Reproducing revolution: Women’s labor and the war in Kachinland

In Reproducing Revolution, Dr Jenny Hedström explores the Kachin revolution in Myanmar from the perspective of female soldiers, female activists, and women displaced by the violence in northern Myanmar. She argues that the household is an inherently gendered, militarised, and political space that impacts, and is in turn impacted by, the external conflict with which it coexists.

In this context, women's everyday labour—the gendered work of care, farming, fighting, and forging connections both across households and between the household and the army and the nation—is key to revolutionary survival. She calls this labour militarised social reproduction. Militarised social reproduction expands the concept of reproduction to include women’s everyday labour undertaken in response to war, including military conscription, frontline provisioning, veteran care, and revolutionary marriage. She shows how this labour is critical to the miliary effort, and that warfare itself is shaped through everyday domestic action.

About the speaker

Dr Jenny Hedström is an Associate Professor in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. Jenny’s research and teaching concerns the relationship between households, gender, and warfare; women’s activism and resistance; and ethics and methods when researching war, often with a focus on civil wars in Myanmar. Her research has been published in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Peacebuilding, Critical Military Studies, International Studies Review, and other outlets. Together with Elisabeth Olivius, she is the editor of the collection Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions (NIAS Press, 2023). Jenny’s book, Reproducing Revolution: Women’s Labor and the War in Kachinland will be out with Cornell University Press in 2025.

Light refreshments in the Atrium at 5pm
Lecture in HB1 at 5.30pm

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