Outsourcing Patriarchy

Abstract

While much has been written on the violence of honour killings and the women who are their victims, little has been written on the production of the concept of ‘honour killing’, or the ways that concept produces meanings, cultures and identities. This article takes on that question, looking at when, where and how violence against women gets named as a specific crime called ‘honour killing’, in which honour comes to be a stable and unchanging term, particularly as the term comes to have hegemonic meanings which submerge other possibilities, struggles and violence. In this article, I argue that the concept of patriarchy has been outsourced from the USA and Europe to do its messy work elsewhere. I do so by examining the circulations of ‘honour killings’ as a concept in the media coverage in India and in the ‘West’. This article finds this method particularly useful in analysing the concept of ‘honour killings’, particularly in terms of feminist struggles to give violence a voice and bring it to the public. The article concludes that attention to the production of the idea of ‘honour killing’ along these racialized lines is all the more important given the fact that the identification of violence as ‘honour killing’ may even foreclose an analytic that might be more historicized, multifaceted or conflictual.

Keywords:

• India
• honour
• women
• media

Acknowledgements

There are many colleagues, friends and audiences that have helped me to think through this project. My thanks to Laura Sjoberg, who was an outstanding editor. I want to also thank colleagues and audiences at Utrecht University, Waterloo University, Harvard University, Brown University, University of Connecticut, University of Toronto, organizers of the first annual conference of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and the audiences at the University of Free State in Bloemfontein, and the University of Witwatersrand WISER group and Centre for Indian Studies in Africa.

Notes

The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies was important in creating popular culture and communication as critical for understanding the ‘social’ and feminists such as Hazel Carby and Angela McRobbie were central to these endeavours.

However, Fox News commentator Phyllis Chesler suggests that the US ‘liberal media’ recognizes only ‘honour killings’ by Hindus or Sikhs but not by Muslims. For her, it is important to recognize that it is a Muslim problem for the most part, and that while Hindus abandon the practice when they migrate to the West, Muslims ‘carry it with them’ (Chesler and Bloom 2012: 59).

See the report by Southhall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism (2007) that critiques the terms under which notions of ‘integration’ are framed.

Report of the Working Group on Software for Doordarshan: An Indian Personality for Television. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1985.