaïli, University of Lausanne
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Room S5, Maison de la paix, Geneva

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Transitional justice, a set of instruments intended to bring peace to and democratize societies through the recognition of victims, was the subject of considerable mobilization in postrevolutionary Tunisia. The specific inclusion of female victims in the process was addressed by institutional measures, which led to the implementation of a gender programme by international organizations, such as the United Nations or the International Center for Transitional Justice.

This presentation will explore how gender norms and representations are transferred through international gender mainstreaming measures in so called “post-conflict” context. Based on ethnographic observation of the construction of a memorial dedicated to women’s experience of the dictatorship in Tunisia, this presentation argues that international organizations, by relying on the racialization of violence against women, emptied the political content of Tunisian women experiences of repression.

 

About the speaker

Sélima Kebaïli is a sociologist whose research focuses on gender, transitional justice, social suffering, islam, and victimhood, mainly in the MENA region and Europe. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2021 and has degrees in gender studies and political science.

Using a qualitative approach, she explores the shaping of female victims' status and subjectivity with regards to political violence. She asks how, in post-conflict contexts, certain forms of suffering tend to be recognized, promoted or otherwise marginalized by political actors and international organizations. This question led her to develop a critical analysis of international NGO’s gender mainstreaming practices from a postcolonial perspective. Her current book project deals with transitional justice and the making of the category of "female victim" in postrevolutionary Tunisia.

She recently joined the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne as a Senior Researcher for a project supervised by Prof. Eléonore Lépinard entitled Shaping the Legal Consciousness of Intersectional Subjects: Accommodating, Negotiating and Contesting Regulations on Islamic Veiling in France, Switzerland, and the UK. She is also a Visiting Postdoctoral researcher with the ANSO department of the Geneva Graduate Institute.

 

 

PART OF THE GENDER SEMINAR SERIES

The Gender Centre has developed this series of research seminars in order to offer a platform for exchange for students, doctoral students in particular, and researchers whose work includes a gender perspective. During this monthly series, researchers have the opportunity to discuss their work, meet peers from different disciplines at the Graduate Institute, as well as interact with other students, guest speakers and faculty members.

See the programme of this semester's Gender Seminar Series here.

 

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