How to Talk about Gender-Based Violence?

Abstract

We are surrounded by evidence, consequences, and signs of structural as well as everyday forms of violence wherever we look. Imperialist policies and neo-liberal capitalist economics are pervasive with their (trans)national articulations of sexism, racism, and heteronormativity. Global in scope and reach, expressions and experiences of gender-based violence in people's daily lives are rendered specific and particular through local and regional power configurations and contestations, belief systems, and cultural norms. Violence and its multifarious sources, perpetrators, and forms of resistance are clearly manifest in our empirical realities. Yet, as scholars and activists, we are not only engaged in the attempts to understand, challenge, and fight violence, but we also struggle with its representations. Representations of violence in scholarship, in the media, in popular culture, and, crucially, in policy discourses, reveal the complex and fraud ways our respective positionalities shape the registers we use to talk about and challenge violence. More specifically, I have been reflecting on western-based feminist academics and activists' struggle to discuss and analyse various forms of gender-based and sexual violence affecting people in the Middle East. These reflections have emerged specifically in the context of my work on Iraq, but have also been relevant in relation to my research in and on Egypt and Turkey, and I suspect that colleagues working in and on other contexts in the region face similar dilemmas and quandaries. In a recently published article on sexual violence in Iraq, I bemoaned the various ways that violence has been instrumentalised historically and in the current context: " Sexual and gendered violence is not merely employed as a racist and othering discourse by imperialist powers, and right-wing constituencies in the west, but discourses about sexual violence have emerged at every single moment of political and sectarian tension in modern Iraq as a central polarizing and political device amongst politicians and activists " (Al-Ali, 2016: 13-14). 1 In the article, I point to the importance of historicizing gender-based violence to escape the " presentism " and myopic views that absolve a wide range of perpetrators, but also historical complicities and silences, as evident in contemporary representations of gender-based violence in Iraq.