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‘Resilient survivors’: narratives of violence against women of refugee background
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In this article, we argue that Direct Provision in Ireland is a state approved form of gendered carcerality which creates and exacerbates conditions of gendered violence. Direct Provision is a system of processing asylum seekers in Ireland where they are temporarily provided accommodation while they wait for a decision on their refugee status claim. This article shows how carceral practices are layered and gendered, making some spaces and bodies more carceral than others. These carceralities increase the institutional burden which agglomerates in human bodies and makes the lives of an already precarious population unliveable. Through a review of the strategies adopted by the government in relation to migrants, undocumented workers and asylum seekers, this article shows how the gendered experiences of certain asylum seekers like mothers and sexual violence survivors become the political site where state approved carceral practices and gendered violence merge.
This article explores the extent to which the human rights framework relating to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is upheld in the Norwegian asylum system, by investigating if and how asylum bureaucrats enable the disclosure of SGBV and how such disclosure may impact the assessment of applicants’ credibility. Credibility assessment is important in deciding who is eligible for protection. Eliciting disclosures of SGBV in general is notoriously difficult, and SGBV allegations are often disbelieved. It is also well known that credibility assessment in the asylum system involves working with ambiguity and challenges, but this has rarely been explored with a particular focus on SGBV. Through an analysis of public case summaries and 18 semi-structured interviews with asylum caseworkers and key actors, drawing on Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucrats, we conclude that caseworkers’ use of coping mechanisms makes them reluctant to enable, or engage with, disclosures of SGBV, and that this may endanger human rights.
In today’s migration and refugee governance, refugees are increasingly required to demonstrate both vulnerability and assimilability to be considered deserving of protection and territorial access. This article advances the notion of ‘promising victimhood’ [Chauvin, Sébastien, and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas. 2018. The Myth of Humanitarianism: Migrant Deservingness, Promising Victimhood, and Neoliberal Reason. Barcelona] as a fruitful concept to capture the contrasting demands refugees face: policies and practices that require refugees to demonstrate that they are currently vulnerable and at risk, yet willing and able to ‘overcome’ their vulnerability to become law-abiding, self-sufficient and culturally malleable members of their host societies in the future. Taking the example of selection practices in refugee resettlement to Europe, I show how ‘promising victimhood’ is characterised by tensions between vulnerability and three dimensions of assimilability: (1) security, (2) economic performance, and (3) cultural ‘fit’. The analysis highlights how social markers of inter alia nationhood/race/religion, gender, sexuality and age shape assessments of both vulnerability and assimilability and thereby, which groups get to be seen as more deserving of access than others. By further developing promising victimhood as a concept, the article advances a more comprehensive understanding of deservingness and of the complex – gendered, racialised and age-differentiated – boundaries of inclusion and exclusion refugees face in today’s protection regime.
Stigma presents specific ethical and epistemological problems for qualitative researchers of violence against women. Narrative research methods promise to enable ethical research on violence while still offering deep insight into stigmatized topics. This article describes narrative methods used in six focus group discussions and four in-depth interviews with victim-survivors of violence against women, all African migrant women living in Ireland. The article connects narrative and stigma in research with the social lives of participants. It concludes with specific recommendations for creative uses of narrative inquiry to explore stigmatized themes, noting that stigma can never be entirely removed from the research encounter.
This critical review of Ireland's policy response to gender-based violence as it affects migrant women contributes to recent literature that focuses on how states' legal and policy regimes can be part of the problem, in this case adding to rather than reducing GBV related vulnerabilities experienced by migrant women. Through a review of key policy, law and NGO documents, the report foregrounds the significance of context-specific framing and interpretation of influential ideas in shaping the horizons of possible policy action. The review is contextualized in relation to developments in Ireland concerning migration, citizenship and racialisation and more broadly vis-a-vis the nexus of migration governance and gender based violence. The authors trace the development of dominant ideas that shape policy practice with a focus on their interpretation in the Irish context—namely, vulnerability, intersectionality, and interculturalism. Four particular areas of policy response are identified, which reveal a pattern of policy failure on the part of the Irish state characterized by exclusion, minimization, and/or inaction. These relate to assessment of vulnerability of applicants for international protection; addressing gender-based violence in the context of direct provision accommodation; identification and referral of trafficking victims; and response to domestic violence linked to dependent migration status. The authors find that the pattern of failure identified is linked to the current dominance of an ever narrowing and individualized framing of vulnerability found in EU migration regulations, a lack of application of an intersectional gender perspective, the diminished influence of indivisible human rights norms requiring attention to economic, social and cultural rights, as a well as a wider national context of declining resource allocation to addressing gender-based violence and integration, including anti-racism initiatives, for over a decade.
This ‘state-of-the art’ article on the role of deservingness in governing migrants’ access to social services situates our themed section’s contribution to the literature at the intersection between the study of street-level bureaucracy and practices of internal bordering through social policy. Considering the increasing relevance of migration control post-entry, we review the considerations that guide the local delivery of social services. Among others, moral ideas about a claimant’s worthiness to receive social benefits and services guide policy implementation. But while ideas of deservingness help to understand how perceptions of migrants’ claiming play out in practice, we observe limited use of the concept in street-level bureaucracy research. Drawing on theorisations from welfare attitudinal research, we demonstrate the salience of deservingness attitudes in understanding the dynamics of local social service delivery to migrant clients.
The paper explores London-based third sector practitioners’ engagement with vulnerability in their work with refugee and migrant women during pregnancy and in the post-natal period. Practitioners draw on notions of vulnerability that signal weakness and passivity as a strategy, which enables them to secure resources for the women they support as well as to sustain their own organisational existence in a third sector landscape that has been transformed by a range of neoliberal measures. Despite this invoking of essentialised vulnerability practitioners possess an awareness of how the broader context of women’s lives, including government policies and structural disadvantage, acts to shape their vulnerability. The paper argues practitioners’ contextual understanding of refuge and migrant women’s vulnerability resonates with theoretical approaches that conceptualise vulnerability as an ontological characteristic of human existence. Strategic use of essentialised vulnerability is central to accessing resources, while an ontological understanding of vulnerability as a universal potential activated by socially mediated unequal power relations enables practitioners to address the specific factors that are producing women’s vulnerability to harm. Crucially, this includes challenging the effects of the UK government’s anti-immigrant ‘hostile environment’ policy and neoliberal austerity measures.
El concepto de vulnerabilidad se ha convertido en el centro de la legislación y la política europeas de asilo y refugio en los últimos años. La adopción de medidas especiales diseñadas para ofrecer una mayor protección a los solicitantes de asilo vulnerables puede considerarse un paso positivo. Ahora bien, la forma en que se ha definido la vulnerabilidad es cuestionable. Con demasiada frecuencia, la vulnerabilidad se reduce a una categorización simplista y esencializada, que también es altamente generizada y racializada. Las mujeres son clasificadas como "vulnerables" a priori, sin una consideración real de las causas estructurales y contextuales de esta vulnerabilidad. Si bien ser clasificado como "vulnerable" puede aumentar las posibilidades de protección dentro de los sistemas de asilo y refugio de la UE, los impactos en quienes son clasificados como vulnerables pueden ser sentidos como formas de violencia simbólica que reducen la agencia y la autonomía. En base a entrevistas con solicitantes de asilo y refugiados, así como en un análisis de las recientes directivas de asilo de la UE, este artículo propone repensar los usos de la vulnerabilidad en las políticas de asilo de la UE para proporcionar una mejor protección al tiempo que reconozcan la agencia y la autonomía de los solicitantes de asilo y de los refugiados.
and will address a range of topics including issues surrounding population dynamics, security, cohesion and integration, identity, global networks, rights and citizenship, diasporic and transnational activities, service delivery, wellbeing, social exclusion and the opportunities which superdiverse societies offer to support economic recovery.
Recent investigations have elucidated the influence of the Strong Black Woman (SBW) Schema on the mental health and treatment seeking behaviors of Black women in the United States. However, the SBW schematic characteristics that produce depression have yet to be identified. The current study fills this void in the literature through a quantitative examination of how characteristics of the SBW Schema relate to depressive symptomology. Analyses were based on 194 participants, including college students (n = 98) and community members (n = 96), ranging in age from 18 to 82 years-old (M = 37.53, SD = 19.88). As hypothesized, various manifestations of self-silencing were found to significantly mediate the relationship between the perceived obligation to manifest strength (a SBW characteristic) and depressive symptomatology. The present study advances the idea that depressive symptoms are related to endorsement of the SBW Schema and highlights self-silencing as a mechanism by which this relationship occurs. These results offer evidence and clarification of the impact of the SBW Schema on Black women’s mental health and identify specific points of intervention for mental health practitioners conducting therapeutic work with Black women. We provide recommendations for future research to avoid pathologizing strength and we discuss the implications and potential benefits of integrating a Womanist theoretical perspective into counseling for Black women, a population that has historically underutilized mental health resources.
Background:
Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is a widespread public health problem and a violation of human rights rooted in gender and power inequities. Refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants living in European asylum reception facilities (EARF) are especially vulnerable to SGBV. To contribute to closing the gap on systematic and accurate evidence on SGBV, we aim to explore reported cases of SGBV, causes and preventable measures described by residents and professionals from EARF.
Methods:
We developed a cross-sectional study using the Senperforto project database. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with residents (refugees, asylum-seekers and unaccompanied minors) and professionals (service and health care providers) at EARF, in 7 European countries. We used IBM® SPSS software to analyze our data. Further, statistical tests - Chi-square Test and Fisher's exact test (5% significance level) were conducted.
Results:
In total 562 respondents: 375 residents (R) and 187 professionals (P) participated in the study. The majority of respondents were male (56.9%), aged 19 to 39 years (67.3%). Respondents described 698 cases of SGBV (R 328, P 370), comprising 1110 acts of multi-types of violence. Respondents from Malta (160) and Belgium (143) reported the highest number of SGBV cases. The main reported causes were frustration and stress (R 23.6%, P 37.6%, p 0.008) and differences related with cultural background (R 19.3%, P 20.3%, p 0.884). Respondents assumed that these acts of violence could be prevented by SGBV prevention interventions (R 31.5%, P 24.7%, p 0.293); improving living conditions (R 21.7%, P 15.3%, p 0.232); and promoting communication (R 16.1%, P 28.2%, p 0.042). The majority of R were not aware of existing preventable measures in the asylum facility or host country. While the majority of P were aware of existing preventable measures in the asylum facility or country. Proposed SGBV prevention strategies in EARF included SGBV sensitization and awareness, improving living conditions and improving communication between R and P.
Conclusion:
In the EARF context, SGBV is characterized by multi-types of violence acts, yet R and P believe that prevention is possible. Our results call for urgent integrative prevention strategies that are in line with country-level and international regulations.
This article examines the enduring alterations in behaviors, practices, and self-image that immigrants’ evolving knowledge of and participation in the legalization process facilitate. Relying on close to 200 interviews with immigrants fromseveral national origin groups in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the authors identify transformations that individuals enact in their intimate and in their civic lives as they come in contact with U.S. immigration law en route to and as a result of regularization. Findings illustrate the power of the state to control individuals’ activities and mind-sets in ways that are not explicitly formal or bureaucratic. The barriers the state creates, which push immigrants to the legal margins, together with anti-immigrant hostility, create conditions under which immigrants are likely to undertake transformative, lasting changes in their lives. These transformations reify notions of the deserving immigrant vis-à-vis the law, alter the legalization process for the immigrant population at large, and, ultimately, shape integration dynamics.
Most studies in the United States documenting immigrant women's experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV) have not included the perspectives of abused immigrant African women. This study utilized a phenomenological approach to explore help-seeking barriers and factors impacting decisions to leave an abusive relationship among 15 immigrant African women. Results from the qualitative analysis indicated that the culture of gender inequality and acceptance of gender violence were primary barriers. Self-blame, loyalty, concern for children, and lack of knowledge regarding abuse, services, and legal rights were additional barriers, along with structural factors such as finances, underemployment, and housing. Muslim African women also feared the additional stigma of being in polygamous relationships. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.
Over the last two decades, research on unauthorized migration has departed from the equation of migrant illegality with absolute exclusion, emphasizing that formal exclusion typically results in subordinate inclusion. Irregular migrants integrate through informal support networks, the underground economy, and political activities. But they also incorporate into formal institutions, through policy divergence between levels of government, bureaucratic sabotage, or fraud. The incorporation of undocumented migrants involves not so much invisibility as camouflage – presenting the paradox that camouflage improves with integration. As it reaches the formal level of claims and procedures, legalization brings up the issue of the frames through which legal deservingness is asserted. Looking at the moral economy embedded in claims and programs, we examine a series of frame tensions: between universal and particular claims to legal status, between legalization based on vulnerability and that based on civic performance, between economic and cultural deservingness, and between the policy level and individual subjectivity. We show that restrictionist governments face a dilemma when their constructions of “good citizenship” threaten to extend to “deserving” undocumented migrants. Hence, they may simultaneously emphasize deservingness frames while limiting irregular migrants’ opportunities to deserve, effectively making deservingness both a civic obligation and a civic privilege.
In this article, we integrate thematic, grounded theory and narrative analytic techniques. We apply methods from each to the same qualitative data to illustrate how they provide different interpretive scopes on medication meaning making. Findings from each are concatenated to produce an integrated conceptual framework for understanding adolescent experience of psychiatric medication. We conclude that thematic, grounded theory, and narrative methods, when integrated, produce a multidimensional understanding of medication experience.
Stories are part of everyday life and constitute means for actors to express and negotiate experience. For researchers, they
provide a site to examine the meanings people, individually or collectively, ascribe to lived experience. Narratives are not
transparent renditions of ‘truth’ but reflect a dynamic interplay between life, experience and story. Placed in their wider
socio-political and cultural contexts, stories can provide insights into how forced migrants seek to make sense of displacement
and violence, re-establish identity in ruptured life courses and communities, or bear witness to violence and repression.
The researcher must pay particular attention to his/her own role in the production of narrative data and the representation
of lived experience as text.
Integration and how it is to be achieved have only recently become objects of policy and discussion in Ireland. Approaches to integration in Ireland are influenced by: the integration policies of those countries with longer experiences of immigration; EU policy; and the specificity of the Irish experience of migration. The Republic of Ireland is an interesting example of a state that is simultaneously involved in policy initiatives that promote the integration of Irish emigrants and their descendents as immigrant communities in their countries of destination and the integration of immigrants in Ireland, including return Irish migrants. This article challenges the assumption that non-integration is the main problem facing emigrants abroad and immigrants to Ireland and argues that the mode and degree of migrant integration (however understood) depends on a wide and changing range of factors and can take place, in spite of, just as much as because of integration policies and initiatives. Taking three policy reports as its focus, the discussion draws on Foucault's notion of governmentality to make explicit the thoughts that are largely tacit in the language, practices and techniques of integration as defined and discussed in these reports. The article argues that integration polices as formulated by the EU and national governments can be seen as nationalist practices of belonging that reproduce national boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. They rely on assumptions about migration and the territorialized nation-state that cannot hold in the face of the speed of capitalist development, which demands a rethinking of the fantasy that national spaces, borders and populations can be managed and controlled.
In this Article, I examine how the international women's rights movement has reinforced the image of the woman as a victim subject, primarily through its focus on violence against women (VAW). I use the example of India to examine how this subject has been replicated in the post-colonial context, and the more general implications this kind of move has on women's rights. My main argument is that the focus on the victim subject in the VAW campaign reinforces gender and cultural essentialism in the international women's human rights arena. It also buttresses claims of some "feminist" positions in India that do not produce an emancipatory politics for women. This focus fails to take advantage of the liberating potential of important feminist insights. These insights have challenged the public/private distinction along which human rights has operated, and traditional understandings of power as emanating exclusively from a sovereign state. In the first Part of this Article, I examine how the victim subject has become the dominant focus of the international women's human rights movement. I examine this move specifically within the context of VAW campaigns and then look at the broader implications it has for women's rights. I argue that the victim subject has reinforced gender essentialism and cultural essentialism. These have been further displaced onto a Third World and "First World" divide. I discuss how this displacement resurrects the "native subject" and justifies imperialist interventions. In the second Part of the Article, I show how the victim subject has been central to feminist legal politics in India and how this focus, in turn, is a symptom of post-coloniality. The victim subject has invited a protectionist response from the state. The focus on the victim subject at a time when the Hindu Right dominates electoral politics in India has reinforced this protectionist response. In the final Part of this Article, I argue in favor of transcending the victim subject and disrupting the cultural and gender essentialism that have come to characterize feminist legal politics. I then discuss the political and emancipatory value of focusing on the peripheral subject and identifying her locations of resistance when addressing women's human rights. Finally, I discuss the importance of engaging with non-state actors and with new sites of power in order to address a broader array of rights and a broader range of arenas that implicate women's human rights.
This article provides a comprehensive review of the emerging domestic violence literature using a race, class, gender, sexual orientation intersectional analysis and structural framework fostered by women of color and their allies to understand the experiences and contexts of domestic violence for marginalized women in U.S. society. The first half of the article lays out a series of challenges that an intersectional analysis grounded in a structural framework provides for understanding the role of culture in domestic violence. The second half of the article points to major contributions of such an approach to feminist methods and practices in working with battered women on the margins of society.
Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into “worthy victims.” Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Legal and therapeutic institutions create a matrix of demands on women’s lives, shaping their practices of survival and performances of self. Through interviews with domestic violence survivors, I show that women engage three strategies of transformation to make themselves credible survivors: (1) extracting domestic violence from their life stories; (2) explaining abuse through “self-esteem;” (3) performing survivorhood through “respectable” motherhood and sexuality. Through these processes, women craft a domestic violence narrative and an institutional performance of survivorhood, both of which allow them to navigate institutional pressures. These therapeutic narratives and performances, however, also rewrite the structural elements of violence into (feminized) accounts of psychological failure and overcoming. Thus, women navigate a paradox when they become survivors: they must tell stories of psychological recovery, even as those stories obfuscate the very infrastructure of violence. It is this disjuncture between individualized narratives of harm and the structural work of survival that I examine in this work. I develop the concept of the “paradox of legibility” to generalize this disjuncture, and to highlight women’s labor of making themselves credible amidst structural and institutional constraints.
Critiques of humanitarian work with refugees have increasingly called for refugee men’s “vulnerabilities” to be recognized. The deployment of “vulnerability” reflects the term’s centrality within contemporary humanitarianism, and its rapidly expanding use in feminist analysis. This article argues that calls to see refugee men as “vulnerable” fail to critique, and even seek to expand, “vulnerability” as a mechanism of humanitarian governance. This approach is likely to lead to more humanitarian control over, and racialized violence toward, refugee men themselves. In an era of calls for decolonial approaches, more radical critiques are required, which center the concepts, understandings, and resistance of refugees.
This essay provides an account of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. This account elucidates two important insights: first, that all sexual violence and not only public gang rape humiliates and, second, that appeals to the neoliberal notion of resilience undermine feminist efforts to counter sexual violence. The first part of the essay provides an overview of the idea of a relation of self to self and its significance, presents humiliation specifically as a manifestation of the self‐relation, and then turns to feminist analyses of sexual violence and its effects in order to illustrate how sexual violence against women humiliates. The second part of the essay illustrates that, given the nature and function of humiliation, neoliberal discourse generally and that of resilience more specifically reproduce the individuation and exclusion that characterize humiliation and are thus detrimental to feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. I conclude by encouraging feminist anti‐sexual violence efforts that at least counter individuation and at best promote collective and inclusive solidarity.
This article augments and elaborates on existing research conducted on the 2004 Irish Citizenship Referendum by outlining the role played by neoliberal rationalities in shaping discourses crucial to initiating the Referendum and securing a yes vote. The article employs Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics alongside various media sources and existing research in order to outline and analyse how the figure of the asylum seeker came to be constructed and understood as unpredictable, un-securable and as such incompatible with dominant neoliberal conceptions of prosperity. In making its case, the article draws upon discourses articulated by key public and political figures to highlight how asylum seekers in Ireland were constructed as a drain on resources and a risk to prosperity in order to legitimise their exclusion and reconstitute the Irish population.
Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long-term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be ‘deserved’. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests ‘from below’, through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the ‘Life in the UK’ test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of ‘deservingness’. Through a set of in-depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the ‘deserving citizens’ and the ‘undeserving Others’ when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo-liberal and ethos-based conceptions of citizenship.
This book presents an in-depth account of nine Black British women’s experiences of violence and abuse. Through in depth interviews and analysis the author reveals their feelings of being silenced as children, women, Black women and as victims/survivors. Being silenced or staying silent about experiences of violence and abuse are key influences in how and when women access help and support and Kanyeredzi illuminates missed opportunities in how and when this help and support can and should be given.
Based on women’s descriptions of how they felt supported, listened to, yet ‘unheard’, chapters explore what professionals might face in the process of supporting Black women who access these services. The book contributes valuable understanding to the growing literature discussing challenges faced by minoritised women attempting to live full lives in the UK. It also includes images created as part of the project. This book is a useful resource for victims/survivors, students, researchers, clinical psychologists, counsellors, health professionals, social workers, educators and specialised violence support organisations.
The article argues that everyday bordering has become a major technology of control of both social diversity and discourses on diversity, in a way that threatens the convivial co-existence of pluralist societies, especially in metropolitan cities, as well as reconstructs everyday citizenship. The article begins with an outline of a theoretical and methodological framework, which explores bordering, the politics of belonging and a situated intersectional perspective for the study of the everyday. It then analyses the shift in focus of recent UK immigration legislation from the external, territorial border to the internal border, incorporating technologies of everyday bordering in which ordinary citizens are demanded to become either border-guards and/or suspected illegitimate border crossers. We illustrate our argument in the area of employment examining the impact of the requirements of the immigration legislation from the situated gazes of professional border officers, employers and employees in their bordering encounters.
We report on the development of, and findings from, two scales measuring coercive control and space for action over a period of 3 years in a sample of 100 women who had accessed domestic violence services. We present statistical evidence to show a significant correlation between coercive control and space for action. However, dealing with violence is not a linear process, and support needs to extend beyond being enabled to separate. The scales advance measurement of women’s experience of coercive control and, through the space for action scale, document their ability to restore agency and freedom in contexts of relative safety.
The notion of ‘shame’ is increasingly being recognised as a tool with some explanatory power to help promote understandings about a range of social problems. Through an exploration of migrant South Asian women’s experiences of domestic violence and help-seeking practices, this article considers the relevance of the notion of shame as a unit of analysis to help contribute to the growing theoretical and empirical literature. The article sheds light on the meanings, events, processes and structures in the lives of migrant South Asian women respondents living in Hong Kong. Within the framework of the discussion on shame and intimate partner violence (IPV), the article also identifies the implications for social work practice.
The current refugee “crisis” in Europe has created multiple forms of vulnerability and insecurity for refugee women including various forms of sexual and gender-based violence. Increasing numbers of women, either alone or with family, are attempting to reach Europe to seek protection from conflict and violence in their countries, but these women are subject to violence during their journey and/or on arrival in a destination country. The lack of adequate accommodation or reception facilities for refugees and migrants in Europe, as well as the closure of borders which has increased the need for smugglers to help them reach Europe, acts to exacerbate the violence and insecurity.
This essay engages the question of where Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of subalternity is to be located today, and it does so by first establishing a brief genealogy of thinking the outside of modern, capitalist economic and cultural modes of production. This genealogy reaches back to the classic Marxist figure of the lumpenproletariat, moves through its postcolonial reappropriation by Fanon as well as Gramsci’s original articulation of the subaltern, and arrives at Subaltern Studies’ re-articulation of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern as well as Spivak’s critical dialogue with Subaltern Studies. This first part of the essay lays the ground for an argument that pertains to the relation between subalternity, agency, resistance, and resilience, within a context of neoliberalism in which agency is particularly salient as a way of accounting for the world. The discussion on subalternity and agency builds on Spivak’s critical engagement with the task of ‘giving voice’, as well as on Saba Mahmood’s work on the conceptual entanglement of agency and resistance. This leads me to the central argument that we may be witnessing a shift in the conceptualization of agency, which is particularly salient to a contemporary understanding of subalternity and the shift that the ‘new subaltern’ [Spivak, G., 2012. The new subaltern: a silent interview. In: V. Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial. London: Verso] indicates: in current neoliberal times, it is perhaps less agency-as-resistance that informs an understanding of the subaltern’s agency, but rather agency-as-resilience. The essay concludes with a critique of resilience.
In this chapter we examine recent debates about the meaning of sexual victimization. These struggles have implications for feminist praxis; for theory, research and practice. We explore several locations from which challenges to previous feminist re-definitions emerge; specifically, recent popularist publications which use, in a pejorative tone, the term ‘victim’ or ‘victimhood’ feminism and academic contestation of prevalence research. In the second half of the paper we connect these themes with a discussion of what we call ‘the victim/survivor dichotomy’, which represents another element in debates about the extent and meaning of sexual victimization.
Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of color and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as "woman" or "person of color" as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en
Challenging standard accounts of globalization that ignore sexuality, race and gender as structuring variables, this article examines how childbearing discourses and practices have provided a means to redraw racial and national boundaries that have become destabilized in the contemporary era. Focusing on the Irish Republic, I show that, historically, women were annexed to postcolonial nationalism through their role as child bearers, understood in racial and national terms, and institutionalized in social policy and law. Today, in the context of accelerated globalization, the Irish government has required new strategies to construct the nation as a sovereign space. Discourses and practices targeting childbearing asylum seeker women have provided the government with a means to reconstitute the Republic as a sovereign space with a legitimate national government—while also generating new modes of racialization and racial hierarchies within Ireland.
Feminist Review (2003) 73, 139–144. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400086
In South Sudan, it is rare for someone to speak about sexual violence. According to the South Sudanese, it can be dangerous to talk - there will be social consequences and talking can destroy you. In this paper, I describe some of the impediments women from South Sudan experience when they try to share their experienced sexual violence with significant others by describing a specific case. The main coping strategy for most South Sudanese women is to keep their experiences secret to protect themselves. The health and health-seeking behaviour of South Sudanese women are influenced by cultural notions of coping with a taboo as strong as sexual violence. I will show that the women's silence is the result of a complex and dynamic reality in the women's everyday lives. The women often experience considerable tension between the dominant public cultural ideas and their private experiences and personal notions. I conclude with a discussion about how women's silence should be respected and the trauma addressed metaphorically to avoid unwanted or uncontrolled social consequences. What is most at stake for the South Sudanese women is the prevention of further humiliation or social exclusion in their everyday lives as a result of sexual violence.
In the United States recognition as a battered immigrant can lead to legalization and citizenship for abused women when provisions in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) are applied. To successfully utilize VAWA towards these ends, however, a battered immigrant woman also receives a lesson in cultural restructuring required of citizenship; VAWA establishes the regulations and standards necessary to remake abused immigrants into neoliberal subjects. This essay examines the experiences of undocumented Latina immigrants within the VAWA legal paradigm and explores the ways in which the process artfully crafts the good neoliberal citizen.
An emerging feminist paradigm likens depression to silencing, as women disconnect from important aspects of their realities
in an attempt to meet cultural standards of feminine goodness. While offering a provocative re-evaluation of hegemonic feminine
norms and depressive episodes, little in this literature explores connections between silencing and depression within other,
non-white constructions of feminine goodness. Employing a voice-centered method that illuminates areas of conflict between
cultural scripts and individual meaning making, I forward that being strong is both the depiction of Black feminine goodness
and an important contributor to depressive episodes. Drawing on interview data from a nonclinical sample of 58 Black women,
I illustrate three depression-relevant aspects of Black women’s gendered experiences: the promotion of their stoicism, silence,
and selflessness through the prevailing discourse of the “strong Black woman”; the active suppression of discourse-discrepant
realities which the women associate with depressive experiences; and the psychological healing attendant on supplanting this
discourse with experience-based knowledge of their social realities. Voice-centeredness, I conclude, brings a needed sensitivity
to depression as a racialized and gendered experience of distress tied to the normative conditions of Black women’s lives.
Yuval-Davis discusses three interconnected questions relating to identity. She first examines whether and in what ways the notion of identity should be theorized, on the one hand, and empirically researched, on the other, focusing on the opposing views of Stuart Hall and Robin Williams. She then examines the contested question of what is identity, positioning it in relation to notions of belonging and the politics of belonging, and in relation to several influential schools of thought, especially those that construct identity as a mode of narrative, as a mode of performativity or as a dialogical practice. Her third interrelated question concerns the boundaries of identity and the relationship between self and non-self. She explores both social psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to that question, and deals with questions such as reflexivity, identifications and forced identities. The last part of the article explores several types of relationships between self and non-self, such as: 'me' and 'us'; 'me/us' and 'them'; 'me' and other 'others'; 'me' and the transversal 'us/them'. Yuval-Davis's basic argument here is that dichotomous notions of identity and difference, when theorizing boundaries of individual and collective identities, are more misleading than explanatory.
En este estudio la autora busca contestar a sus propias interrogantes acerca de la función de las emociones en nuestra praxis; cómo éstas nos mueven o nos paralizan, nos juntan o separan. Desde el desarrollo de una teoría de las políticas culturales, Sara Ahmed se centra en la relación que existe entre emociones, leguaje y corporalidad para mostrarnos cómo las emociones son nombradas y estan presentes en los actos discursivos, lo mismo que pueden ser sentidas tanto en el plano emocional como en el fisico. Ahmed nos ofrece una nueva metodología para leer la emocionalidad de los textos y un análisis del rol emocional en debates sobre el terrorismo internacional, el asilo político y la migración, considerando la intersección entre raza, género y sexualidad. Este documento es un diálogo interdisciplinario entre estudios de género y de la cultura, la psicología y la sociología de las emociones; también participan la fenomenología, el psicoanálisis, el feminismo y la Teoría Queer, y en el que se abordan diferentes emociones- dolor, odio, miedo, disgusto, vergüenza y amor- .
Cultural competence continues to receive limited attention in domestic violence service provision from research to the evaluation of programs. Yet with changing demographics reflecting larger numbers of people of color and increasing needs for more effective responses, it is critical that we change the way we think about domestic violence. Using a feminist framework, this article examines how knowledge has been developed in domestic violence and its consequence related to service provision and perceptions. The article ends with recommendations as to how to better include culturally competent responses in domestic violence.
The Myth of Humanitarianism: Migrant Deservingness, Promising Victimhood, and Neoliberal Reason. Talk at Venice University
- Sébastien Chauvin
- Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas
- Chauvin Sébastien
Am Only Saying It Now: Experiences of Women Seeking Asylum in Ireland
- Akidwa