Violence is a multidimensional phenomenon that involves violation, suffering, trauma and loss. It appears to be universal, established and widespread across the world and throughout human history (Besteman 2002; Krug et al. 2002; De Haan 2009; Ray 2011; Kilby 2013; Dobash and Dobash 2015). The concept of violence includes psychological threat, blame, humiliation and devaluation as well as the actual use of physical force or power, which may result in injury, death, psychological harm or deprivation. Violence is embedded in the social structures of power, inequality, institutions and regimes as well as in the symbolic order (Walby 2012; Walby and Towers 2017; Hearn 2013; Husso et al. 2017c; Hearn et al. 2020). It is manifested in human interaction, institutional and affective practices and ideological structures of cultural discourses and representations.
Violence not only reflects social conditions, attitudes and conceptions but also involves a wide range of mental processes intertwined with material, bodily and ācarnal ways of beingāāaffectsāas well as emotions and feelings (Liljestrƶm and Paasonen 2010). It arouses emotions, produces sensations and bears several kinds of passions and intensities that are considered mostly negative, such as anger, rage, fear and disgust. In witnesses of violence, it also evokes secondary complex emotions and moral sentiments, such as empathy, compassion and care, although secondary social emotions, such as hate, shame, embarrassment, frustration and guilt, may be present as well (Greco and Stenner 2008; Keen 2011; Hemmings 2012; Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Pinker 2012; Ć
hƤll 2018).
Affect and emotion influence the ways in which we think about, act in relation to and experience violence and violation, and they also, in part, frame how we make judgements in everyday life and draw conclusions. Emotion has a cognitive consequence. When it impacts how we think or our judgements and, ultimately, the way we act, it also impacts our ideological, institutional and affective practices (see Pedwell and Whitehead 2012; Smith et al. 2018).
At the Intersection of Violence, Gender and Affect
The current understanding of violence is based on the development of the modern state. In the early modern period, the growing sphere of central administration gave new meaning to the term āviolenceā, which had the aim of legitimating the governmental monopoly on violence. Physical violence as a medium of social control and conflict resolution was taken under the control of the centralised modern state, which imposed norms through consistent legislation and punishments. The new judicial system had the power to, on one hand, offer people peaceful means of resolving conflicts and, on the other hand, to punish those who did not follow the norms that it enacted (Ylikangas et al. 2000; Dinges 2004; Schwerhoff 2004). Since then, there have been tensions in attempts to define violence. Over the course of time, the negative connotations have strengthened and violence has been associated generally with illegitimate and unlawful behaviour (Sandmo 1999).
Violence is a context-dependent phenomenon, and what counts as violence in a certain time or place also varies. Generally, it can be said that there has been a downward trend in male-on-male violence and homicides over time in many so-called Western and Eurocentric countries. Simultaneously, certain patterns of serious violent acts have remained quite static over the centuries (Eisner 2003; Eibach 2016). Disciplining, for example, from a historical perspective, has had legitimacy in patriarchal societies; thus, menās violence towards their wives and children has lingered in the grey area between legitimate discipline and criminalised violence. The contemporaries who witnessed the violence of men against their wives evaluated it as unacceptable or cruel depending on the personal circumstances or characteristics of the victim. However, the majority of violent acts were understood as a legitimate correction of insubordinate behaviour (Foyster 2005; Lindstedt Cronberg 2009). Already in the premodern era, there were attempts to restrict violent behaviour and despotism and to reconcile disunity between spouses. However, these attempts expressed the Lutheran doctrine and patriarchal hierarchy (Roper 1991; Bailey 2003; Fiebranz 2005; Eibach 2016).
Patriarchy as a practice, ideology and form of structural violence exemplifies an unequal gender order in which menās hegemony dominates women and people of non-normative gender and sexuality, as well as other subordinated men in society. In other words, not only women and other marginalised people but also men who are structurally positioned in unequal relations are often violently shown their allegedly lower place in society. Furthermore, for people of, for example, lower class, education and income, for people of colour, bodily or mentally non-normative or disabled people, patriarchal order causes unequal and harmful living conditions. The concept of patriarchy still has currency in understanding ideological, institutional and affective practices of violence. Recently, for example, the multitude of digital and online violence and abuse, online misogyny, decriminalisation of domestic violence against women and criminalisation of abortion in different parts of the world have addressed a new rise of a patriarchal ideology and hierarchical societal order (Saresma 2018a; Pease 2019). Moreover, daily reported violent crimes and increased hate speech especially on digital and social media affect our conceptions and emotions and influence the ways in which we act when encountering violence and violating practices (Saresma 2018b).
Emotion, affect and corporeality generate human agency, and gendered differences are produced by the prevailing ideological, institutional and affective practices where people live. Thereby, gender becomes āa lived social relationā rather than a fixed location within societal relations (McNay 2004, 2008; Probyn 2005; Husso 2008; Husso and Hirvonen 2009, 2012; Connell and Pearse 2015; Husso et al. 2017a). In the contemporary scholarly understanding, gender is regarded as a cultural construct. However, it is not articulated only as a structural and societal phenomenon but also as an individual and private phenomenon, internalised in personal psychic and bodily experiences and lived realities. These structural and personal dimensions as well as the context always affect the meaning and understanding of gender. Moreover, gender is constructed in performative repetitions and reiterations that produce the cultural understanding and idea of gender, be they repetitions of bodily gestures, expressions, positions or movements, or cultural discourses and representations producing meanings of gender (Butler 1990, 1993, 2004; Karkulehto and Rossi 2017). As structurally bound but also constantly constructed in situated, interactional and institutional conduct, gender differences are reproduced in a way that can be difficult to recognise, and such misrecognition can become a source of social suffering. However, gendered conventions and habits can also be reflected, learnt and negotiated once they are explicated (Husso 2016; Husso et al. 2017a). Thus, to recognise these differences, it is crucial to understand the intersection of violence, gender and affect.
Affect has an important role in gendered violent deeds and practices. In justifying violence both at the individual and collective levels, mobilising affect, such as fear or hatred, is vital. It is, however, not only the affective mobilisation of aggressive feelings, such as hate, but also shame and feelings of insufficiency on the part of the perpetrator that may motiv...