NOW PUBLISHED!

Gendercide
and
Genocide

[Click on the above link to reach the Amazon.com page
for "Gendercide and Genocide"]

Edited by Adam Jones

Vanderbilt University Press, 2004

The most wide-ranging book ever published on gender-selective mass killing, or "gendercide," this collection of essays is also the first to explore systematically the targeting of non-combatant "battle-age" males in various wartime and peacetime contexts.

Representing such fields as sociology, political science, psychology, queer studies, and human-rights activism, the contributors explore themes and issues outlined by editor Adam Jones in the book's opening essay. In that article, which provoked considerable debate when it was first published in 2000, Jones argues that throughout history and around the world, the population group most consistently targeted for mass killing and state-backed oppression are non-combatant men of roughly fifteen to fifty-five years of age. Such males, Jones contends, are typically seen as "the group posing the greatest danger to the conquering force." Jones's article also examined the use of "gendercidal institutions" -- such as female infanticide, witch-hunts, military conscription, and forced labor -- against both women and men.

The subsequent essays -- some original, some drawn from a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research and other sources -- expand, diversify, and criticize this framing of gendercide. They range from a sophisticated theory of gendercide to in-depth treatments of such topics as the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the gendercidal oppression of young African American males, the predicament of gays and lesbians in the face of increasing biotechnological manipulation of human behavior, and the psychology of shame and humiliation underlying gendercides against both sexes. Still other chapters take issue with Jones's theories of gendercide, or explore how human-rights organizations have defined, documented, and responded to gendercide and other sex-specific atrocities. A closing essay considers the relevance of feminist and men's studies literatures for the study of gendercide.

Table of Contents

Editor's Preface

Chapter 1
Adam Jones, "Gendercide and Genocide"

Chapter 2
Evelin Gerda Lindner,
"Gendercide and Humiliation in Honor and Human-Rights Societies"

Chapter 3
Øystein Gullvåg Holter,
"A Theory of Gendercide"

Chapter 4
Adam Jones,
"Gender and Genocide in Rwanda"

Chapter 5
David Buchanan,
"Gendercide and Human Rights"

Chapter 6
Augusta C. Del Zotto,
"Gendercide in a Historical-Structural Context:
The Case of Black Male Gendercide in the United States"

Chapter 7
Stefanie S. Rixecker,
"Genetic Engineering and Queer Biotechnology:
The Eugenics of the 21st Century?"

Chapter 8
Stuart Stein,
"Geno and Other Cides: A Cautionary Note on Knowledge Accumulation"

Chapter 9
R. Charli Carpenter,
"Beyond 'Gendercide': Operationalizing Gender in Comparative Genocide Studies"

Chapter 10
Adam Jones,
"Problems of Gendercide: A Response to Stein and Carpenter"

Chapter 11
Terrell Carver,
"Men and Masculinities in Gendercide/Genocide"

Index

About the Editor

Adam Jones is Research Fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is the author of Beyond the Barricades: Nicaragua and the Struggle for the Sandinista Press, 1979-1998 (Ohio University Press, 2002) and editor of Genocide, War Crimes, and the West: History and Complicity (Zed Books, 2004).