Busboys and Poets Books Presents RADICALIZING HER with Nimmi Gowrinathan
Date and Time
Sep 8, 2021 6:00 pm
Location
450K
450 K St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20001
Sep 8, 2021 6:00 pm
450K
RADICALIZING HER: WHY WOMEN CHOOSE VIOLENCE goes beyond the question of ‘can women be violent?’ and examines the motives and realities of female fighters in militant movements (released April 13th, 2021). Women fighters make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide, and yet have continued to be deeply misunderstood. Moving beyond gendered and flawed stereotypes of female fighters, NImmi Gowrinathan moves the conversation to recognizing these women for their political agency and personhood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up in all her complexity as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. Joining Growninathan are editor in chief of Guernica Magazine, Jina Moore, and Global Opinions Editor for the Washington Post, Karen Attiah. This event is free and open to all, accessible through our Facebook and Youtube pages (@busboysandpoets).
Please RSVP if you are joining us in person or are interested in purchasing a signed book with shipping (limited to those tuning in via livestream)
The program will start out with an introduction from Busboys and Poets Books Director of Operations, Lori Barrientos Sanchez, before we get right into it with Nimmi and guests. modern retelling, it is sure to be an interesting evening around desire, nuance, and intentionality. There will be time for Q&A with the audience before the end of the program, as well as the opportunity to purchase a copy of RADICALIZING HER for Nimmi to sign the night of!
RADICALIZING HER: WHY WOMEN CHOOSE VIOLENCE is an urgent corrective to the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power, demanding that we see all women as political actors.
"Violence, for me, and for the women I chronicle in this book, is simply a political reality."
Though the female fighter is often seen as an anomaly, women make up nearly 30% of militant movements worldwide. Historically, these women--viewed as victims, weak-willed wives, and prey to Stockholm Syndrome--have been deeply misunderstood. Radicalizing Her holds the female fighter up in all her complexity as a kind of mirror to contemporary conversations on gender, violence, and power. The narratives at the heart of the book are centered in the Global South, and extend to a criticism of the West's response to the female fighter, revealing the arrayed forces that have driven women into battle and the personal and political elements of these decisions. Gowrinathan, whose own family history is intertwined with resistance, spent nearly twenty years in conversation with female fighters in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Pakistan, and Colombia. The intensity of these interactions consistently unsettled her assumptions about violence, re-positioning how these women were positioned in relation to power. Gowrinathan posits that the erasure of the female fighter from narratives on gender and power is not only dangerous but also, anti-feminist. She argues for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of women who choose violence noting in particular the tendency of contemporary political discourse to parse the world into for--and against--camps: an understanding of motivations to fight is read as condoning violence, and oppressive agendas are given the upper hand by the moral imperative to condemn it. Coming at a political moment that demands an urgent re-imagining of the possibilities for women to resist, Radicalizing Her reclaims women's roles in political struggles on the battlefield and in the streets.
Nimmi Gowrinathan’s writing on the female fighter has been featured in publications as varied as Vice, Harper’s Magazine, Foreign Policy, Freeman’s Journal, Guernica Magazine, and The New YorkTimes, among others. She is the Publisher of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine aiming to rehumanize policy, and creator of the Female Fighters Series at Guernica Magazine. She is Professor and the Directorof the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York. Follow her work at deviarchy.com and on Twitter (@nimmideviarchy).
Jina Moore is the Editor in Chief of Guernica magazine, a global journal at the intersection of arts and politics. She was also the East Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times, the inaugural Global Women's Rights Reporter for BuzzFeed News, and a longtime Africa correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. She has been a leading voice on trauma-informed reporting, pushing for better ethics on consent in sexual and gender-based violence reporting. She is a member of the board of Adi Magazine, a literary journal rehumanizing policy. She's on Twitter.
Karen Attiah is a columnist for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2014 as a digital producer in the Opinions section. Attiah often writes on issues relating to race, gender and international politics, with a special interest in Africa. Previously, she reported as a freelancer for the Associated Press while based in the Caribbean. Attiah was the winner of the 2019 George Polk Award and was the 2019 Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists.
