Guest Lecture: Contesting Gender Identities and Practices: Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) is Search of Self
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Since 1992, the Republic of Georgia has experienced civil wars that have resulted in massive and numerous displacement of thousands of women, men and children. These different displacements have generated different impacts on the lives of individual internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Yet so far little attention has been given to multilayered gendered identities of IDPs. The omission of a gender is striking given different societal expectations towards gender roles and the actual practices.
This lecture will examine how men and women experience the two phases of displacement, becoming and living as an IDP, differently. Joanna Regulska treats displacement as a multidimensional process that affects gender power relations and aim to inquire how these have been altered as a result of displacement.
What kinds of shifts in gender roles have occurred? How does gendered power circulate in the reconfigured households and families? Does the experience of displacement as a result of violent conflict reinforce patriarchal ideologies or does it fundamentally change them? How is the sense of loss and attempts to rebuild identity connected to the IDPs ability to fulfill their gender expectations?
Joanna Regulska examines struggles to regain the gendered self through IDPs narratives.
