[Blog post] ‘The Continuum of Violence and the Sexual Politics of Freedom’ - Reflections on the SPF conference by Carol Ballantine

The recent conference on Sexual Politics of Freedom was an opportunity to dive into some contradictions that are pivotal to the research that I carried out for my PhD. Conducted remotely over Zoom, the conference was nourishing and intimate in the way the best academic meetings are. This blog is not a summary of the conference – which was replete with outstanding papers, half of which I missed as I was attending the other half – but rather a thread of my responses and reactions. 

 

I structured my PhD, in part, around the concept of the continuum of violence. This concept, as developed by Liz Kelly, felt intuitively right to represent the violent experiences of my research participants, African women living in Ireland. It showed that individual violent incidents acquired their meaning, not as standalone moments but in a context where many other offences were normalized and accepted. It showed that violence impacted individuals in a cumulative way: many events, one on top of another. In her formative 1989 book Surviving Sexual Violence, Kelly notes that women do not make sharp distinctions between ‘real’ violence of the sort that the law and the media consider valid, and ‘inconsequential’ violence of the sort that patterns daily life: catcalling; talking down; denying money. 

 

This continuum concept spoke powerfully to my research findings. I invited women to talk about their experiences of violence, and they responded with predictable instances of intimate partner violence, racial abuse, and sexualized violence. An aspect of the continuum concept that is important to me is that it shifts the focus from individual incidents (and a calculus of their relative severity) towards the cumulative meaning of living in a society where women and girls are constantly denigrated and devalued, and girls’ lessons about sex and sexuality begin with learning to protect themselves. Liz Kelly writes about how violence occurs in a conducive context: here in Ireland, the horrendous murder of Ana Kriegel in 2017 was portrayed in the media as some inexplicable aberration until feminists pointed out that it was not  that surprising, and had occurred in our own conducive context of misogyny. 

 

The continuum concept has served me very well for containing women’s accounts of lives lived alongside violence, punctuated by violence’s that are physical, emotional and economic, large and small. It is a success of feminist theorizing, because it gives a name and a shape to a dark reality that was previously hidden in plain sight: the nature of the structures of confinement that define women’s lives, freedoms and daily risks and compromises. I am deeply committed to the act of naming that underlies the concept of the continuum of violence.   

 

At the recent conference on the Sexual Politics of Freedom, the continuum was apparent in many papers I attended, for instance when Anindita Datta described the everyday violence which was tolerated in Indian society, barely mentioned even as crowds mobilized against egregious offences like the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. In her extraordinary keynote speech, Linda Martín Alcoff too noted the thread that connects the extreme to the everyday. We can’t talk about sexual violence, she insisted, without talking about everyday sexual practices, and the ways these are equally structured by misogyny and threat as well as consent and desire. The continuum haunted our discussions at the conference. As feminists, we are agreed that to focus on extremes is to look away from the reality of violence and what makes it possible. 

 

Nonetheless, the conference was teeming with a counter-perspective. While mapping the continuum of violence and naming all violent acts as such is a major contribution of feminism, the truth is that women have been navigating this continuum for centuries. They have been developing accommodations with it, bargaining with it, and living alongside it. And feminist praxis has almost invariably oriented itself towards the complete destruction of the patriarchal continuum of violence, resulting in a failure of understanding of the complicated ways in which women experience the injustice of patriarchy alongside many others. Thus, the question that conference organizer Hasret Cetinkaya posed is the most crucial one of all: is it possible to have a feminist research practice that is non-normative? What can such a practice offer to the wider project of feminism? 

 

In answer to this question, numerous presenters shared their research with communities of women who coexist with and even uphold the norms of violence and misogyny that Liz Kelly and others have so effectively described. Cetinkaya spoke of her work on the meanings of namus or honour as positive ethics for Kurdish women in Turkey; Esra Aslan explored similar themes, also with Kurdish women; while Suzy Joseph Ramez Ameen sought to decolonize concepts of sex and sexual freedom for Egyptian women living in Germany. All of these researchers encountered criticisms familiar to their theoretical forebears, in particular Michel Foucault and Saba Mahmood: that they were defending patriarchy and autocracy, that they were opposed to liberation struggles and conservative in their leanings and their sympathies. Such critiques are trojan horses, situated inside a narrow liberal imaginary, as Ratna Kapur argued – and in themselves they do a symbolic violence to alternative, non-liberal (not illiberal) perspectives. 

 

Silvia Gagliardi’s paper highlighted the gulf between the community in her research with Moroccan Amazigh women and the professionalized feminist NGOs who supposedly represented their needs. She noted that the women in her study found identity and shared meaning in language, rurality, even illiteracy: it was from these bases that they developed a strong collective culture with its own leadership. They felt no resonance with the advocacy that was done in their name: the language of feminism and human rights did not represent freedom for this group. They existed on many continuums of violence, and resistance was not as simple as rejecting patriarchy.

 

These papers explored in evocative detail the limits of human rights as a concept of freedom, the topic of Ratna Kapur’s keynote address. Kapur, following Mahmood, explored how the wearing of the veil in Islam can be a self-directed act, and argued that the relationship of the veil to the wearer’s subjectivity falls fundamentally outside of the liberal imaginary. Beyond human rights, we need new questions, new theories and new methods to fully engage with such relationships and understand them. The religious right has succeeded in advancing its agenda through the discourse of liberal rights, so there is little to be gained from doubling down on liberal rights as though they have some sort of protective power. Indeed, “liberation” is often experienced as violence, so truly, what value is freedom?

 

We need to move beyond a simple dichotomy of liberalism vs authoritarianism – which means understanding all the alternatives that exist to liberal defiance of power (the rejection of the continuum, its toppling wherever it manifests). How does all of this understanding help us to fight for justice? Kapur reflects: probably, it doesn’t. But it is time that we brought a non-liberal episteme into the frame.

 

The conference pushed the concept of the continuum of violence to its limits. The concept does not shift, or budge: what shifts for me is how we engage with it, what questions we ask of it. We can desire the disruption of patriarchy, which constructs a continuum of violence – but if we are serious, then we need to understand and embrace the women who continue to live alongside it. Ratna Kapur challenged us to begin to imagine freedom outside the liberal fishbowl. This excellent conference helped me to begin.