Violence and Gender in the Globalized World

The Intimate and the Extimate

Sanja Bahun, V.G. Julie Rajan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001744
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence and Gender in the Globalized World expands the critical picture of gender and violence in the age of globalization by introducing a variety of uncommonly discussed geo-political sites and dynamics. The volume hosts methodologically and disciplinarily diverse contributions from around the world, discussing various contexts including Chechnya, Germany, Iraq, Kenya, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Palestine, the former Yugoslavia, Syria, South Africa, the United States, and the Internet. Bringing together scholars' and activists' historicized and site-specific perspectives, this book bridges the gap between theory and practice concerning violence, gender, and agency. In this revised and updated edition, the scope of inquiry is expanded to incorporate phenomena that have recently come to the forefront of public and scholarly scrutiny, such as Internet-based discourses of violence, female suicide bombers, and the Islamic State's violence against women. At the same time, new data and developments are brought to bear on earlier discussions of violence against women across the globe in order to bring them fully up to date. With an international team of contributors, comprising eminent scholars, activists and policy-makers, this volume will be of interest to anyone conducting research in the areas of gender and sexuality, human rights, cultural studies, law, sociology, political science, history, post-colonialism and colonialism, anthropology, philosophy and religion.

PART I
Revealing the Gaps

The chapters in this section highlight and explore the significance of what has been perceived as “gaps” in the critical cultural and theoretical scholarship in gender and violence. The existence of many discrepancies in knowledge concerning femininity attests to a number of such gaps in the mapping of gender studies. Traditionally, such gaps have been viewed negatively, as a reminder of the still nascent manifestation of women’s and gender studies on the seasoned stage of intellectual thought. In addition, the visibility given to such tensions often has necessitated ongoing debates as to the legitimacy of any one position on the discourse of feminism. Yet, such debates and the attentiveness to hermeneutic gaps are beneficial for any production of knowledge.

The Editors assembled the pieces in this section, “Revealing the Gaps,” intentionally to surface such gaps and reorient our knowledge about them. As Editors, we hope that Yifat Susskind’s activist piece on indigenous women’s voices in Nicaragua and Kenya will engender questions about more broad, scholarly approaches to indigenous women globally. We hope that, in perusing Sharon A. Bong’s theoretical approach to faith-rights feminists in Malaysia, readers will be moved to consider femininity across hyphenated experiences outside of the bounds of gender theory. Upon reading V.G. Julie Rajan’s argument concerning the effects of the Islamic State terrorist activities on women in Iraq and Syria, the Editors hope that the precariousness of their position and the urgency to address and redress both their vulnerabilities and their discursive and existential positioning as victims but also as perpetrators will become evident to the reader.

The Editors encourage this type of reading and counter-reading to enrich the interpretation of knowledge in and effects of these essays on the discourse of gender and violence—for it is because of and through such gaps that we as Editors can conceive of critical cultural studies and scholarship concerning femininity and violence as an ever-expanding spectrum of the present and evolving thought.

Chapter 1
Indigenous Women’s Anti-Violence Strategies

Yifat Susskind

Introduction

In the summer of 1983, a group of women from the National Women’s Association of Nicaragua and the Ministry of Health for the Atlantic Coast region of Nicaragua extended an invitation to a small group of women in the United States. The Nicaraguans wanted the women from the U.S. to see for themselves the impact of their government’s undeclared war on the women and families of Nicaragua, including on indigenous women, whose voices were so rarely heard. Out of that exchange grew MADRE, which is today an international women’s human rights organization that works in partnership with indigenous women’s groups in Nicaragua, Kenya, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and numerous other countries, to combat gender-based violence and other human rights abuses.

Among the women on that first MADRE delegation there were activists from the U.S. battered women’s movement. Most of these women conceived of “violence against women” mainly in terms of domestic violence. That narrow conception was soon dislodged as they listened to the stories of the indigenous women who were hosting them. The Nicaraguan women spoke of the U.S.-backed militias that targeted civilians with mass killings, rape, torture, abduction, and the destruction of crops and livestock, as well as the bombing of day-care centers, schools, and hospitals all in order to overthrow Nicaragua’s left-wing government. They told stories of being discriminated against as indigenous people and of being denied basic services, such as education in their own languages.¹ They spoke of losing their traditional leadership roles within their communities to forces of colonization and religious conversion. All of this they defined as violence against women.

Since that initial exchange, MADRE has stressed the importance of understanding that violence against women occurs in relation to facets of women’s identity that include, but extend beyond, gender. Indeed, each woman’s experience of violence is mediated by the interplay of multiple identities, such as race, class, caste, religion, sexual orientation, geographic situation, and ethnicity. Based on this understanding, MADRE works with indigenous women to develop programs that combat gender-based violence. MADRE articulates a unique indigenous perspective on violence against women that both builds on and critiques the insights and strategies of the conventional human rights framework and the mainstream of the global women’s movement.

Towards an Integrated Analysis of Indigenous Women’s Rights

In recent years, the metaphor of “intersectionality” has been used to communicate inter-relationships between various aspects of identity and the ways that identity is used as a rationale and a vehicle for meting out privilege and oppression.² Indeed, much theoretical work has been devoted to elaborating this concept and to applying it in various fields, including that of human rights. Yet, for indigenous women, who have long experienced violence and discrimination on the basis of multiple identities, “intersectionality” is not an arcane academic concept, but a daily lived reality. The theoretical perspective that emerges from the concrete experience of living as an indigenous woman recognizes both the near-universality of violence against women and the specificity of violence perpetrated on the basis of distinct, but overlapping, identities. This approach is not only a theoretical proposition, but also the bedrock of strategies that most effectively combat violence against indigenous women—indeed, against all women—within a human rights framework.

Indigenous women from such places as Nicaragua, Australia, and the U.S. insist that anti-violence strategies must account for the ways that multiple identities and systems of domination interact to construct women’s experiences of violence. For while the threat of gender-based violence impacts every woman, certain women are specifically targeted for violence on the basis of other variables that circumscribe their identities, such as ethnicity and language. The multiple forms of discrimination that render these women more likely to be abused also function to deny them access to mechanisms to redress abuse. Indigenous women must situate their anti-violence work at the intersections of movements for women’s human rights and indigenous peoples’ rights when responding to the multiple forms of discrimination that they face.

The Importance of Collective Rights

For indigenous women, the key to combating gender-based violence lies in the promotion of Indigenous peoples’ collective rights. For example, Monica Aleman, a young indigenous woman leader from Nicaragua, testifies:

In our community, like other communities worldwide, violence against women is aggravated by factors such as male unemployment and substance abuse. But for indigenous men, joblessness and the psycho-social crises that lead to substance abuse derive largely from the violation of collective rights. Therefore, collective rights are part of what we must address to combat violence against indigenous women.³

This claim has confounded many in the global women’s movement who fail to see how collective rights constitute a “women’s issue.” Yet, the indivisibility of all human rights means that indigenous women do not enjoy their right to a life free from violence while the collective rights of their people are also systematically violated—manifested at the very least in a double layer of violence. Dr. Myrna Cunningham is an internationally recognized indigenous leader and a long-time partner of MADRE from the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. She explains collective rights and their importance to indigenous women:

Exercising our rights—both as indigenous people and as women—depends on securing [ … ] our collective rights. [These] include the right to full recognition as peoples with our own worldview and traditions, our own territories, and our own modes of organization within nation-states; the right to self-determination through our own systems of autonomy or self-government based on a communal property framework; and the right to control, develop, and utilize our own natural resources.⁴

Dr. Cunningham emphasizes that collective rights (of the sort that indigenous peoples are demanding) and individual human rights (of the sort that have upheld the legal basis for opposing violence against women) are complementary. In other words, indigenous peoples are entitled to collective rights in addition to the rights guaranteed to all people by the full body of human rights instruments and standards.

Indigenous Women and the Global Women’s Movement

Indigenous women have been part of the global women’s movement since its inception and were active in the international processes that yielded critical instruments for combating violence against women such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the optional Protocol of Belem do Para, and the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action. Yet their commitment to the elimination of violence, and the priorities and perspectives they bring to this work, have often been disregarded or misunderstood within the mainstream women’s movement. Indeed, the global women’s movement has at times reproduced the very types of hierarchies and exclusions that it has challenged in pursuit of its goals. Cunningham further explains:

Like other women from historically marginalized groups, indigenous women have had to fight to be heard in a movement where the only ostensible criteria for participation are to show up and be a woman. Even now, after decades of international conferences, discussions, publications, and much hard work, issues that are a matter of life and death for indigenous women—racism, for example, or the exploitation of the earth’s resources—are relegated to a tagged-on conceptual category called “diversity” in the dominant feminist paradigm.⁵

Despite their frustration with these dynamics, many indigenous women recognize the importance of the global women’s movement in their work against gender-based violence and are committed to generating change from within the movement. For example, indigenous women have partnered with MADRE to create leadership development and skills-training programs to maximize their effective participation in international processes, such as the United Nations World Conferences on women and other international fora. Since 1999, MADRE has supported the creation and development of the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (known by its Spanish acronym, FIMI). This network of indigenous women leaders from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas defines combating violence against women as one of its primary goals.

Most of MADRE’s partnerships with indigenous women have been at the community level. For example, MADRE has worked to support women in Ayacucho, Peru, working to produce and broadcast indigenous women’s radio programming. Through the project, indigenous women gain media skills and disseminate critical information on reproductive health and violence against women to their communities. MADRE has also worked with indigenous women to bridge the gap between their work at the community level and the initiatives of the global women’s movement that occur in the international arena. Through MADRE, indigenous women have pressed the women’s movement to provide translation services, stipends, scholarships, child-care, and other measures to help offset the lack of income, family obligations, and work burdens that often hinder indigenous women’s participation in the global women’s movement.

When Flawed Assumptions Yield Flawed Strategies

Indigenous women’s critiques of the mainstream women’s movement center on the movement’s tendency to stress the universality of women’s oppression at the expense of recognizing differences in the forms and subjective experiences of that oppression. This tendency has produced conceptual approaches to violence and anti-violence strategies that fail to address the specific needs and realities of indigenous women. These include:

• Restricted conceptualizations of “domestic violence.”

• An uncritical emphasis on separation from abusive partners.

• The privileging of criminalization strategies in anti-violence work.

• The notion that gender-based violence is rooted in “culture.”

An Indigenous Critique of “Domestic Violence”

It is widely recognized that “domestic violence” occurs in every coun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction On Violence, Gender, and Global Connections (Again)
• PART I REVEALING THE GAPS
• PART II ENCLOSURES AND EXPOSURES
• PART III Bordered Subjectivities, Global Connections
• PART IV AESTHETIC AND GENDERED TRANSFORMATIONS
• Index