This interdisciplinary John E. Sawyer Seminar, supported by the Mellon Foundation, will explore gender-based violence and the abiding fiction that it is a natural and inevitable facet of the family, state, and nation. It will investigate the logics and mechanisms by which violence is woven into the ordinary and the institutional structures of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, racism, and capitalism. In this sense, gender-based violence—whether physical or symbolic—is a constitutive act that defines belonging and exclusion. Intimately embedded in quotidian life, it often takes a singular event to disrupt the “normalcy” of gender-based violence and illuminate the routine harms that pervade our lives. This seminar will examine these ruptures in the logics of violence that “name the pain” (to quote bell hooks) and transform the law, the social imaginary, and material life. We must attend equally to the lived experience—that is, narratives not only about embodied violence, especially against specific gendered, racialized, and disabled subjects, but also acts of resistance through literature, art, and film that defy the forces that create imperiled bodies. Thus, this seminar addresses the affective dimension alongside the political and historical to elucidate the insidious nature of gender-based violence and to envision a future without it. 

The seminar will bring together scholars of literature, history, art, and law to explore gender-based violence in the United States, Mexico and Central America, Jamaica and Trinidad, India, South Korea, and Israel/Palestine from the nineteenth century onward. The conjoined histories and afterlives of colonialism, slavery, war, colonial settlements, and more provide a theoretical vertebra for their varied, yet connected global trajectories. Drawing on the rich educational resources of metropolitan Boston, we will also partner with local and national organizations. The nine panel sessions spanning the 2023-2024 academic year and an associated exhibition will foster rich, intellectual collaborations, build on and help germinate new classes and programming in the ensuing years. The seminar coincides with the 75th anniversary of Brandeis University’s founding and the 65th anniversary of the founding of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. It will amplify the social justice mission and history of the university with its long engagement with gender-based violence—from Pauli Murray (1968-73) to Anita Hill (1998-present).