Femigenocide in the Gaza Strip and counter-pedagogies of cruelty: Academic mobilization and educational interruption against symbolic scholasticide

As members of our faculty’s Gender-Equality Working Group, we analyze the genocide mission underway in Gaza and describe our educational strategies aimed at denouncing and opposing it. We underscore the relevance of Rita Segato’s notion of femigenocide as it relates to the notion of reproductive genocide proposed by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, this considering the inverse relationship between women’s commitments to life-sustaining nonviolence versus the reconfiguration of women into military targets through sexual and lethal violence. We further engage Segato’s counter-pedagogies of cruelty, among other feminist and decolonial theoretical and methodological tools, to act pedagogically on the dire situation in Gaza. This involves community-based teaching predicated not only on the profound suffering but also the impunity surrounding human rights violations in Gaza. Three lines of educational action make interruption our foremost strategy: the creation of synergies, community mobilizations, and pedagogical hospicing. We conclude by calling on women and university communities in general to interrupt institutional inertia and symbolic scholasticide vis-à-vis the genocidal offensive against Palestinians.