Feminism and Global Justice

Kerry Carrington

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317605843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, Kerry Carrington takes a bold, critical and reflexive approach to understanding the global divisions and inequalities that shape distinctive patterns of gender and crime.

The book argues that in order for feminist criminology to enhance its conceptual and political relevance in the twenty-first century, bold new directions in scholarship on gender, crime and global justice are required that also take into account global divisions and inequalities. Issues explored in the book include the forced marriage of child brides, female genital mutilation, feminicide, honour crimes, rape and domestic violence, and the systemic denial of female rights justified by religion, custom or culture. It also explores rising rates of violence recorded for women offenders globally, and their increasing participation in terrorism, as well as troubling male-on-male violence in anomic spaces cultivated by globalising forces.

Feminism and Global Justice argues that the world needs feminism more than ever to address systemic culturally shaped and diverse forms of injustice experienced by females across the globe, many of them children. It will be essential reading for international and national human rights organisations, as well as academics and students engaged in the study of criminology, development studies, sociology, politics, and gender studies.

1 Feminism and Global Justice

DOI: 10.4324/9781315748368-1

Introduction

Apart from the disturbing stories of atrocities endured by females across the globe, some as young as ten, the arguments advanced in this book are provocative, as it also includes instances of women (mainly young) committing torture and terrorism and inflicting violence upon others. Some will find the analysis refreshing and illuminating, others irritating or even repugnant. This book attempts to persuade a new generation of scholars, criminologists, activists and policy makers sympathetic to the quest for global justice to push the envelope, to step out of their comfort zones and typical frames of analysis to gaze at a world full of injustice against the female sex, much of it systemic, linked to culture, custom and religion. In some instances the sources of these injustices intersect with those that produce global inequality, imperialism and racism. This book also investigates circumstances where the globalising forces cultivate male-on-male violence in the anomic spaces of super-capitalism – the border zones of Mexico and the United States, and the frontier mining communities in the Australian desert. However systemic gendered injustices, such as forced marriage of child female brides, sati (the cremation of living widows), genital cutting, honour crimes, rape and domestic violence against women, are forms of violence only experienced by the female sex. According to Human Rights Watch there are estimated to be over fourteen million child brides worldwide, many of whom are traded for debt, bondage, and in contexts where polygamy and paedophilia go hand in hand, justified by religion or custom. While Western feminism has been somewhat insular and Anglo centric, the quest for global justice needs feminism now more than ever. Campaigns, protests and reforms to address gender injustices sprang largely independently from feminist movements in the Western world. Hence there is much feminists from the Western world can learn from the struggles for global justice waged by women activists, movements and campaigns from the global south. The global north is a metaphor for the Western world and the global south a metaphor for the countries and continents (not all from the global south) outside that Western world.

Just as the colonialists of much of the southern hemisphere came from the north, so too has a great deal of criminological theory. Chapter 2 argues that criminological theories (including feminist criminologies) need to encompass more global perspectives and outlooks. There is nothing wrong with embracing worldly influences from the northern hemisphere; it is just that many criminological theories embed assumptions that do not translate well to the global south, where problems of crime and violence are constructed around Indigenous populations and the architecture, culture and customs of rural and regional life in these vast continents. Feminist criminology has tended to uncritically, although unwittingly, replicate these metropolitan biases. The chapter makes the case that for feminism to enhance its international relevance it also needs to widen its research agendas to include the distinctively different gendered patterns of crime and violence that occur across the globe. This chapter sets out an alternative framework of transnational feminist intersectionality to correct the biases embedded in the metropolitan criminological gaze, which is the conceptual scaffolding for the remainder of the book.

There is much that feminists and criminologists can learn from the struggles for justice from the global south. Chapters 3 and 4 contrast the struggles for gender and justice in Latin America with the Islamist states of the Middle East and Asia and with the Hindi states in Asia, India especially. These chapters cannot present an exhaustive overview of violence against women in every one of these countries, so I select a number to highlight how gendered violence is shaped by local contours of power, patriarchy, religion and custom.

Chapter 3 examines a wide array of systemic forms of violence against females, most of which are not even defined as crimes. These include infanticide of female babies; female genital mutilation; sati (the cremation of living widows); honour killings and dowry violence; arranged marriage of child brides as young as ten; zina (the punishment of women for sex outside marriage, even in contexts where they have been raped); and the denial of basic human freedoms to millions of women, such as the right to drive, work, vote or even appear in public without a man. This chapter also explores the victimisation of a new rising class of feminists in countries like Pakistan, where Islamist extremism targets and in instances even murders or attempts to murder women who challenge their patriarchal power base. The analysis represents these forms of violence against women and women’s struggles for justice using their voices and their stories, from their frame of analysis. As such the chapter relies heavily on accounts by victims of forced child marriage and Islamic violence targeting female rights campaigners and accounts from books banned in Pakistan and Malaysia. There are relatively few academic sources as these issues have escaped the attention of English speaking authors.

Chapter 4 extends the analysis developed in the preceding chapter to provide a glimpse into the culturally diverse forms of violence against women and women’s struggles for justice outside the metropolitan horizons of the Anglophone world. The examples explored within this chapter include the many victims of rape, torture and femicide in the border city of Juarez, Mexico, and the abduction, torture and murder of activists, many of them women, by the brutal military regimes that reigned in Chile and Argentina from the 1960s through to the 1980s. The reasons for choosing these contrasting examples is to illustrate how grassroots campaigns for justice, bravely led by women (some feminist – others not), exposed the brutality of violence against women in Latin America. These women’s movements challenged the systemic inequities that women endured in a continent where deeply conservative Catholicism was intertwined with military fascist dictatorships to shape the distinctive patterns of violence against women. The chapter highlights the local as well as transnational women’s movements that have bravely resisted the violation of human and women’s rights, sometimes at their own peril. Ultimately it argues that the rise of women’s movements in these countries to seek justice cannot simply be interpreted as offshoots of Western feminism, but rather as distinctive and heterogeneous collectivities that are networked and strengthened by transnational global flows of discourse. It concludes with an analysis of the importance of United Nations Women and other such transnational entities in the elimination of violence against women and children by highlighting some the work they are undertaking with partner local organisations in Latin America.

In other contexts, globalising processes and power structures have created anomic social settings where male violence flourishes. Chapter 5 analyses the interplay between globalisation, masculinities and violence. It argues that the high rates of violence, self-harm, suicide and injury among men living or working in the socio-spatial frontiers of global capitalism cannot simply be reduced to individualised expressions of deviance or psycho-pathological deficit. The argument advanced also rejects outright essentialist representations of men as essentially dangerous. Instead it argues that some patterns of violence among men are cultivated in psychosocial contexts that are also partly the product of the anomic spaces of super-capitalism. These are spaces where self-sustaining communities and forms of sociality based on social democratic norms of governance are largely absent or marginalised (Currie 2013). These are also social and organisational spaces where the valorisation of the self is primarily as an economic conduit for global forces. Drawing on field research undertaken in communities experiencing the globalising impacts of super-capitalism, this issue is approached through a comparison of two case studies, one in Australia and other in Latin America. The first is a case study of violence between rival groups of men in mining communities at the forefront of generating resource extraction for global economies in the Australian desert. The second is a comparison of masculinity and violence in the anomic spaces of free trade zones in Latin America, also surrounded by desert. From the local the analysis works outward to encompass the wider, structural forces driving change in these communities and shaping personal and local troubles, in a similar way as C. Wright Mills (1959) envisaged the workings of the ‘sociological imagination’.

Female violence challenges deeply ingrained assumptions held by many, among them feminists, lawyers, criminologists, media commentators, parents and policy makers. Criminological theory has a long history of essentialising violence as a capacity associated primarily with boys, overlooking the capacity for the female sex to participate in and inflict violence. Feminist scholars too have tended to duck the discomforting issue of female violence, preferring instead to either construct violent women as victims or narrow their research interests to only where women are victims of men’s violence. It is perfectly understandable why feminists have had particular difficulty coming to grips with recorded rises in female violence over the last forty years. This is because feminism was, and still is, wrongly blamed. Feminism (a term of abuse used by feminist backlash ideologues) has also been blamed for spoiling the American military, luring men to participate in atrocities, war crimes and the torture of prisoners. Implicitly feminism is also sometimes blamed for encouraging women to become terrorists, in seeking equality with men.

Chapter 6 overviews the empirical evidence that the reported increases in young women’s violence, and participation in terrorist groups and activities are global phenomena. The chapter canvasses possible theories to explain recorded rises of girls’ violence in the Westernised countries of the northern hemisphere including the UK, the US, Canada and Australia from the global south. The first relates to shifting cultural constructions which celebrate the violent femme and normalise ‘ladette’ culture. The second relates to the impact of new forms of social online networking that create a parallel universe that rewards and incites girls’ fights and girls’ violence in the real world. The chapter then canvasses possible reasons for the rise in women participating in terrorist activity, especially suicide bombing and assassination, in countries like Russia, Palestine, Israel, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Women, the fastest cohort swelling the ranks of contemporary organisations defined as terrorist, make better assassins and suicide bombers than men and since 2008 have been responsible for more than half of the world’s assassinations! This chapter offers an explanation as to why. The chapter will no doubt be controversial and met with scepticism, disbelief or even fury. The most important point made by this chapter is that acts of female terrorism are not rooted in any particular religion, politics, ethnicity or social background. Not all are Islamist. Many women involved in acts of armed struggle and terrorism both historically and in the contemporary context are associated with secular causes and political struggles.

The final chapter synthesises the arguments developed in the book and suggests some possibilities for further research using a transnational feminist intersectional framework. It argues that if feminism wants to have a voice in the public, cultural, political and criminological debates about heightened, albeit often exaggerated, social concerns about growing female violence and engagement in terrorism, then new directions in theorising female violence are required. Feminist silences about the violent crimes, atrocities and acts of terrorism committed by the female sex leave anti-feminist explanations uncontested. It is time to contest these and offer counter explanations for the rise in female violence and female terrorism, in a global context where systemic gendered violence against women is alarming and entrenched. The world needs feminism to take hold across the globe, now more than ever.

References

• Currie, E. (2013) ‘The Sustaining Society’, in K. Carrington, M. Ball, E. O’Brien and J. Tauri (eds.) Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: New International Perspectives, Willan: Collompton, 3–15.
• Wright, Mills C. (1959) The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press: New York.

2 Globalising Feminist Criminology

Gender, crime and geo-spatial inequality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315748368-2

This chapter argues that criminological theories (including feminist criminologies) need to encompass more global perspectives and outlooks. Just as the colonialists of much of the southern hemisphere came from the north, so too has a great deal of criminological theory. There is nothing wrong with adopting theories from the northern hemisphere; it is just that many criminological theories embedded assumptions based on densely settled urban environments of Europe or North America. These theories do not transplant well to the southern hemisphere where crime problems tend to be constructed around Indigenous populations and the architecture, culture and customs of rural and regional life in these vast continents shaped by distinctly different patterns of crime and forms of violence. The chapter sets out an alternative framework of transnational feminist intersectionality to correct the biases embedded in the metropolitan criminological gaze that has for too long privileged theories from the northern hemisphere. The chapter makes the case that for feminism to enhance its international relevance it also needs to widen its research agendas to include the distinctively different gendered patterns of crime and violence that occur across the globe from outside the lens of urban-centric criminological theorising. It describes what those lenses are, how feminist criminology has tended to uncritically, if unwittingly, replicate them and how it can begin to rectify those conceptual shortcomings through a feminist transnational inter sectionality, the conceptual scaffolding for the rest of the book.

Metropolitan thinking and the limits of the criminological gaze

In Southern Theory, Connell takes issue with the way that social theory pretends to be placeless and universal. This theoretical strategy produces ‘readings from the centre’, which make universal claims about social relations and experiences about both global hemispheres, yet fails to reflect on the geo-political specificity of these (Connell 2007:44). In a hierarchy of global social science, southern theorists from Asia, Africa, Australia and Latin America are rarely considered of relevance to the social scientists from the global north. In one devastating swoop Connell argues, ‘Debates among the colonised are ignored, the intellectuals of colonised societies are unreferenced, and social process is analysed in an ethnographic time-warp’ (Connell 2007:44). This kind of theory, which Connell calls metropolitan theory, fails to conceptualise ‘the bloodshed’, ‘the destruction of social relations’ and the ‘dispossession’ ‘involved in creating the current world in which we live’ (Connell 2007:215). Southern theories are either ignored, excluded or pressed into service as a ‘data mine’ for metropol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Abbreviations
• 1 Feminism and global justice: introduction
• 2 Globalising feminist criminology: gender, crime and geo-spatial inequality
• 3 Violence against women and women’s struggles for justice: Asia and the Middle East
• 4 Violence against women and women’s struggles for justice: Latin America
• 5 Masculinity matters: super-capitalism, men and violence
• 6 Female violence, torture and terrorism: is feminism spoiling girls?
• 7 New directions in transnational feminist criminology
• Index