Miriam Ticktin On “The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism”

Miriam Ticktin, associate professor of anthropology at The New School for Social Research, works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory.

Ticktin’s recent article “The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence” in Gender and History examines the relationship between gender and the human through the lens of humanitarianism, whose key mission is to protect “humanity.”

Specifically, the article traces the recent history of the entry of gender‐based violence into the medical humanitarian portfolio, quickly becoming the poster‐child for humanitarian aid. The article argues that this unprecedented attention to gender‐based violence, and its incorporation into the mandate of humanitarians and their mission to protect a universal humanity, works to medicalize and depoliticize the issue, limiting the ability to address violence in all its manifestations. The article also suggests that paying attention to the details of this attempted incorporation, and its ultimate failure, actually offers us something more important and interesting to think with: it opens the way to new possibilities for the political, and hence for addressing such forms of violence and inequality.

Source: Online Wiley Library