The question of gender and agency in the context of violence is a topic of much debate in feminist scholarship. The controversy lies in developing understanding how violence is gendered without reinforcing gender stereotypes about women as passive victims and men as aggressive perpetrators and to develop new understanding of how especially women use and enact agency in conflict and post-conflict setting. In this chapter I combine feminist security studies with feminist research on violence in order to deepen understandings of how gender and agency can be understood in the context of violence. The objective of the chapter is to focus on how violence is gendered, how gender norms and normative notions of gender inform manifestations and practices of violence in public and private spheres as well as look for possibilities of agency in the midst of violence.

Peer reviewed