What kinds of injuries are classified as violence

Minoo Moallem
Women's Studies, San Francisco State University

What kinds of injuries are classified as violence? Many kinds of violence are naturalized and, therefore, invisible. If the various brutalities of the everyday life of many people are themselves forms of violence, then how do we render them visible without creating states of numbness and denial?

"What does it mean for a word not only to name, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it names?"

(Judith Butler, 1997: 43)

I wish to focus on the process of globalization as it relates to the coding of violence in the discourses of protection, that is to say, those discourses which enable speaking subject positions to render visible the violence, by concealing the non-violent framework against which that very violence is measured. I would like to interrogate discursive formations, which create such fields of visibility enabling the production, circulation and consumption of violence as an important signifier in the context of the nation-state and a highly globalized society. Such discursive formations are important as they textualize violence by framing specific forms of representation, which institute and demand the subject's compliance with identifiable subject-positions. I will consider the transnationality of such discourses, fellow travelers, as it were, alongside capital and labor, as well as their national production through the institutionalization of gendered and racialized citizenship.

I suggest that the universalizing discourses based on key dichotomies—west/non-west, civilized/barbaric, modern/traditional—are major sites of the production and reproduction of semantic regimes enabling empowered and depowered subject positions, and determining the horizons within which something is perceived as violence. Furthermore, I argue that the need to bring particulars under the sign of a universal in colonial modernity creates a constant need for such dichotomies within a broader network of what Spivak (1988) refers to as epistemic violence in the attempt to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This process takes place in the context of old and new forms of globalization and in the transnational coding of violence in relation to the discourses of protection. I refer to what Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari Rajan describe as the creation of "an alliance between protector and protected against a common opponent from whom danger is perceived and protection offered or sought, and this alliance tends to efface the will to power exercised by the protector"(1989: 263). These discourses constitute gendered and racialized subject positions in the very act of making the violence visible.

In the context of postcolonialism, characterized by the uneven process both spatially in different geopolitical locations, as well as in terms of divergent positions of various groups of people based on gender, race, class and sexuality, the discourses of violence and protection have become the most important tropes whereby particulars get represented in this semantic circulation of meaning and placed beyond law and order. The representation of women has been central in this framing of the violence and protection. These discourses serve to distinguish an "inside" and an "outside," assigning positions to the protected and the protectors. This positioning is defined by the gendered metaphors of the 'private' and the 'domesticated' which is then opposed to the 'public' and the 'political'. This construction relies on the spatial and physical metaphor of ‘home’; that is, a domesticated bordered space as well as a territorial homeland.

The metaphor of home is gendered; it is the main location of women, and it is served to define the modern notions of family as well as nation. As a spatial metaphor it stands both for the inside, which is protected from the outside, and a place of emotionality and affection. For example, the guest/host metaphors which define and regulate the labor force of immigrant and diaporic bodies in our contemporary societies establish a logic which naturalizes the movement of capital and labor for the dislocated subjects while keeping them from the protection of a home space. The host/guest logic places the possibility of citizenship outside the realm of politics because of the presupposition that a guest can never be at home in the host place. Indeed the very notions of "peoplehood" and "we-ness" create sites of agency for the protection of an "us" in its relation to an "other".

The institutionalization of both state institutions of surveillance (borders, prisons, mental institutions) and patriarchal family ideologies are related to such temporal and spatial metaphors and the discourses of protection. As argued by Doreen Massey, in the broader Western mode of dualistic thinking "It is time which is aligned with history, progress, civilization, politics and transcendence and coded masculine. And it is the opposites of these things which have, in the traditions of Western thought, been coded feminine. The exercise of rescuing space from its position, in this formulation, of stasis, passivity and depoliticization, therefore, connects directly with a wider philosophical debate in which gendering and the construction of gender relations are central"(1994: 6-7). Gender locations and meanings define agency within the discourses of protection.

In the context of the nation-state, while submission to normative respectability is fundamental for all members, gender notions assign particular positions to men as protectors and to women as protected. As noted by Grewal and Kaplan, the civilizing mission of modern European imperialism has relied on women's lives and such practices as suttee, seclusion, foot binding, veiling, arranged marriages, and female circumcision to symbolize the "barbarism" of non-Western cultures (1996:14). These discourses not only define particular realms of women's life as violence but also authorizes those who claim the power to decide what counts as violence. For example, in opposing violence against women, many Western global feminists rely on an abstracted notion of gender violence in an attempt to protect women victims from their non-western patriarchal societies. These attempts converge with cultural-nationalist projects of silencing women in producing and reproducing semantic fields that are organized around notions of 'violence' and 'non-violence'. Such framing has been essential in the production and reproduction of both Eurocentrism and masculinist citizenship in the context of colonial modernity and postcolonial nationalisms.