https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9698-1274
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ABSTRACT
Applied to institute a distinct category of violence, the testimonial format of battered migrant women who escape their families is a recurrent narrative pattern in public discourses on honor-based violence. Through interviews with women categorized as victims of honor-based violence, this essay problematizes the presuppositions marking the narrated violence a distinguishable category including the testimonial format on which it derives. The critique is empirically based on resident-interviews and participant observation in a Danish refuge set to relieve honor-based violence and on resituating the analysis to include the socially, institutionally, nationally, and historically embedded setting of such interviews.
Acknowledgements
Helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts from Laura Feldt, Åsa Eldén, Catharina Raudvere, Casper Jacobsen, the CC/CS editor, and two anonymous reviewers are gratefully appreciated.
ORCID
Louise Lund Liebmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9698-1274
Notes
1 Suvi Keskinen, “Securitized Intimacies, Welfare State and the ‘Other’ Family,” Social Politics 24, no. 2 (2017): 154–77.
2 Keskinen, “‘Honor-Related Violence’ and Nordic Nation-Building,” in Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, ed. S. Keskinen, S. Tuori, S. Irni, and D. Mulinari (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 268.
3 Mara Buchbinder, “Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 34, no. 1 (2010): 111.
4 Åsa Eldén, “‘The Killing Seemed to be Necessary’: Arab Cultural Affiliation as an Extenuating Circumstance in a Swedish Verdict,” Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 6, no 2 (1998): 89–95; Åsa Eldén, “Heder på liv och död: Våldsamma berättelser om rykten, oskuld och heder” PhD dissertation (University of Uppsala, 2003); Åsa Eldén, “Life-and-Death Honor: Young Women’s Violent Stories about Reputation, Virginity, and Honor in a Swedish Context,” in Violence in the Name of Honor: Theoretical and Political Challenges, ed. Nahla Abdo-Zubi (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2004), 91–100.
5 RED was initially the shortened version of the refuge’s full—Danish—name: Rehabilitation center for Ethnic minority women in Denmark (similar in Danish). The refuge has since changed its name multiple times, but RED remains within it.
6 Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
7 In a Scandinavian context, “regular” women-shelters focus exclusively on providing housing and safety for escaped women and children. They do not provide a rehabilitation program. Historically, these shelters are part of the women’s movement and based upon volunteer work, solidarity between women, and “help to self-help.” Rebecca Emerson Dobash and Russel P. Dobash, Women, Violence and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1992), 89.
8 Buchbinder, “Giving an Account,” 122.
9 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 18ff.
10 Eldén, “The Killing Seemed to Be Necessary”; Eldén, “Heder på liv och död”; Eldén, “Life-and-Death Honor.”
11 Eldén, “Heder på liv och död,” 15ff., 51ff.
12 Keskinen, “Honor-Related Violence,” 262. For the “discursive explosion” in the coverage of honor-based violence, cf. Maria Carbin, “The Requirement to Speak: Victim stories in Swedish policies against Honor-Related Violence,” Women’s Studies International Forum 46 (2014): 109.
13 Unni Wikan, For ærens skyld: Fadime til ettertanke (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2003). This book on the life and death of Fadime Sahindal was first published in Norwegian, afterward in Danish, and then in English. In 2008, Wikan published a book on different Scandinavian cases of alleged honor killings; Unni Wikan, Om ære (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2008).
14 Carbin, “The Requirement to Speak,” 110.
15 Louise L. Liebmann, “Æresrelateret vold: en gen-anvendelig selvfortælling,” Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning 39, no. 1 (2015): 39–59. For “formula stories,” cf. Donileen Loseke, “Lived Realities and Formula Stories of ‘Battered Women’,” in Institutional Selves: Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World, ed. Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 107–26.
16 Eva Reimers, “Representations of an Honor Killing: Intersections of Discourses on Culture, Gender, Equality, Social Class, and Nationality,” Feminist Media Studies 7, no. 3 (2007): 239–55, at 241ff.
17 Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein, Analyzing Narrative Reality (Thousands Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2009), 22.
18 Ibid.
19 For my methodological sources of inspiration that link feminist research on violence with narrative enquiries, cf. Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1995); Pauline Savy and Anne-Maree Sawyer, “Risk, Suffering and Competing Narratives in the Psychiatric Assessment of an Iraqi Refugee,” Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry 32, no. 1 (2008): 84–101; Sara Scott, “Here Be Dragons: Researching the Unbelievable, Hearing the Unthinkable. A Feminist Sociologist in Uncharted Territory,” Sociological Research Online 3, no. 3 (1998).
20 As there are no IRB protocols in Denmark, I have worked with the CC/CS editor to ensure ethical research procedures were met. In addition to assuring informed consent from participants, using pseudonyms to help protect confidentiality, including names used by interviewees, was ensured.
21 Follow-up interviews with the women were impossible to conduct as they had moved out of RED Safehouse upon my return. Due to safety and ethical considerations, I did not keep a record of the women’s names or contact info and I was therefore unable to contact them afterward.
22 Anne Korteweg, “‘Honor Killing’ in the Immigration Context: Multiculturalism and the Racialization of Violence against Women,” Politikon 41, no. 2 (2014): 194.
23 Ibid.
24 Janna Hansen and David Herbert, “Life in the Spotlight: Danish Muslims, Dual Identities, and Living with a Hostile Media,” in Contesting Religion: The Media Dynamics of Cultural Conflicts in Scandinavia, ed. K. Lundby (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 205–22.
25 Keskinen, “Honor-Related Violence,” 264–65.
26 Birte Siim and Hege Skjeie, “Tracks, Intersections, and Dead Ends: Multicultural Challenges to State Feminism in Denmark and Norway,” Ethnicities 8, no. 3 (2008): 322–44, at 335.
27 Rikke Andreassen, “Gender, Race, Sexuality and Nationality: An Analysis of the Danish News Media’s Communication about Visible Minorities from 1971–2004” (PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2005); Siim and Skjeie, “Tracks,” 327.
28 Liebmann, “Magtparadokser og dikotomier i Connect: en styringspraktisk analyse af en majoritetsdansk indsats mod æresrelateret vold,” Nordiske Udkast no. 2 (2014): 51–69.
29 Charles L. Briggs, “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relations between Narrative and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3 (2007): 344.
30 Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 15; Idem, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 140.
31 William Labov, “Speech Actions and Reactions in Personal Narrative,” in Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1982), 219–47.
32 Catherine K. Riessman, Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences (London: SAGE Publications, 2008); Bal, Narratology, 6. Drawing on Bal, I distinguish between the “fabula,” the “story,” and the “text.” The text is constituted by a specific, physical manifestation of the story. While the story refers to the content of the text, it also generates a certain framing of the fabula.
33 Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 12, no. 1 (2000): 88–116.
34 Liebmann, “Et spørgsmål om ære: Intertekstuelle læsninger af fortællinger om æresrelateret vold” (PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2014).
35 Women are often located as the symbolic boundary markers of the community and as mothers of the nation and guardians of its purity and honor. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997).
36 Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 766–75.
37 Ibid., 767.
38 Including Arub’s family, people pointing their fingers, and Arub and Bahira themselves.
39 Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” 767.
40 Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1993), 24.
41 In the statement, “you” is nonreferential as it replaces the subject and does not refer to a specific person.
42 The phrase additionally comprises a grammatical alteration − since the narrator shows an ambivalence in using the third person singular when recounting how the brother generally had difficulty with being rejected − and adds a first person singular possessive pronoun into the sentence, “my” [iPod], before continuing in the third person singular. In the excerpt, the possessive pronoun is yet another example of narrative, and, in this case, grammatical discontinuity now in the “text”-layer.
43 Anja Bredal, Vi er jo en familie: Arrangerte ekteskap, autonomi og fellesskap blant unge norsk-asiater (Oslo: Unipax, 2006), 286–7.
44 Anna Mansson McGinty, Becoming Muslim: Western Women’s Conversion to Islam (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 184.
45 Loseke, “Lived Realities and Formula Stories”; Idem, “The Study of Identity as Cultural, Institutional, Organizational, and Personal Narratives: Theoretical and Empirical Integrations,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2007): 661–88.
46 Ibid., 670.
47 Ibid., 671.
48 How individual cases are categorized reflects and further fuels already existing perceptions about “illiberal” minorities and “liberal” majorities. Volpp, “Blaming Culture.” Moreover, the case illustrates the difficulty of thinking outside recursive patterns that characterize how gender and cultural difference is understood in Danish society. Idem, “Framing Cultural Differences,” 99.
49 Loseke, “Lived Realities and Formula Stories,” 121.
50 Volpp, “Framing Cultural Differences: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 90–110, 97.
51 Bredal, “Ordinary v. Other Violence? Conceptualising Honour-Based Violence in Scandinavian Public Policies,” in ‘Honor’ Killing & Violence: Theory, Policy & Practice, eds. Aisha K. Gill, Carolyn Strange, and Karl Roberts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 135–55; Carbin, “The Requirement to Speak”; Reimers, “Representations of an Honor Killing.”
52 Liebmann, “Kulturel dikotomisering i tid og rum: æresrelateret vold i journalistikken,” Chaos 62, no. II (2014): 149–84; Idem, “Æresrelateret vold: en gen-anvendelig selvfortælling.”
53 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
54 Lotte Kragh, “Kampen om anerkendelse, spillet om ære,” Higher PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2010, 276.
55 For the phrase “conduct of conduct” (in French), cf. Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits: 1954–1988, vol. 4, (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1994), 237. For post-Foucauldian studies on governmentality, cf. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–4; Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Sage Publications: London, 1999), 10; Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and Interview with Michel Foucault, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–51, at 2–3.
56 Liebmann, “Magtparadokser og dikotomier”; Idem, “Æresrelateret vold: en gen-anvendelig selvfortælling.”
57 Through visitation interviews, the refuge management “screens” the battered woman and determines whether her problems fall within the scope of the institution.
58 Korteweg, “Honor Killing,” 188.
59 The women’s options and lack thereof are part of their classification as “particular kinds” of victims and ensuing eligibility to benefits from the welfare society. Eligibility to different benefits are, again, associated with the women’s ability to see, recognize, and narrate their sufferings through a specific (professional) terminology recognized by the relief efforts’ representatives. Bumiller, In an Abusive State, 13, 129–30.
60 In the reception, then, their accounts are transformed into “group narratives” representing entire (migrant) cultures.
61 Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, Becoming an Ex: The Process of Role Exit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988).
62 Judith Butler, Giving Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 21; “Framing Cultural Differences,” 99.
63 Nathan Miczo, “Beyond the ‘Fetishisms of Words’: Considerations on the Use of the Interview to Gather Chronic Illness Narratives,” Qualitative Health Research 13, no. 4 (2003): 469–90, at 475–8.
64 Diane Baxter, “Honor Thy Sister: Selfhood, Gender and Agency in Palestinian Culture,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2007): 737–75, 264; Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds, 15.