Women Studying Violent Male Institutions Cross Gendered Dynamics (original) (raw)
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This book aims to expand and enrich understandings of violences by focusing on gendered continuities, interconnections and intersections across multiple forms and manifestations of men’s violence. In actively countering, both, the compartmentalisation of studies of violence by ‘type’ and form, and the tendency to conceptualise violence narrowly, it aims to flesh out – not delimit – understandings of violence. Bringing together cross-disciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary, perspectives, this book addresses how –what are often seen as – specific and separate violences connect closely and intricately with wider understandings of violence, how there are gendered continuities between violences and how gendered violences take many forms and manifestations and are themselves intersectional. Grounded by the recognition that violence is, itself, a form of inequality, the contributors to this volume traverse the intersectional complexities across, both, experiences of violent inequality, and what is seen to ‘count’ as violence. The international scope of this book will be of interest to students and academics across many fields, including sociology, criminology, psychology, social work, politics, gender studies, child and youth studies, military and peace studies, environmental studies and colonial studies, as well as practitioners, activists and policymakers engaged in violence prevention.
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Gender based violence can be viewed-using the sociologist C. Wright Mills's conceptual vocabulary introduced in his book The Sociological Imagination (1959)-as both a personal trouble and a public issue. Gender based violence was most often seen in the past as a personal trouble, a private matter between couples. Of course for the women who endure this violence it is very personal and very troubling to their safety and damaging to their whole sense of being and self-worth. Only recently has gender based violence come to be seen as a public issue. In the 1980s domestic violence was found to be the leading cause of injuries to women, and the Surgeon General deemed domestic violence, "the most serious health risk facing women" (Disch 2006:471). It is not only domestic violence that is an issue in gender violence but the trafficking of women and girls through countries as sex slaves and prostitutes, and governments' inaction to stop this. This writing has allowed me to learn from my own person troubles with domestic violence, and to see the ways in which gender based violence is a bigger social issue. Putting this paper together helped me to see that it wasn't just my own personal "defects," or just his insecurities, that caused me to experience a violent relationship, as "the individual abuser and the victim do not operate in a vacuum; rather, they are nested within the supportive circles of social institutions and culture."
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The concern to eradicate violence against women is not new in the global agenda. In the search and struggle for a more equitable and peaceful world, the feminist movement has undoubtedly been the main driving force behind the changes produced. From diverse grassroots women's movements against any kind of violence towards women (rape, battering, war or poverty, among others) to institutionalized feminist policies and NGOs working to combat gender-based violence, women's organizations and initiatives have been able to raise awareness and articulate a demand to place gender-based violence at the core of political agendas. By having placed the collective and collective organization at the heart of the debate, women's movements have sought not only to address direct violence, but also to transform the very frames sustaining its intelligibility.
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This workshop has asked us to reflect critically on our research practice. I am mindful that invitation to self-reflexive research was a qualified one and that the purpose of researcher self-reflection should always be to enhance and not overshadow our engagement with the field of study. So this paper will tease out some questions that arise for me in my research practice with the aim of improving it.
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Abstract:<br> This paper examines the controversies of femininity and<br> masculinity. It obviously takes the side of situating gender<br> reality and rationality within patriarchal structure and argues<br> that its misinterpretation starting from origin of creation has<br> culminated into building up a distinctive dichotomy between<br> males and females. As a fair way out, the paper balances the<br> schools of thoughts, despite its resonating string attached to<br> women. These strings are visible in the cases of key informants<br> presented for the study which conclude that the deployment of a<br> methodological approach like Theatre for Development (TfD)<br> could well be a strong ground upon which voices can jointly<br> explored, advocated, negotiated and engendered the intervention<br> needed for the (re)humanisation of the "other".<br>
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Sociology Compass, 2011
This paper is a consideration of the increasing diversity of images of gender violence and its victims, as both the grassroots antiviolence activists, and the scholars of the movements and the violence that inspires the activism, engage with cultural codes and feeling rules that tend to narrow the criteria for what constitutes gender violence and victimization. We are coming to better understand that social location, including but not limited to positions within patriarchal systems of stratification, shapes violence and victimization in many different ways. Since the inception of the women's movement, the discourse of victimization has grappled with the implications of constructing 'pure victims', and despite the tremendous progress in the resources available to survivors of gender violence, we find the tensions between victimization and agency, and between simplicity and complexity, reemerging repeatedly in the stories victims, activists, and scholars tell about this social problem. Below, we review the sociological research and activism, in conjunction with the collective narratives in the social movements against gender violence, to show how the issues of perceptions of women who are framed as victims began and remain central to feminist research in this area. We also explore the newest visions of gender violence, that broaden theorizing and activism to include multiple dimensions of inequality and their intersections. Taken together, these debates reveal multifaceted layers of complexity that inform the contexts and lived experience of violence, and that continue to enter into our storytelling.