Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color (original) (raw)
Related papers
Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency, Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality
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.
Intersectional approaches are often called upon in social work education and practice to conceptualize identities (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, etc.) and forms of oppression and privilege (racism, sexism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, mentalism, etc.) as separate yet mutually constitutive categories. An ongoing problematic within such approaches is the propensity to rely on predetermined analytical systems of oppression interlocking or aspects of identity intersecting. I suggest that it is possible to consider the material effects of oppression that are targeting delineated groups without requiring the technologies of difference (including analytical categories named upon difference, i.e., racism, patriarchy, ableism, sexism, etc.) to advance positions of social justice. These technologies of difference were forged through violent means for colonial and imperial projects. As formulated through a study of the practice of deportation for those identified with men...
“At the Intersections: Race, Gender and Violence”
In this chapter we review key contributions to the literature on gender, violence and victimization. Instead of providing an exhaustive review of the literature, we highlight key theoretical and empirical contributions that illustrate how intersections of race, gender and class shape the criminological literature on gender, violence and victimization, and the implications of “intersectionality” for helping us to better understand trends in violence and victimization among women. We begin with a discussion of Dorie Klein’s (1973) “The Etiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature,” which is one of the earliest and most significant reviews of the traditional criminological canon. Klein’s critique was among the first to challenge the representation of women in the traditional criminological literature. Subsequent critiques of the literature encouraged the development of gender and crime and feminist criminology as valid areas of study in the criminological literature. These critiques also paved the way for the development of Black feminist criminology (Potter, 2006), which encourages the use of an intersectional analysis to understand trends in violent offending, victimization and institutional responses to each. In contrast to the early criminological works surveyed in the first section of this chapter, recent work on gender, violence and victimization draws on an intersectional framework to explain how categorical variables like race, gender or class, pattern violence and victimization. In addition to explaining differences in patterns across and within groups, these explanations also help us to better understand how race, gender and class inform institutional responses to violence and victimization.
INTERSECTIONAL AND MULTIPLE FORMS OF DISCRIMINATION IN THE CONTEXT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
2011
This research paper examines multiple forms of discrimination against women and considers a holistic approach to addressing the ways in which this discrimination operates in cases of violence against women and girls. The purpose of this research paper is to understand violence against women in all its complexity, which requires addressing the conceptual and institutional challenges regarding its elimination. This research paper follows the current Special Rapporteur's initial thematic report to the Human Rights Council in April 2010, which focuses on the human right to reparation for women subjected to violence in contexts of peace and postconflict.
2015
Intersectional approaches are often called upon in social work education and practice to conceptualize identities (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, etc.) and forms of oppression and privilege (racism, sexism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, mentalism, etc.) as separate yet mutually constitutive categories. An ongoing problematic within such approaches is the propensity to rely on predetermined analytical systems of oppression interlocking or aspects of identity intersecting. I suggest that it is possible to consider the material effects of oppression that are targeting delineated groups without requiring the technologies of difference (including analytical categories named upon difference, i.e., racism, patriarchy, ableism, sexism, etc.) to advance positions of social justice. These technologies of difference were forged through violent means for colonial and imperial projects. As formulated through a study of the practice of deportation for those identified with men...
I routinely set aside the summer for reading those books which have caught my attention in the course of the previous academic year but which, because they are neither related to anything I"m currently teaching nor explicitly theological, I could notor simply did notmake the time for. Last summer one of these books was Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn"s look at the world-wide prevalence of human trafficking and violence against women and children. Though this is by no means an adequate summary of their remarkable book, the seed for this paper is found in the authors" suggestion that the "cure" for male violence against women is for "more women [to] stop turning the other cheek and begin slapping back." 1 This suggestion strikes me as wrong on (at least) three levels. The first is merely pragmatic. That is, this seems to me to be bad advice, in fact, perhaps dangerously bad advice.