Chapter 8
From:
Sally Engle Merry. 2009. Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell
Conclusions: A Cultural Perspective on Gender Violence
Gender violence is clearly an old problem and one that occurs around the world.
Yet, only recently has it attracted serious national and international attention. As this
book shows, feminist social movements seeking to understand women’s subordination in
the 1960s and 1970s recognized the importance of violence as a fundamental source of
inequality in gendered relationships. The particular issues that galvanized movements
against gender violence in various countries differed, but important similarities in ideas
and politics connected the disparate movements. By exchanging theories and ideas about
the nature of gender, violence, and ways of diminishing it across national borders,
feminists influenced each other’s thinking and actions. Gradually, they formed an
international movement.
The current international understanding of gender-based violence as a human
rights violation is one of the important products of this vibrant global exchange. It has
expanded the range of actions considered gender violence and created new global
alliances and mechanisms for reducing violence in a wide variety of situations from
female genital cutting to the illegal immigrant women. For example, village collectives
in Senegal have refused to do further genital surgeries, while the VAWA Act in the US
offers special protections to undocumented battered women. Perhaps most important,
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gender violence is now recognized around the world as a significant social problem. It is
widely discussed as a public concern that warrants state and private intervention.
Gender violence refers to a highly diverse set of actions ranging from
interpersonal violence within the home to rape of men or women in police custody or
prison. It is violence whose meaning depends on the gendered identities of the parties.
Gender violence is violence that is comprehensible because of the gender of the
interaction. For example, when a man hits his wife because he suspects she has been
flirting with someone, his actions are shaped by his sense of masculine entitlement to
control her. When the American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stripped Iraqi
soldiers naked and forced them to lie in a pile, they were using ideas of proper and
improper masculine behavior to humiliate them. When a family kills a daughter for
flirting with a man, they are endeavoring to recover from the dishonor she imposed on
them by violating the proper modesty of women. When the police in New York City
anally raped a black man with a broom handle, they were insulting and injuring him in a
gendered way. When a man discovers that the female prostitute he is with has male
genitalia, his assault on this may is a way to recover what he imagines is his lost
masculinity.
As social movements against gender violence grow and coalesce into an
international movement, the scope of actions considered to be gender violence continues
to grow. Since the conception of violence against women as a major social problem
grew out of social movements in the first place, it is understandable that as these
movements develop and expand, new issues appear. Some of the more recent issues are
sex trafficking, rape in wartime and during armed ethnic conflict, widowhood rituals,
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and violence against transgendered people. Whether the continual addition of new issues
to the category of violence against women will expand its audience or doom it to
incoherence remains to be seen. At this point, the collection of issues is extremely diverse
and wide ranging.
Rethinking Gender
The emergence of gender violence as a social problem was deeply influenced by
theoretical developments in the analysis of gender. Movements against gender violence
were inspired by ideas developed in new women’s studies programs in universities
around the world, as happened in India, China, and the USA. Of course, scholars in these
programs often worked closely with movement activists as well. The intellectual ferment
of the 1960s to 1980s produced critical changes in the analysis of gender. After an initial
period that focused on adding women to descriptions of social life, social scientists
started to explore gender as a social phenomenon. Instead of viewing male/female
differences as based on sex and therefore biological and fixed, new feminist scholarship
developed the concept of gender as a way of describing identities that are socially
constructed. Talking about male/female differences as based on gender rather than sex
emphasized the culturally determined and variable nature of this identity. By locating
gender in the social world rather than the biological realm, as the term sex did, theorists
were able to appreciate variations in the way gender was defined in different contexts.
Moreover, the shift from sex to gender moved the analysis of gender difference beyond
the narrow focus on reproduction to the myriad ways that gender shaped male as well as
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female identity and experience. Women’s studies programs became gender studies
programs.
With the transition from thinking of gender as a role to a performance, theorists
began to focus on how gender is enacted for various audiences rather than analyzing it as
a set of stable identities with rights and duties. Instead of viewing humans as simply
male or female, the performative perspective emphasizes the multiple ways masculinity
or femininity is performed. Gender is no longer a binary set of categories but a
repertoire of signs and images that are used to perform gender that vary over time and
situation. Performances resist binary categorization. This theoretical approach suggests
that gender falls along a continuum, with individuals enacting gendered identities in a
wide variety of ways along this continuum. Sexuality emerges as an important dimension
of the performance of gender, again with a fluid and multiple set of performative
possibilities. Just as sex differences are no longer a simple binary, so sexuality takes on a
wide variety of forms.
These new theoretical developments challenged movement ideas that gender
violence is simply an expression of patriarchy. Studies of non-heterosexual battering
revealed that interpersonal violence occurs between same-sex couples and that there are
forms of gender violence that target non-heteronormative expressions of gender. Clearly,
gender violence is not just a way of expressing male power over women.
Nor are men and women simple categories of identity and action. As essentialist
ideas of gender gave way to more intersectional models, the importance of race and class
variation took on greater importance. This theoretical development reflected and
informed concerns that the violence against women movement in the US was exclusively
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white and middle class. As they grappled with this limitation, feminists sought to
expand their frameworks and programs to include people of differing language, ethnicity,
race, and sexuality. Similar issues confronted the movement in India, where the
movement was lead by urban, educated women but gradually expanded to incorporate a
broader range of perspectives and concerns.
While issues of the disproportionate voice of some women based on race, class,
and caste are still difficult issue, the women’s movement has engaged with this issue
intensively. Work in critical race theory on gender violence has contributed significantly
to these developments as well (eg., see Mama 1997; Bhattacharjee 1997; Razack 2000a,
2000b; Wing 2000). Many women’s centers are deeply committed to an intersectional
approach to gender. Services for battered women who come from a range of nationalities,
races, and sexualities are more available than in the past. The Incite! organization that
grew out of the Color of Violence conferences has contributed significantly to expanding
the framework of gender violence to a more intersectional model (see Smith 2005; Incite!
2006). Although the international movement lags behind, there are pioneers attempting
to apply intersectional analysis to the global field as well.
Rethinking Violence
In addition to these changes in theories of gender, conceptions of violence have
also changed since 1970. The meaning of violence has expanded from blows and
physical injury to a wide array of assaults on self-esteem, personal possessions, and
emotional and financial well-being. Threats, fear, insecurity, and more indirect harms are
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seen as important. Theories of violence recognize that this is a system of meaning, so
that it is important to see how and why individuals come to see themselves as facing
danger and the risk of harm. Narratives of danger play an important role in creating a
world of fear and anxiety. One transgendered group, for example, has catalogued
murders and assaults on transgendered people, both as a warning and to build a social
movement. Although the early years of the US battered women’s movement separated
rape and domestic violence, the contemporary movement focuses more clearly on sexual
violence, recognizing the intimate connections between sex and violence.
Interpersonal violence is intimately connected to structural violence, as this book
demonstrates. Structural violence refers to injuries and assaults that are produced by
collective actions and institutions. It includes the violence following conquest and
dislocation suffered by indigenous peoples, the use of violence to reinforce differences of
caste and class, violent forms of racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination and exclusion,
and the violent consequences of poverty and the inability to support oneself.
Contemporary labor markets that require massive migration of single young women or
child labor, often with job opportunities on one side of a border and poverty on the other
and a harsh border patrol in the middle, provide situations rife with violence. There are
frequently gendered dimensions to structural violence, as occurs when women are
disproportionately refugees after armed conflict. Interpersonal violence in gendered
relationships is often embedded in these larger systems of inequality and violence.
Interpersonal gender violence often maintains structural inequalities. The caste
system in India, for example, is supported by routine practices of rape and violence
against lower caste women by upper caste men, assaults that humiliate the man and his
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caste at the same time as they injure and violate the woman. Racial minorities were long
subject to disproportionate violence in the US, often targeting the women of the
community. During warfare, rape and other forms of sexual violation and gender
violence are commonplace as means of defeating enemies and enacting militarized
versions of masculinity. As women and children flee, they become vulnerable as
refugees and internally displaced persons. Raping or otherwise violating women during
armed conflict not only injures and perhaps kills women and produces illegitimate
children, but also angers and humiliates women’s husbands, brothers, and other men of
their nation or ethnic/religious community.
Controlling women’s sexuality and reproduction through violence or threats of
violence in the family supports family structures based on the power of the male head.
Ideas about women’s sexual modesty and virtue legitimate patriarchal control of women
and violent retaliation for lapses. Women come to see these actions as fundamental to the
way they perform gender. Comparing why women might acquiesce to female genital
cutting or to anorexic eating patterns demonstrates how blurry the distinction is between
consent and coercion. In all societies, members consent to identities that they understand
as ideal. Those who resist experience coercion. This extends to American women
pressured to be thin and American men who feel they must be aggressive and controlling
toward women to show that they are “real men.” As chapter 7 showed, even war games
celebrate a “masculine” show of force and make fun of a “feminine” tendency to
negotiate.
The chapters in the book show that interpersonal violence cannot be understood
separately from these forms of institutional or social violence. Moreover, they make
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clear that no general theory of violence against women is adequate to explain this diverse
phenomenon. Violence against women is a complicated form of behavior that is situated
in particular economic and cultural contexts and never separate from larger systems of
power and inequality. It has multiple causes from the emotional to the cultural to the
structural. Both individual features of emotionality and anger and the collective use of
violence in social life shape the particular forms gender violence assumes in any location.
Gender violence is inherently difficult to measure. Because it is an injury that the
victim sees as unacceptable, whether or not a person thinks she has experienced it is a
matter of interpretation. A person could interpret a slap or kick as punishment, love,
hazing, or fighting. If so, she will probably deny that she has experienced gender
violence. Victimization surveys of gender violence that ask people if they have
experienced gender violence only count what people think is gender violence. If they
think an incident is simply fighting or normal behavior, they will probably not report it.
Measurements that use calls for help depend not only on the victim interpreting the
experience as illegal violence but also deciding that it makes sense to ask an institution
for help. Of course, it must be an institution that collects data on these requests. An
abused person who summons state assistance such as the police must have some hope
that the police will intervene constructively. But, is there a police force? Can they be
trusted? Will they do anything? Is what they will do what the victim wants? Any of
these factors could deter calling for help, but unless the person calls, the incident will not
be counted. All of these interpretive, cultural, and institutional factors affect the accuracy
of measures of gender violence based on surveys or requests for help. Clearly, because
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gender violence includes both harm and an interpretation of the meaning of the harm,
measuring gender violence is a subjective and culturally shaped process.
An Anthropological Perspective on Gender Violence
This book offers a social science perspective on gender violence, one rooted in
particular in anthropology. The range of particular forms of gender violence it
considered exemplify this approach and show its strengths. Chapter 1 articulated the four
dimensions of an anthropological perspective, which the rest of the book has illustrated.
First, it argues that issues are created by social movements and political debates, subject to
change over time. Clearly, the definition of gender violence as a social problem grew out
of a series of national movements that joined into a global movement in the 1990s. It
continues to grow and develop as activists think about the implications of defining gender
violence as a human rights violation and as new issues emerge under that framework,
such as sex trafficking. With the emergence of a human rights perspective, new
coalitions have developed among activists in different countries. At the same time, the
human rights perspective is reshaping the US movement, putting greater emphasis on
social and economic rights to housing and economic support. While some activists work
to develop the human rights perspective, others in the battered women’s movement have
turned to more therapeutic and interpersonal ways of defining the problem, emphasizing
counseling and conflict resolution skills.
The wide range of issues and approaches now used to define and intervene in
gender violence shows the creativity of social movements but also the risks of a
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movement-generated definition of the problem. It has produced a very broad definition
of gender violence that has some conceptual incoherence and builds on a wide variety of
theories about the phenomenon and modes of intervention. It has not resolved the
problem of establishing a universal standard for unacceptable forms of gender violence
that simultaneously validates cultural difference. Nor has it succeeded in specifying
prohibited forms of violence while also understanding these practices within their social
and cultural context. Instead, practices such as honor killing and female genital cutting
are condemned without taking into account the systems of kinship and ideologies of
sexuality within which they operate. A contextual analysis does not preclude critique, of
course, but it does suggest a more nuanced perspective on the problem.
Such a contextual analysis is a second feature of the anthropological perspective,
which understands gender as a performance for audiences in various contexts. These
performances are done by individuals, but the repertoires of each performance and the
expectations of audiences are collective, part of the culture of particular groups.
Communities vary greatly in which performances are acclaimed and which are condemned.
Gender violence is a performance directed at certain audiences, whether the person subject
to the violence or others surrounding it. In militarized societies that value violence as an
expression of heroism, the performance of a violent masculinity against either men or
women may produce acclaim. The marauding groups of young men that terrorize
transgendered individuals or gay and lesbian men and women may see themselves as
performing a kind of masculinity that will be praised by some audiences. The conversation
in the men’s violence prevention program in Hilo, Hawai’i provides another illustration of a
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gender performance, done for the other men in the room as well as the facilitator, which
both celebrates and denies the violence they have carried out.
The third principle, that interpersonal behavior must be understood within wider
contexts of power and meaning, emphasizes the importance of linking interpersonal gender
violence and structural violence. As the case studies of rape in wartime, police rape of
women in custody, rape of lower caste women by higher caste men in India, and the use of
sexual violence during the assault on Muslims in Gujarat indicate, interpersonal gender
violence serves as a mode of establishing and maintaining systems of inequality. At the
same time, vulnerability to violence varies with a person’s position of power. It is typically
the marginalized, excluded, poor, and female who are targeted for violence. Perpetrators
often escape consequences for their actions. In these situations, the violence reproduces
existing inequalities. Threats of violence can constrain behavior even when the violence is
not actually carried out, as occurs when women fear honor killings. Threats of violence or
stories about violence reinforce these inequalities.
Finally, the anthropological perspective is comparative. This book shows the value
of expanding the analysis of gender violence from the situation in the United States to a
more international perspective and emphasizes gender violence as a global phenomenon.
Even in one country, of course, there are significant variations depending on a person’s race,
economic situation, and legal status. The analysis of the effect of illegal immigrant status
shows clearly the variations in the experience of gender violence among migrants depending
on whether they are legal or not. Although much of this book has discussed forms of
violence against women, there are important comparisons with forms of gendered violence
against men. As the example of the Canadian peacemakers indicated, certain performances
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of masculinity target other men, such as those defined as “savage” or “less civilized” in the
name of establishing a “civilized” form of order. The comparative approach exposes
similarities and differences, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. While a
man who slaps his wife seems familiar to many Americans, as one instance of a global
practice by which men assert control over women, it is a strange form of behavior. On the
other hand, the practice of surgically altering a woman’s genitalia to preserve her sexual
modesty may seem strange, but for social class and cultural communities that consider
plastic surgery to enhance breasts and reduce noses and buttocks or self-starvation to
produce a thin body essential, it seems familiar.
The anthropological approach, which is sees gender violence as socially produced,
performed, contextually defined, and existing in many different situations and contexts,
provides a valuable way to understand what gender violence is, how its definition is
changing, and how modes of approaching it are changing. This approach does not explain
why one or another person uses gender violence against another; it takes a broader, more
collective approach. However, it does explain why a performance of gender violence in one
context is celebrated and in another one is condemned. And it shows clearly that efforts to
change gender violence must understand the practice in terms of audiences that support it,
the institutions that treat it lightly, and the structures of inequality that benefit from the kinds
of control and power that it provides.
Gender Violence and Inequality
This book argues for an analysis of gender violence situated within larger
structures of inequality, but there are many scholars and activists working on gender
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violence that focus more specifically on its interpersonal dimensions. The early leaders
of the battered women’s movement came from Marxist, socialist, and feminist
backgrounds and thought that changing women’s position required changing society as a
whole. However, as shelters, women’s centers, and intervention programs became more
established and supported by government funding, the understanding of gender violence
as a product of incompetence in interpersonal interaction, an inability to manage anger
and violence, and a failure in family relationships grew more prominent. Instead of
critiquing social inequalities, many scholars, activists, and service providers now focus
on personality factors that produce violence, family dynamics that perpetuate violence
across generations, and forms of conflict management that will deflect violent fights.
Interventions are based on counseling, conflict management training, violence control
programs, and removing children from violent households. Despite the value of these
interventions, they neglect the larger social issue that inspired the movement in the first
place: the concern with inequalities on the basis of race, class, and gender.
The international movement has retained this structural perspective more
substantially than the US domestic movement. Moreover, the international movement is
more skeptical about the role of the state than the social services segment of the US
movement. Much of the current intervention relies on state activity without an extensive
analysis of the state’s interest in preventing gender violence or its complicit support for a
very limited form of intervention. It is largely at the international level that such
questions are now being addressed.
Even the socialist-feminist originators of the gender violence movement relied on
the law, however. As we have seen, the initial modes of intervention were passing laws
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and creating safe spaces. The former soon encountered the inadequacy of legal reforms
in the absence of effective implementation strategies. During the 1980s and 1990s,
activists in the US worked energetically to improve police, prosecutor, and judicial
responses to gender violence. But, if law is part of patriarchal institutions, can it change
the situation? Moreover, if gender violence is embedded within and reflects larger
structures of inequality and violence, how can any society diminish interpersonal forms
of violence without attending to these larger patterns? Can gender violence in families
be tackled without simultaneous efforts to deal with global conflict, economic inequality,
and a lack of social justice? Activists around the world have adopted a similar approach
to criminalizing gender violence, despite skepticism about the state. Both American and
international activists share misgivings about the capacity of the state to transform gender
hierarchies in the absence of larger social changes.
Clearly, this book shows that it cannot. Its analysis challenges us to think
broadly about gender violence, to see it as a manifestation of other forms of violence, and
to confront these larger systems as well. In some ways, it returns to the roots of the
battered women’s movement, which questioned not only the notion that men have the
right to hit their wives to discipline them, but also the inequalities produced by
capitalism, by male political hierarchies, and by inequalities of race and class. Such
perspectives have lasted longer in the international movement than in the American one,
but must remain fundamental to all of them. A society that is free of violence against
women can only happen when it is free of other forms of violence as well.
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