Embodying violence: critical geographies of gender, race, and culture

Abstract

The papers in this themed section collectively explore the intertwined geographies of corporeality and violence; to explore the ways in which narrow representations of race and culture are imbricated in the mis/understanding of gender based violence. This introductory essay draws out linkages across these papers, and to several themes in feminist geography. Combined, the four papers in the themed section offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. The authors connect the intimate and the global, the personal and the geopolitical, and offer critical insights into how feminist geographers might unpack entangled inequalities that give rise to distinct experiences of violence. Through their disparate studies, the authors also destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence.

Resumen

Los trabajos en esta sección temática analizan colectivamente las geografías entrelazadas de corporalidad y violencia, para estudiar la forma en que las representaciones estrechas de raza y cultura están imbricadas en los mal/entendidos de la violencia de género. Este ensayo introductorio establece conexiones entre estos estudios y varias temáticas en la geografía feminista. Combinados, los cuatro artículos en la sección temática ofrecen nuevos caminos a considerar por la geografía feminista. Lxs autorxs conectan lo íntimo y lo global, lo personal y lo geopolítico, y ofrecen una mirada crítica sobre cómo lxs geógrafxs feministas podrían desenredar las desigualdades que dan origen a distintas experiencias de violencia. A través de sus diversos estudios, lxs autorxs también desestabilizan los preconceptos mapeados sobre los cuerpos generizados, particularmente aquellos que se basan en representaciones racistas, sexistas y clasistas de ‘cultura’ y ‘comunidad’ para describir la vulnerabilidad generizada. Subsecuentemente, sus análisis revelan cómo estos preconceptos trabajan simultáneamente para borrar o ignorar las desigualdades estructurales del capitalismo o el estado, que enmarcan y contribuyen a la violencia contra los cuerpos y las geografías vulnerables y las perpetúan. Conjuntamente, los trabajos destacan las posibilidades epistemológicas, metodológicas y ontológicas de las geografías corporales, particularmente cuando se toman la tarea de analizar intelectualmente las experiencias de violencia tanto excepcionales como cotidianas.

摘要

本主题文集中的文章，共同探索肉身性与暴力之间相互纠缠的地理；以及探讨狭义的种族与文化再现，如何在理解／误解根据性别的暴力中交叠。此一引介论文从这些文章之间与女权主义地理学的若干主题中得出连结之处。此一主题文集中的四边文章，共同提出女权主义地理学可考量的崭新路径。这些作者连结亲密性与全球，个人与地缘政治，并对女权主义地理学者如何能够解开生产特定暴力经验的相互交缠的不平等提出批判性的洞见。这些作者透过截然不同的研究，同时动摇在性别化的身体上绘製的预设，特别是那些倚赖种族主义、性别歧视与阶级歧视的‘文化’与‘社群’再现来描绘性别化的脆弱性之预设。他们的分析随后揭露这些预设如何同时用来抹除或忽略资本主义或国家结构性的不平等，导致框架、促成并延续加诸脆弱身体与地理的暴力。他们共同强调肉身地理学的认识论、方法论与本体论的可能性，特别是在知识上与同时分析暴力的例外与每日生活经验的工作结合时。

Keywords:

• Gendered violence
• embodiment
• systemic inequalities
• resistance

Palabras clave:

• Violencia generizada
• encarnación
• desigualdades sistémicas
• resistencia

关键词:

• 性别化的暴力
• 体现
• 系统性的不平等
• 反抗

Introduction

In an atmosphere where inequalities of class are spread like nets of thorns in every corner and over every doorstep, how possible or appropriate is it for us to wage a war by centering it solely on the men in our homes and villages? … In other words, can real equality be achieved in our society if we isolate gender difference from all other differences and base all our strategies and conversations on the gaps between women and men? When we know that the nature and form of gender differences cannot be comprehended in any context without connecting them with caste and class differences …. (Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar 2006, 116).

These questions, posed by the Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar in their co-authored book Playing with Fire (2006), emerge from the lives and grounded activism of women employed to create ‘women’s empowerment’ in rural north India. In these queries, they articulate their own encounters with the intersectional realities of power – with the simultaneity of lived experiences of poverty, caste oppression, and patriarchal structures. In their book, and subsequent work together, the Sangtin Writers insist upon countering patriarchy as a system entangled with other structures of inequality. In this regard, they also point to a central query that animates the papers in this themed section – that is, how can women’s vulnerability to gender-based violence be addressed through the multiple, co-constitutive forms of systemic violence and inequality that shape women and men’s lives in marginalized communities? The authors collected here all take up the issue of gender violence, and do so in relation to women’s and girls’ lives, but their work insists upon understanding gendered vulnerability beyond individualized situations of interpersonal violence. These papers work instead to understand how women’s embodied experiences reveal the relational production of geopolitical and geo-economic violence through systematic and institutional forms of oppression.

Several authors in this themed section demonstrate that grassroots struggles led by and for marginalized communities often demonstrate a keen insight into the complex, yet determinative, relationship between interpersonal violence and systematic, institutionalized forms of violence and inequality. This critical understanding of the significance of state and structural violence in shaping the intimate lives of marginalized people suggests that gendered violence cannot be separated out from the study of other forms of social, political, and economic violence. In this themed section, the authors build upon several strands of feminist scholarship. Despite long-standing interdisciplinary conversations around gender violence, culture, and race (Hill Collins 1990; Hooks 1997; Narayan 1997; Abu-Lughod 2002, 2013; Smith 2005; Sokoloff and Dupont 2005; Coomaraswamy and Perera-Rajasingham 2008; Merry 2009; Hodgson 2011), as well as feminist geographic engagements with gendered violence in diverse settings and communities (Mehta 1999; Brunell 2005; Pratt 2005; Wright 2006, 2007, 2011; Fluri 2009, 2011; Holmes 2009; Kedir and Admasachew 2010; Burgess 2012; Tyner 2012; Wilding 2013), there is a critical need to examine the intersecting relationship between gendered corporeality and geographies of violence. As Sweet (2016) emphasizes, centralizing bodies and embodiment helps us to move beyond binaries – such as public vs. private – in large part because the body crosses over such constructed spatial boundaries. As a lens on violence, embodiment also brings the systemic into sharper view. And as Sweet articulates, this shapes not only scholarly understanding, but also the possibilities for action: ‘By examining all the different kinds of violence as a whole system of oppression or as a “matrix of domination” (Collins 2002), we are able to take action that is more holistic because the formation of the problem is not sidelined by invalid distinctions of public and private places that uphold patriarchal and capitalist constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and so on in spatial formations’ (Sweet 2016, 204). The focus on embodiment in this special themed section simultaneously illuminates the intimate and the systemic, thereby revealing the ways in which oppressions intersect in constructing vulnerability to violence.

In examining gendered violence through the lens of embodiment, the authors collected here also draw upon and extend critical conversations raised in feminist geography and published in Gender, Place and Culture over the years. ‘Feminists Talking across Worlds’ (Staeheli and Nagar 2002) grappled with the difficult challenges necessary to consider when conducting ethical fieldwork. This special issue focused on representation and inequality, colonial legacies and the promise and pitfalls of transnational feminisms and communicating across experience, language, and voice. The papers in the special issue ‘Entwined Spaces of Race, Sex, and Gender’ (Saad and Carter 2005), analyze how conventional and mediated understandings of race and sexuality converge to produce subjectivities and geographic spaces and places. ‘Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics’ (Dixon and Marston 2011) includes a series of articles drawn from extensive fieldwork, qualitatively rich, and empirically driven research that examines corporeal geographies that ‘recognize how space and power are differentially experienced and embodied’ (Dixon and Marston 2011, 446). Transnational bodies are discussed through the lens of health geographies in the ‘Gendered Geographies of “bodies across borders”’ (Greenhough et al. 2014) special issue. The papers in this issue examine the mobility of bodies within the neoliberal ‘globalization of care’, the politicization of individual choice in medical tourism, the international organ trade, and the global health care market. In consideration of the centrality of embodied geography within feminist scholarship in geography, this themed section attempts to maintain lively discussion within and beyond feminist geography around embodiment, relationality, and the ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ of violence (Pain and Staeheli 2014).

Placing the body and space analytically central, the authors explore intimate and ‘visceral geographies’ of violence (Pain 2001) demonstrating how they stem from and are complicated by the insidious violence of entrenched inequalities. These geographic explorations of embodied violence lay bare the ways in which raced, sexed and gendered bodies experience extensive vulnerabilities that are ignored or rendered invisible through the machinations of structural and institutionalized violence. These articles examine various aspects of such systemic vulnerabilities, including how they are manipulated to legitimize the existing marginalization of communities. The authors, through their disparate studies, destabilize the assumptions mapped onto gendered bodies, particularly those that rely on racist, sexist, and classist representations of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ to describe gendered vulnerability. Subsequently, their analyses reveal how these assumptions simultaneously work to erase or ignore structural inequalities of capitalism or the state, which frame, contribute to and perpetuate violence against vulnerable bodies and geographies.

This themed section addresses the need for more attention to everyday forms of violence within geographic analyses of conflict and insecurity (Tyner 2016), attending to carceral feminisms and destabilizing the public/private dichotomy (Sweet 2016). The papers in this series draw from important and innovative research examining these complex and complicated intersections. The conversation generated by these articles examines embodied forms of political, social, and intimate violence. By focusing on the corporeal, this themed section disrupts both explicit and implicit representations of gender based violence that position culturally othered or racially marginalized communities as inherently prone to conflict and accepting of gender-based violence. We argue that the power of these popular/mainstream tropes has become subsumed into some academic scholarship, particularly when non-white and non-western forms of ‘culture’ are presented as the primary or sole obstacles to anti-violence work. The articles in this issue critically examine violence along with interlinking spatial and gendered corporeal processes of sociocultural and political othering. These papers provide new insights and arguments toward dispelling common tropes.

Several themes link and thread through the papers, despite the range of places and contexts explored by the authors. First, the papers deepen feminist explorations of bodies and corporeality through explicit attention to the linkages between intimate and systemic forms of violence, and embodied experiences of both direct physical violence and the often-invisible violences of deprivation, humiliation, and structured vulnerability. Providing a geographic perspective on gendered violence, race, and culture makes visible linkages between intimate forms of violence and systemic/institutional/structural/state violence. This series examines corporeal geographies of violence through an intimately global lens and multi-scalar analyses (Mountz and Hyndman 2006; Pratt and Rosner 2012; Smith 2012; Pain and Staeheli 2014; Pain 2015). The authors build upon and extend feminist geographers’ critical interventions in literatures on gendered violence (Brickell 2008; Holmes 2011; Tyner 2012; Cuomo 2013; Pain 2014), further drawing out the spatiality of violence and the significance of bringing a geographic lens to the complex intersections of mutually constitutive forms of violence and resistance. The recent issue on gendered violence in Dialogues in Human Geography (Brickell 2016; Brickell and Maddrell 2016a, 2016b; Datta, Ayona 2016; Datta, Anindita 2016; Sweet 2016; Tyner 2016; Wilding 2016) both addresses and identifies the need for scholarship and discussion of embodied experiences of gendered violence and resistance. The papers featured here extend the conversation, and also elaborate on structural forms of violence and violence against certain bodies because of ‘how they look’ (Hopkins 2016), which is intersectionally linked with interpersonal violence. In taking up such linkages, this themed section offers vital insights into the ways in which cultural tropes operate as a tool of geopolitics that perpetuate neocolonial, racist, and (hetero)sexist logics that serve to erase or to justify the militarization of space and other forms of state violence (Mohanty 2004; Fluri 2009; Abu-Lughod 2013).

The papers also work to challenge spatial tropes around safety and security, private and public spaces. In examining relationships between bodies and spaces across presumed divisions or borders (i.e. private/public), the authors construct plural definitions of violence that actively work to recover those forms of exploitation, violence, and suffering made invisible through their everyday and/or structural operation – in many ways answering Tyner’s (2016) call for the ‘denaturalization of violence’ in geography. Across these linkages, each paper also offers unique insights into the embodied geographies of violence and resistance. Jibrin’s examination of ‘restorative justice’ programs in Oakland public schools challenges mainstream liberal feminisms that have fallen into the tropes constructed by state narratives that manipulate gender vulnerabilities. She calls on us to address the contradictions inherent in structural violence – namely, narratives that suggest poor black women and girls as especially vulnerable to abuse in their home and communities, and therefore considered ‘in need’ of outside intervention, which in turn obscures the violence of capitalism and a masculinist security state. Institutionalized responses focus acutely on individual girls, women and their communities while simultaneously failing to address structural forms of violence and oppression.

Jibrin calls attention to the business of ‘assistance’ and intervention and the currency attached to vulnerability for liberal institutions and academics. She also challenges academics and activists to rethink their co-constituted relationship with oppressive systems and institutions. ‘At this juncture of rethinking the terms of oppression under systemic violence and sexism, we confront the failure of academics to evict themselves from careerist hierarchies of elitism into an intellectual role of humility for the people’ (Jibrin, this issue). Jibrin’s attention to the business of academia and activism resonates with the structures of international development that similarly rely on gendered vulnerabilities to perpetuate capitalism. Gendered vulnerabilities have become a currency that is exchanged for the geopolitical and geo-economic opportunities of dominant states and organizations along with securing the personal profit or professional gain of individuals representing these governing entities (Fluri and Lehr 2016).

Piedalue (this issue) coins the term plural resistance to capture anti-violence workers’ care work and social movement practices that simultaneously challenge several forms of interwoven violence. Similar to Jibrin, she shows how structural forms of violence transform culture into culturalism, which ‘conflates religion and patriarchies with “culture,” and turns acts of violence into religion-driven third world pathologies or customary/sacred traditions’ (Sangari 2008, 2). Her qualitative study of Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India explicates the ways in which intimate forms of gendered violence are inextricably linked to structural inequalities, institutionalized violence, and the economic and political marginalization of Muslims. She argues that ‘Gender violence cannot be separated from intersecting structural inequalities that divide and exploit’ (Piedalue this issue). Piedalue reminds readers of the extensive work of postcolonial, transnational and women of color feminists in documenting and critiquing historical and contemporary constructions and deployments of cultural essentialism, culture talk, and ‘death by culture’ liberalisms. Such narratives bring sensationalized instances of intimate gender violence into view, while obscuring the myriad forms of violence that structure marginalized women’s lives. Building upon the literature that critiques culturalism, Piedalue traces the ways in which spatial exclusion and structural violence generate Muslim women’s precarity and can consequently increase their vulnerability to intimate forms of violence.

The papers in this issue further lay bare the myth of spatially contingent security. They illustrate through rich descriptions and qualitative data that security is never fixed or evenly situated by spatial location or the accouterments of disparate security apparatuses (Faria, this issue). As feminist geographers argue, the home is a site filled with complementary and contradictory experiences from comfort and safety to violence and instability (Blunt 2005). For example, two women in Sweet and Escalante’s (this issue) study identified that they feel ‘free when they are outside their houses away from their partners’. Conversely, Piedalue discusses domestic violence along with the fear of Muslim women’s vulnerability outside the domestic sphere. Faria (this issue) centers her analysis on the murder of Roda by an ex-boyfriend while visiting a friend’s home, in suburban Burien, Washington, years after she had survived war related violence and displacement as a Sudanese ‘lost girl’. She explicates the intimate encounters of violence by analyzing how this murder was more than an individual act of violence. She argues ‘Violence against women post-U.S. resettlement shares foundation with the “hot war” of Sudanese civil conflict’. Faria’s analyses further reveal how men suffering from post-traumatic stress are differentially understood based on their corporeal categorizations rather than the reverberations of violence embodied in men beyond spaces of conflict.

The relationship between bodies and space remains an important aspect of feminist geography. Sweet and Escalante (this issue) push existing understanding further by ‘seeing bodies and communities as a continuum through mapping’. Their article offers novel methodological and epistemological insights into the study of gender, violence, and space. For the authors, ‘moving visceral geography to territorio cuerpo-tierra is part of a reflective exercise of doing research with migrant and Mexican women about safety and contemplating the multiple oppressions that impact women’s bodies, as well as challenging Western centric methodologies in which we have been educated’ (Sweet and Escalante, this issue). Methodologically, they gain knowledge from research participants through a three step methodology: they documented the corporeal experiences of violence from individuals in small group situations, engaged participants in community mapping to develop collective knowledge about spaces and safety, and worked with the participants on body map storytelling. Body map storytelling is a ‘holistic and non-linear data creation technique’ that can be used to ‘document intersecting temporal and spatial events, processes, and experiences that include feelings, emotions, perceptions while also visually engaging bodies and spaces around them’ (Sweet and Escalante, this issue). They identify how community mapping can be used as a tool for planners to de-emphasize ‘the public/private divide’. By destabilizing the public/private divide the authors move research opportunities beyond spatial binaries, which enriches our understanding of multiple complexities and complications that are spatially embodied through disparate experiences of violence.

Violence is pluralistically defined through the research narratives of each author. From acute physical wounds to the long-term trauma of situational and political conflict, and the everydayness of inequalities manifested through disciplinary structures. Education is one area addressed through multiple lens within this issue. Faria’s research participants (Sudanese refugees living in the U.S.) identify education as hopeful and a motivating factor for migration, despite experiences of marginalization and inequality. Jibrin’s research participants (young African American females in Oakland public schools) were embedded in disciplinary structures that did not address racialized or gendered forms of dehumanization, and focused on changing behaviors rather than ‘on the conditions that shaped the brutality of those very behaviors’. The anti-violence activists in Piedalue’s research incorporate a number of different strategies to assist families; from including men in awareness raising and family counseling, to addressing state based and economic inequalities in the community as integral to preventing interpersonal violence. At the same time, Piedalue and the other authors in this series, also carefully critique the ways in which poverty and marginalization are used by dominant groups to hyper-fixate on gendered violence as representative of these communities; while interpersonal violence that occurs in middle and upper middle class spaces is rendered invisible, or treated as an individual issue in relatively privileged families rather than presuming a causal relationship to community or ‘culture’.

Combined, these four papers offer new pathways for feminist geographers to consider. They collectively underscore the epistemological, methodological and ontological possibilities of corporeal geographies particularly when tasked with intellectually analyzing both exceptional and everyday experiences of violence. These articles are particularly skilled at dislocating the sterility of analysis through qualitatively exquisite prose that connects the reader to vulnerabilities through thoughtful narratives and interview data. The authors (while not explicitly claiming to do so) have embraced Nagar’s (2014) call to practice radical vulnerability. Radical vulnerability, as Nagar articulates, arises through particular kinds of journeys. ‘These journeys enabled by trust and with the ever-present possibility of distrust and epistemic violence; journeys of hope that must continuously recognize hopelessness and fears; and journeys that insist on crossing borders even as each person on the journey learns of borders that they cannot cross – either because it is impossible to cross them, or because it does not make sense to invest dreams and sweat in those border crossings’ (Nagar 2014, 5, 6).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. Fluri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her research examines geopolitics, gender politics, and the geo-economics of international military, aid, and development interventions in Afghanistan. She has published articles on gender, geopolitics and development in journals some recent articles include: Fluri, Jennifer L. 2014. ‘States of (in)security: corporeal geographies and the elsewhere war’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 32: 795–814. Fluri, J.L. 2012. ‘Capitalizing on Bare Life: Sovereignty, Exception, and Gender Politics’ Antipode. 44(1): 31–50. Fluri, Jennifer L. ‘Bodies, Bombs, and Barricades: Gendered Geographies of (In)Security’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 36(3): 280–296. She has recently co-authored a book with Rachel Lehr entitled The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and other American-Afghan Entanglements: Intimate Development, Geopolitics and the Currency of Gender and Grief, University of Georgia Press, 2016 as part of the Geographies of Social Justice series. Dr. Fluri is currently working on a new book project that explores the role and efforts of Afghan Women’s Civil Society Organizations in conflict mediation and peace building in Afghanistan.

Amy Piedalue received her PhD in Geography from University of Washington and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australia India Institute and University of Melbourne. Her work in feminist geography unpacks the complex relationships between gendered violence and structural inequalities, as well as processes of peace-making and collective response to intimate forms of violence. This includes critical analysis of relational poverty and the production of inequalities in and through modernization projects in the U.S. and India. Amy’s work draws upon over ten years of experience in anti-domestic violence activism, with a particular emphasis on the critical interventions of community-based organizations led by immigrant women and women of color in the Seattle area. Amy has published in the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, ACME: A Journal of Critical Geography, and Films for the Feminist Classroom.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributors to this themed section for their thoughtful and thought provoking scholarship. Our appreciation is extended to the anonymous reviewers who provided insight and critiques that ultimately improved this introduction and themed section. We extend our special thanks to Peter Hopkins for his editorial suggestions and assistance throughout the review process.