Lecture 9

Question 1

Public & Private Violence

Answer 1

Patriarchy

Ingroup/outgroup

War

Emotions

Wounds

Organization vs Networks
à in-group/out-group
à state

Institutions
à rules are taken for granted, accepted and stable.
àpatriarchy & structural racism

Question 2

Violence

Answer 2

Private: invisble, tabu, shameful, uncounted, ‘feminised and thus devalued’

Public: visible, countable, contestable, discussed, (potentially) compensated

Question 3

Violence Against Women

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Answer 3

Individual and couple dynamics are not enough to understand why women experience IPV, but the community and societylevel factors influence women’s exposure to forms of violence.

Women victims of IPV replicate the patriarchal patterns of tolerating and rationalizing VAW

VAW dissolves into socially negotiated emotions instead of creating politically shared values, such as solidarity u (lack of) policies, laws and practices inform our understanding of the IPV phenomenon (the taken for granted patriarchy)

Question 4

Violence & Emotions

Answer 4

The ‘affective turn’ (Ahmed 2004):

personal or collective feelings?

political engagement with affects

socially constructed emotions

Question 5

Emotions belong to the private or public sphere?

Answer 5

Emotions belong to the private or public sphere?

Socially constructed emotions: shame, guilt, security

Question 6

Social Emotions

Answer 6

Emotions shape and form political communities

Ø shame, guilt and security influence decisions about managing the experience of abuse in intimate partner violence (IPV).
Ø intersectional dimensions of gender and ethnicity
Ø the state acts to inform women from different ethnic groups how to relate to public administration

Question 7

The argument

Answer 7

Blaming the victim
à Strategy that constrains the victim and negates the violent act that was exercised against her.
àWomen who seek mediation question their group identity (social class, ethnic community) and challenge social norms. U

Group identity & socially negotiated emotions
à Women did not know how to talk about IPV experience and ethnicity without feeling ‘judged’.

Affects and institutional racism
à social workers tend to protect the state by blaming women’s ‘culture’ and ‘mentality’ rather than denouncing the structural oppression women suffer.

Question 8

Waging War

Answer 8

We routinely underestimate the amount and kinds of gendered power expended in the elite men’s preparations for and their wagings of wars: power exercised to militarize diverse masculinities and power exercised to militarize diverse femininities (p.398)

Gender essentialization

to promote the idea that something can be only ‘naturally’ (and thus effectively) done by people of a certain biological sex

gender divisions of labour are inevitable, immutable, ahistorical, and apolitical
Feminizaiton/ masculinization

to study how someone invests effort and resources into making a particular role at a particular time something which men are imagined to do best

Racializing, ethnicizing, and class-channeling efforts must be studied in order to track feminizing efforts

Question 9

Wounds

Answer 9

The concept offers a political analysis of the gendered causes and consequences of war.

Question 10

Wounds / Weaponry

Answer 10

Preserving the beautiful male body vs. repairing the male bodies mutilated by wartime weaponry

Inequality among war wounds: different sorts of wounds elicited not only different levels of government compensation, but different sorts of attention, sympathy, care, anxiety, denial, or disgust.

Wounds and the wounded are political in so far as wounds and the wounded are visible political subjects to state policy makers, … in so far as political energies and resources are used to make them invisible

Question 11

Gendered Emotions and gendered wounds

Answer 11

Who is allowed to express and what kind of exmotions?

The politics of mourning (Eng, Kazanjian & Butler, 2003.)

Gendered wounds

Inequality among war wounds
Invisible and/or invisibilized wounds

Question 12

Who is (represented) in the war?

Answer 12

wartime nurses are popularly and officially feminized, this does not blot out their classed, racialized, and ethnicized relationships (between each other as nurses, between the wounded civilians and soldiers and themselves, and between themselves and their military commanders), and those relationships’ distinct impacts on their political thinking about masculinities, about war, and about violence. (p.399)

“don’t ask, don’t tell”

Question 13

Article Enloe, Cynthia

Answer 13

Yet, for the analyst of the international politics of militarization and of wars and post-wars, taking these women’s ideas, relationships, and experiences seriously pries open analytical windows into rooms that otherwise remain close

It is not that no wartime nurse ever has gained public prominence. Yet when they do, they are routinely turned into cartoons, romantic heroines, sacrificing angels, daring adventurers, or static statues.

Question 14

To gender essentialize anything is

Answer 14

to promote the idea that something can be only ‘naturally’ (and thus effectively) done by people of a certain biological sex: for example, men bartending, while women, according to the essentialists, are (naturally) caring for children. ‘that’s just the way it is and has been’

to adopt the concepts of feminization and masculinization is to open up vast fields for historical and political investigation. It is to study how someone invests effort and resources into making a particular role at a particular time something which men are imagined to do best. Usually masculinization is entwined with the processes of racialization, ethnicization, and class presumptions

So too, to feminize something is to take specific actions to ensure that women play only certain roles – usually, lower or unpaid, typically with minimal influence over important decision-making. Racializing, ethnicizing, and class-channeling efforts must be studied in order to track feminizing efforts

by adopting a feminization/masculinization curiosity, a researcher immediately becomes sensitive to the time, place, and economic conditions in which each of these political processes is attempted – and is resisted or occasionally reversed.

Question 15

(gender essentialize) Even though,

Answer 15

as so often they are, wartime nurses are popularly and officially feminized, this does not blot out their classed, racialized, and ethnicized relationships (between each other as nurses, between the wounded civilians and soldiers and themselves, and between themselves and their military commanders), and those relationships’ distinct impacts on their political thinking about masculinities, about war, and about violence

One of the most widespread inclinations of officials in war-waging and post-war governments is to hide wars’ wounds and to shove into the political wings the severely war-time wounded. To the extent that civilians see the wartime wounded of a current or recent war, they are likely to be unenthusiastic about supporting officials in their next war-waging enterprise. The blind veteran, the veteran amputee – they are not persuasive advertisements for the militarizers’ cause. If the wounds cannot be thoroughly hidden from civilian view, then at least they should be woven, militarizers are likely to believe, into post-war narratives of soldiery resilience and amazing physical recovery.

Question 16

What counts as a ‘war wound?’

Answer 16

à In practice, it has taken decades, often multiple generations extending far into any war’s post-war era for any government to acknowledge what wounds were produced by the ways that officials at the time waged that war. it attempts to deny the seriousness of the less visible wounds of post-traumatic stress syndrome and other mental health wounds suffered by male and female soldiers.

to adequately explain why people who have experienced wartime violence can be open to future re-militarization, we need to explore more attentively what happens to the visible and invisible wounded after wars. In order to shed, or at least minimize, their public responsibility for caring for the wartime wounded, most governments rely on the mythical scenario of the war wounded ‘returning to their families’. This, of course, is a patriarchal (thus unreliable) scenario

In so far as the post-war care of the wartime wounded can be effectively feminized and thereby shoved conveniently into private spaces, official and popular militarizers may be able to minimize the perceived costs of the wars they have planned, promoted, and celebrated. Such an effective minimization of a war’s costs will leave conveniently ajar the political door into the next cycle of militarization.

Question 17

Article Vrăbiescu, Ioana.

Answer 17

In conclusion, this overarching victim blaming maintains and deepens the internalization of guilt

Question 18

The fear of shame and guilt is an essential element of IPV (intimate partner violence)

Answer 18

On the one hand, the abuse experienced by women reflects various types of suffering and mental illness: chronic dependence on the violent partner, self-flagellation or self-harming, depression, and so on. Based on psychological, cultural and personal factors, women victims of IPV internalize guilt as participants in the act of violence

On the other hand, scholars explain IPV as the expression of power relations not only between partners, but also as embedded in the social environment: that is, within the family, in the neighbourhood, in the workplace and in society at large

Question 19

Internalizing guilt

Answer 19

By internalizing guilt and the toleration of violence exerted upon them, women contribute to the way in which society debates and regulates gender violence. Both symbolically and politically, the community adjusts, condemns or confirms the power relations. In the following section I reflect on the ways that women victims of IPV define their identity and label others.

Question 20

Intersectionality

Answer 20

as shown by Crenshaw (1991), captures the interaction between racism and sexism in the lives of black women who are victims of domestic violence, and investigates practices of group identity to uncover a whole system of intertwining hierarchies

Question 21

In general, all women tend to believe that IPV occurs regardless of ethnicity, yet

Answer 21

yet there are other factors such as social class, financial status and education that are correlated with the experience of violence. In addition, all the women declared that other men do not intervene in any IPV incident. No fathers, brothers, cousins, or even the abused women’s sons took direct action against the aggressor as a mediator or by turning to the public authorities

When it comes to the relationship between education and IPV, perceptions are not as clear. Although non-Roma women do not tend to view the education of men as a factor reducing violence, they do tend to view a lack of education among Roma women as a determining factor in their victimization. On the other hand, Roma women admit that education does not prevent Roma or non-Roma men from being violent against women, although they internalize the majority racist and elitist model, which claims that in Roma communities gender violence is more frequent and tolerated.

My data show how guilt, shame and security are entangled in the social fabric of a community. They are negotiated within ingroups and become constitutive of relationships with outgroups.

Question 22

Effect of guilt

Answer 22

Shame proves to be one of the most powerful emotive-political tools of the patriarchal system. It is socially shaped with the purpose of organizing and controlling the reproductive and sexual life of women in a community. In my analysis of the relationships between women from different ethnic groups living in the same residential area, shame stands out as controlling and regulating both the private lives of women and the social life of the entire community. It acts by deterring all members of the community from addressing issues of gender-based violence, first to secure the group’s identity against the outgroup, and second to keep state intervention to a minimum in order to maintain the authority of informal structures of power.

The effects of guilt, shame and security point to, with some exceptions, a weak solidarity among women victims of IPV, who have to negotiate their multi-layered identity within the community, their ingroup and outgroup relations, and during their encounters with state structures and representatives. Nevertheless, in some cases, suffering multiple vulnerabilities may help to strengthen feelings of solidarity and political tactics among

The social function of solidarity in confrontation with oppressive structures reveals the ways in which the micro-politics of emotions function as a deterrent to reaching out and actively participating in addressing IPV publicly.

Question 23

Political subjectivities

Answer 23

This article refers to the political subjectivities constructed in a specific context where women subjected to IPV have little to no formal assistance and have sought no help outside their social network. I engaged with the critical theories of IPV and socially negotiated emotions using the theory of intersectionality as a lens for examining and theorizing data on a multi-ethnic neighbourhood in Romania. The article showed when and where the various forms of self- and hetero-labelling of women occur, and revealed women’s multi-layered identities and positions when negotiating social emotions within ingroups, with outgroups and in encounters with state structures.

Crucially, by emphasizing 160 European Journal of Women’s Studies 26(2) state–community relations, the article shows how (lack of) policies, laws and institutional practices shape our understanding of the IPV phenomenon. I have argued that state investment in political community formation, as well as out-groups’ social dynamics, informs attitudes towards IPV. I have shown how shame, guilt and security are mobilized to comprehend the intricacies of social and institutional affective dynamics, precisely because women who were victims of IPV relate to these feelings.

The community-regulated emotions, such as ‘shame’, have a role in silencing women victims of IPV in ways which do not guarantee their personal security and, at the same time, shame inhibits public debates on gender-related violence so that the integrity of communities will not be endangered. The empirical findings have shown how shame (defined specifically within the patriarchal structure and functioning at the community level) is a multidimensional factor for social, emotional and political abandonment (whether or not followed by acts of resilience or solidarity).

Question 24

ingroup and outgroup dynamics

Answer 24

I have analysed guilt, shame and security as factors that determine specific ingroup and outgroup dynamics. Ingroup tactics to negotiate women’s status and behaviour through emotions are augmented by tensions between groups and enhanced by state interventions. While guilt and shame maintain ingroup codes and rules, women’s concerns about security in a social sense deter them from asking for help from outgroups, particularly state representatives.

As the data demonstrate, both Roma and non-Roma women have the tendency to avoid interaction with institutions that do not challenge the IPV phenomenon. The disclosure of IPV experiences is perceived by the community as a threat to group security, and this discourages Roma and non-Roman women from interacting with state representatives. Women suffer or witness gender-based violence, and this type of knowledge informs the overall support they give to each other when suffering IPV.

This support is neither structural nor constant but based on a network of relationships built in the neighbourhood, thus often trespassing barriers of ethnicity, class or age. As a matter of fact, living in the same neighbourhood enhances social ties and solidarity within multiple vulnerable sub-groups. For this reason, Roma women are those who present acts of solidarity more often than non-Roma women. They learn how multiple structures of oppression work against them and thus come to appreciate the value of a women’s support network.

Question 25

Purpose

Answer 25

My purpose has been to advance debates on the social and political dimension of shame, guilt and security in relation to IPV. I have argued that state non-intervention is crucial in deterring women from seeking formal assistance and instead abandoning them to community patriarchal structures and the personal turmoil of their experience. IPV is not only an effect of patriarchy, but also entails the acceptance of violence, labelling it as a social norm rather than as social injustice. Social injustice can be challenged only by moving beyond social values and norms and by understanding the potential for solidarity to create political communities. By bringing the issue of IPV to the realm of social justice, solidarity may thrive not only among women – who rely on survival strategies and acts of solidarity within their community – but more broadly within the society at large.