Anthropology of Gender-Based Violence: Beyond the Binaries of Intervention

Abstract

The organization of gender-based violence by the urgent need for intervention results in an emphasis on binaries, namely a distinction between domestic violence and sexual assault. It also produces an ethnographic landscape that focuses on the institutions associated with intervention, primarily the courts and clinics whose policies are framed by these binaries. The anthropology of gender-based violence trades in the binary categories of intervention while exceeding and critiquing them. Within these studies are queries about gendered vulnerabilities and structural conditions that generate harm. Resisting the normative ways in which gender-based violence is discussed gives rise to critical theories of masculinity and lays bare queer vulnerabilities. It also allows anthropology to think about the role of gender-based violence in the production of anthropological knowledge. By moving beyond domestic violence and sexual assault as mutually exclusive formations, anthropology has increasingly deployed the rich specificities of time and space to think with and through capacious avenues for preventing, addressing, and producing gender-based violence in a broader array of ethnographic sites and institutions.