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[gendercide_watch@hotmail.com: Announcing: Gendercide Watch <www.gendercide.org>]
================= Begin forwarded message =================
From: gendercide_watch@hotmail.com ("Gendercide Watch")
To: cej@bht.com
Subject: Announcing: Gendercide Watch <www.gendercide.org>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 10:27:58 PST
Greetings --
I am very pleased to announce that after many months of effort by our
dedicated trio, "Gendercide Watch", our Web-based educational initiative to
confront gender-selective mass killing worldwide, has now been launched at
<www.gendercide.org>. A mission statement, along with "What Is
Gendercide?", follows this message. An initial complement of twelve
gendercide case-studies has been posted to the site, and a dozen more will
follow in coming months. Please do what you can to spread the word!
Furthermore, I would like to issue a personal invitation to those on this
mailing list to consider becoming "affiliates" of Gendercide Watch. This
involves no time or financial commitment on your part (though contributions
of either are most welcome!). Rather, it is simply a statement of support
for the broad goals of the project. If you are interested in adding your
name to the "staff & affiliates" page, please write to this address with a
short biographical description, institutional affiliations, and links to any
Web-based projects you might be involved in. We're hoping to get a diverse
and international group of affiliates together to buttress the credibility
of the site and its contents.
Please let us know of any glitches you find on the site -- we are still
doing a little last-minute scenery painting. And thanks to those who've
offered solidarity and support over the last (busy!) few months.
All the best,
Adam Jones
Executive Director, Gendercide Watch
======================================
1) MISSION STATEMENT
GENDERCIDE WATCH seeks to confront acts of gender-selective mass killing
around the world. We believe that such atrocities against ordinary men and
women constitute one of humanity's worst blights, and one of its greatest
challenges in the new millennium.
GENDERCIDE WATCH is working to raise awareness, conduct research, and
produce educational resources on gendercide. In particular, we seek to
dispel stereotypes that blame victims and survivors for their own suffering.
Among our activities is the maintenance of a website,
www.gendercide.org, which represents our major means of outreach and public
education. This site includes a constantly growing data-base of
case-studies and other research materials on gendercide.
GENDERCIDE WATCH seeks contacts and affiliations with scholars and students,
activists, and other individuals who share our concerns and will allow us to
learn and benefit from their diverse efforts. We manage a moderated
mailing-list that will link concerned individuals and institutions in many
countries. This list will allow staff and subscribers to issue "urgent
action" notices as cases of gendercide arise, and to provide word of
important available resources.
=============================
2) WHAT IS GENDERCIDE?
[n.b. A number of the case-studies referred to here are currently under
construction; our aim is to have the full complement in place by the end of
this year. The case-studies already uploaded are (in alphabetical order):
Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Incarceration/The Death Penalty,
Maternal Mortality, Military Conscription/Impressment, Jewish Holocaust,
Kosovo, Montreal Massacre, Nanjing Massacre, Soviet POWs, and Srebrenica.]
Gendercide is gender-selective mass killing. The term was first used by Mary
Anne Warren in her 1985 book, "Gendercide: The Implications of Sex
Selection." Warren drew "an analogy between the concept of genocide and what
I call gendercide." Citing the Oxford English Dictionary definition of
genocide as "the deliberate extermination of a race of people," Warren
wrote:
By analogy, gendercide would be the deliberate extermination
of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms,
such as "gynocide" and "femicide," have been used to refer
to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But "gendercide"
is a sex-neutral term, in that the victims may be either male
or female. There is a need for such a sex-neutral term, since
sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims
happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact
that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that
these are in important respects analogous to the lethal
consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.
Warren explores the deliberate extermination of women through analysis of
such subjects as female infanticide, maternal mortality, and witch-hunts in
early modern Europe. Gendercide Watch includes all three of these as
case-studies of gendercide. In addition, we include cases of mass rape of
women followed by murder, as has occurred on a large scale in recent decades
(see the case-studies of gendercide against both women and men in Nanjing in
1937 and Bangladesh in 1971). We also feature a case-study of the Montreal
Massacre (1989), a gender-selective mass execution of young women that is
indelibly imprinted in the minds of millions of Canadians, and which shocked
many others worldwide.
The difficulty with Warren's framing of gendercide, though -- and this is
true for the feminist analysis of gender-selective human-rights abuses as a
whole -- is that the inclusive definition is not matched by an inclusive
analysis of the mass killing of non-combatant men. Gendercide Watch was
founded to encourage just such an inclusive approach. We believe that
state-directed gender-selective mass killings have overwhelmingly targeted
men through history, and that this phenomenon is pervasive in the modern
world as well. Despite this prevalence of gendercide against males --
especially younger, "battle-age" men -- the subject has received almost no
attention across a wide range of policy areas, humanitarian initiatives, and
academic disciplines. We at Gendercide Watch feel it is one of the great
taboos of the contemporary age, and must be ignored no longer.
Accordingly, we offer case-study treatments of gendercide against men in
political, military, and ethnic conflicts over the last
century-and-a-quarter. If the case-studies numerically outweigh those of
mass killings of women in wars and other conflicts, this reflects our
conviction that men are, indeed, generally the victims of the most severe
gender-selective atrocities in such situations.
Case-studies range from The Paraguayan War of 1864-70 to the gendercides in
Kosovo and East Timor in 1999. Other cases of gendercide against men include
the Indonesian genocide of 1965-66, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Jammu/Kashmir, Sri
Lanka, Burundi, Colombia, and Iraqi Kurdistan. We analyze little-known
gendercides such as the Nazi murder of 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war
in just eight months of 1941-42 -- possibly the most concentrated mass
killing of any kind in human history. The ambiguous case of Stalin's Purges
in the USSR receives case-study treatment because of the sheer scale of the
gender-specific killing (tens of millions of men). It is harder to say
whether Stalin's mass murders were intentionally gender-selective, in the
manner of the Serbs in Kosovo or the Nazis in Occupied Russia. Should they
truly be considered acts of "gendercide"? Where such difficulties and
ambiguities arise, we will do our best to acknowledge them and open them for
discussion.
As feminists have sought to move beyond traditional political-military
framings of conflict and violence, we seek also to understand institutions
rooted deep in human history that have consistently been "gendercidal" in
their impact on men. Four of these institutions have been discussed
alongside "non-traditional" institutions that overwhelmingly or exclusively
target women (maternal mortality, female infanticide, and rape/murder). For
men, the case-study institutions are: corvée (forced) labour, military
conscription, imprisonment/the death penalty, and violence against gays.
Part of our educational brief is to encourage a re-examination of certain
"classic" cases of genocide through a gender-inclusive lens. Our case-study
of the Jewish holocaust, for example, points to little-appreciated but
strongly-gendered "phases" leading up to the eventual root-and-branch
extermination of European Jews. Similar trends are found in the Armenian
genocide of 1915-16 and the genocide against Rwandan Tutsis in 1994. In none
of these cases do we claim that the gendering of the atrocities was all (or
even primarily) one-way. Nor do we suggest that the gender dimension of the
Jewish holocaust, or the Armenian or Rwandan genocides, is the dominant or
most important dimension of these horrific events, which swept up all
sectors of the targeted populations. But policymakers, humanitarian workers,
and scholars of genocide have worked to identify reliable indicators of the
onset of genocide, as a means of intervening promptly and effectively to
suppress it. We feel the inclusive analysis of gender throws fresh and
important light on these global crises and issues. Our goal is a world that
is safer for women, men, and their children.
=============================
(end)
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