Sexuality and the Politics of Violence and Safety

Les Moran, Beverley Skeggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136499562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence offers a timely and critical exploration of issues of safety and security at the centre of responses to violence. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, drawing on feminism, lesbian and gay studies, sociology, cultural geography, criminology and critical legal scholarship, the book offers to transform the way we understand and respond to the challenges raised by violence. It breaks new ground in its examination of the rhetoric and politics of violence, property, home, cosmopolitanism and stranger danger in the generation of safety and security. Using interviews, focus groups and surveys with lesbians and gay men, Sexuality and the Politics of Violence draws upon 'real life' experiences of safety and security. It raises some fundamental challenges to the law and order politics of existing scholarship and activism on homophobic hate crime.

1 Violence, sexuality and cultures and spaces of safety

This is a book about violence and safety. Our primary focus is the nature and practices of safety and security, not violence, a departure from most contemporary writing on violence. The focus on safety can be explained simply. Safety and security are at the heart of reactions and responses to violence, yet violence is predominantly represented as being in opposition to safety. But this is a very partial and limited representation of the relationship of violence and safety. The loss of safety and insecurity – the threat of, the drama, the anxiety, the possibility – shapes the whole public imaginary of violence.¹ Violence, we suggest, is also for safety and security.

In taking safety and security as our point of departure, it is not our intention to suggest that work which gives priority to violence, is either invalid or has no urgency. Nor do we seek to distract attention from the perpetrators of violence. Our study builds on pioneering lesbian and gay scholarship (Blumenfeld 1992; Comstock 1992; Herek and Berrill 1992; Mason and Tomsen 1997; Valentine 1989) and activism (Butler 1997b); Greater Manchester Lesbian and Gay Policing Initiative (GML & GPI) 1999; Kuehnle and Sullivan 2001; Mason and Palmer 1996; National Advisory Group 1999; National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programmes (NCAVP) 1999; Sandroussi and Thompson 1995; Morrison and Mackay 2000), which documents violence previously denied or ignored. Though debate continues as to whether this work documents previously unrecorded levels of violence or reports an explosion of ‘new’ violence (Jacobs and Potter 1999; Moran 2000), it is clear that lesbians and gay men experience a wide spectrum of heterosexist violence, from physical assault to harassment and verbal abuse, on a day-to-day basis.

The nature and form of safety and security is frequently an unexplored and unquestioned dimension of work on violence in general, and violence against lesbians and gays in particular. In part, this may be explained by the immediacy of the impact of violence and the urgency of the need to respond to its damaging effects. Critical reflection on the assumptions of safety and security at play in the response to violence may, in this context, seem to be something of a diversion, a luxury, which is at best out of place. In the specific context of violence against lesbians and gay men, the absence of critical reflection also needs to be situated in the political context in which debates and interventions, focusing on violence, have arisen. An urgent priority has been, and in many instances remains, the struggle to ensure that this violence is recognised and taken seriously as a threat to good order. Critical reflection on the nature and form of safety and security also tends to be overshadowed by a focus on the individual and social causes of the violence where the primary objective is to bring violence to a more speedy and successful end.

Safety and security also remain marginal and unexplored for another reason. Much work on violence emphasises the failure of security and the lack of safety. In part this focus reflects the immediate political context of the intervention: the demand that a wide network of individuals and organisations (both official and voluntary) take violence seriously and provide services to promote safety and security. It is not our intention to suggest that this approach has no validity. Our objective is to question the assumptions about safety and security that inform this work. We want to expose the silences and question the marginalisation of perceptions and practices of safety and security that takes place in this politics. Safety and security, we argue, are too important to be left as assumptions operating in the shadow of violence.

Various factors suggest that this is a matter that demands urgent attention. There can be little doubt that the oppressive and destructive dimensions of heterosexist violence are a key factor informing the task of the management of violence by lesbians and gay men. However, as Gail Mason (2001) has demonstrated, the management of violence also has another dimension. It is one context in which lesbians and gay men take control. Both dimensions inform the nature and day-to-day practices of safety and security produced by lesbians and gay men. In turn both are at work in the sexual politics of violence and safety that turns to the state in general, and its institutions of crime control in particular, in attempts to counteract the everyday reality of heterosexist violence. An emphasis on insecurity and the lack of safety denies this complex state of affairs. There is considerable irony in silencing and marginalising the practices of safety and security by those who are particularly vulnerable in society. Lesbian and gay people have long had primary responsibility for their own sexual safety, and in the face of day-to-day hostility it is a remarkable success story. The priority of insecurity threatens to ignore this fact, pushing the nature and practices of sustainable safety and security developed by lesbians and gay men out of the political frame. At best, the sexual politics of safety takes the form of unspoken assumptions at the heart of interventions relating to violence. At worst, the priority of insecurity may reinforce vulnerability and disempower.

Wendy Brown (1995) captures another of our concerns. She warns of the ‘perils of pursuing emancipatory political aims’ (p. ix), suggesting that progressive and emancipatory political projects may, contrary to expectations, generate reactionary and conservative political effects and affects, producing unfreedom in the name of freedom. Safety and security, we argue, is one context in which a progressive and emancipatory politics of sexual violence may in fact reinforce modalities of subordination and exclusion. Our reference to the lesbian and gay experiences arising out of a sexual politics of violence and safety does not seek to single out that politics or experience of violence and safety for particular criticism. Nor is it to suggest that it has unique problems. Our objective is to use the lesbian and gay experience to explore the limits of contemporary political projects of violence and safety more generally.

This book will offer evidence in support of our argument that, in the absence of critical reflection on safety and security, political projects which demand that violence be taken more seriously will at best be flawed. A failure to address the nature and form of safety and security that is being produced in response to violence, we argue, threatens to limit and undermine the very objectives of freedom and justice promoted by that politics.

In developing a critical understanding of the nature and form of experiences and practices of safety and security we may be in a position to more actively define, influence and determine the satisfaction of our present and future safety and security needs. In turn it may help to draw attention to the dangers and limits of a political agenda founded upon safety and security which may close off the possibility of understanding the significance of regimes and perceptions of safety and security that inform a perpetrator’s acts of violence. Violence is not the antithesis of safety and security. As we demonstrate in Chapter 2, violence is a key practice of safety and security. An analysis of safety and security will enable us to better understand violence and its relation to social order. Finally, we are concerned that without critical reflection on safety and security the future of lesbian and gay social order will, in our name, be imposed on us by default, rather than as the result of our active participation in determining its manner and form.

Cultures of safety

Before we turn to analyse current experiences and practices of safety and security we make some comments about the wider social and cultural contexts and concerns that inform the sexual politics of violence and safety. The backdrop to contemporary sexual politics of violence and safety is changing economic, social and cultural conditions. These have been variously described as a shift from Fordism to post-Fordism; modernity to post-modernity, tradition to de-traditionalisation; a movement from the politics of redistribution to recognition politics, and the vision of a society based on hyper-commodification and the immateriality of culture, generated through various formations of ambivalence, risk and reflexivity. All represent an attempt to understand the present through both continuity and change. And whilst these reported changes are often at the level of rhetoric, polemic and suggestion, in this study we want to explore how they are changing the landscape for how we can understand violence, safety and the politics of sexuality. For instance, David Garland (2001) documents how the structures of criminal justice, a set of state institutions dedicated to security, safety and order, have changed in important ways, arguing that the most important aspect in the ‘history of the present’ are the cultural assumptions that animate them. He identifies a new crime control culture that embodies a reworked conception of penal welfare, a new criminology of control, and an economic style of decision-making, formed through new administrative strategies and institutional domains. Yet, this crime control culture is not just shaped by the mechanisms through which it is institutionalised, it is also shaped by much wider issues of sexuality, gender, race and class.

Sexuality informs and reworks what we know as culture through the increasing presence of lesbian and gay issues on a public agenda. An objective of this study of violence and the cultures of safety is to examine both the politics and strategies that produce sexual subjects in this context and to explore how these particular sexual subjects impact politically through the use of culture. Garland (2001) and Young (1999) suggest that crime control has been shaped by two underlying forces, the distinctive social organisation of late modernity and the free-market socially conservative politics, that came to dominate UK and US politics in the late 1980s. We want to know how these forces simultaneously shape and are informed by new political organising and new demands on the state and markets.

The demands made by a variety of different groups, such as lesbian and gay demands for safety and security, need to be set, we propose, in the context of new patterns of association between political, economic and civil institutions that are currently being forged, such as those illustrated in the new debates about governance,² a term that designates rather loosely a field that takes in debates over private interest government, neo-corporatism, mesocorporatism, private interest, government, socio-economics and associative governance (Slater and Tonkiss 2001). Studies of governance focus on issues of policy problem-solving, questions of institutional design, mechanisms of representation and particular objects of regulation – such as crime control – constituted through the very discourses and practices that seek to govern them. One aspect of new debates about governance is that cultural goods and cultural logics have become increasingly more significant in generating both economic value and mechanisms of social order. How the public imaginary is shaped in terms of how people think they can relate to and make use of violence and state institutions is also significant. This is why new forms of governance are central to how political claims can be shaped. To explore this further we now turn to the claims that have been made by lesbian and gay politics for recognition.

Recognition politics?

Nancy Fraser (1995) documents a shift from the 1980s politics of redistribution (concerned with inequality, economy and class) to a politics of recognition (concerned with difference, identity and culture). This shift means that in order to have access to the protection of the law, or any rights, one must be ‘recognised’ as legitimate. Visibility and the relation of the visible to the invisible are central to recognition politics. Eve Sedgwick (1990) suggests that the relation of visiblity/invisibility is the ‘defining structure’ for lesbian and gay oppression. We would add that it is also central to the lesbian and gay recognition politics of freedom. In the context of violence and safety various techniques such as crime surveys and autobiographical accounts of violence,³ have had particular significance in the production of new visibilities.

Patricia Williams (1991) documents that for black people in the United States pathology or invisibility are the ways in which they are legally seen. They are not just misrecognised (as pathological), but often not recognised at all. This is the violence of judgement where one is delegitimated. Yet law’s violence, as McVeigh et al. (2001) note, developing Derrida, is that it can be distinguished from ‘numb force’ because it opens an opportunity to respond to the call of justice. All recognition claims are claims for justice, an appeal to be heard and seen and not misrecognised. So the demand for recognition is always a demand for justice. One of the demands made by lesbians and gay men is that they become visible before the law and therefore can access protection. There are various techniques for producing this visibility (such as crime surveys, as will be discussed below). Yet recognition politics is always reliant upon a scopic economy, that is, it assumes that groups can be made visible, want to be made visible and that visibility can enable a claim to be made on the state. But the demand for law through visibility may produce paradoxical effects. It may generate forms of visibility that, when rendered through law, generate very restricted representations of lesbian and gay experience (Robson 1998; Phelan 2001).

The demand for law always forces groups to become visible (otherwise their demand could not be seen). Any demand for law brings into focus the values that have been attached to the groups who are making the claim for recognition and state protection; values previously attached through various forms of symbolic economy. Alison Young (1996) charts the institutionalisation of visibility, which ‘mark the time of the criminal by marshalling a citizenry against her as the subject-to-be-looked-at; all mark the face of the citizen as the subject-who-looks, in an ever present state of watchfulness’ (p. 210). It is through these scopic economies that an ‘us’ and ‘them’ can be imagined. But who is the ‘us’ and ‘them’ when complicated by sexuality?

So whilst recognition may enable claims for law, justice, resources and legitimation to be made, it may also be premised upon misrecognition, and by attaching negative values to the groups who demand recognition, the subject may be fixed in new exclusions and pathologies. Part of the struggle we see in the demand for law is premised upon both making visible and trying to engage a shift from misrecognition (negative value attribution) to recognition (positive value attribution)⁴ via culture and identity. To participate in recognition politics, categories have to already exist, or have to be made, that have some sense of value and are inhabitable by those who are meant to occupy them.⁵ So, for instance, as Sara Ahmed (1998) has shown in relation to being black, and Beverley Skeggs (1997) has shown in relation to being white and working-class, and Mariam Fraser (1999) has shown in relation to queer, some categories of visibility are brought into recognition with only negative value attached to them.

When the political landscape is shaped by visibility/invisibility who and what can be seen (and how) becomes highly significant. This is particularly acute for the politics of sexuality, as Mason (2002) demonstrates. Examining the visual and discursive nature of violence, she details how violence infiltrates not just the daily experience of lesbians and gay men, but also the knowledge systems through which we construct and recognise sexual identities. She also shows how homophobic hostility functions through the ambiguous trope of visibility. Using the metaphor of visuality, Mason argues that violence is itself a spectacle, a bodily experience and practice through which we see and thereby come to know certain things. Violence, she argues, also makes a ‘statement’ about the disordered, or dislocated nature of lesbian (and we would add gay) sexuality. Different repertoires of meaning operate as mediums through which violence is experienced.

The act of violence is a spectacle. This is not so much because violence is something that we observe, but, more, because violence is a mechanism through which we distinguish and observe other things. In other words violence is more than a practice that acts upon individual subjects to inflict harm and injury. It is, metaphorically speaking, also a way of looking at these subjects.

(Mason 2002: 11)

One of the central techniques of mobilising identity to generate recognition is the use of pain to make a claim. Violence is the inscription of pain, but then pain is also used to assuage and control violence and to demand a different violence. Brown (1995) contends that the injuries, insults and agonies embodied in the politicised subject become a necessary fetish for gaining visibility and credibility in late modernity (Taylor 1994); the subject, in effect, is what she feels, and she desires recognition of her pain as her primary identity. For Brown, as a result of this complete identification with pain, the politicised subject is either unable or unwilling to break its hold or envision a less self-absorbing and retributive politics, leading her to argue that it is ultimately neo-conservative because it does not project into the future.

Locating recognition: being in and out of place

The sexual politics of safety and security in particular, and recognition politics in general, we argue, is always a matter of location: of being in and out of place. We want to draw attention to two connections between recognition and space. The first concerns the relationship between recognition, visibility and space. The work of Castells and Murphy (1982) suggests that place is a precondition for the visibility of marginalised groups. They argue that excluded groups need to symbolically occupy a given territory if they are to have any impact upon the transformation of the urban structure. However, at the same time, to make oneself symbolically visible always invokes systems of knowledge, classification and disciplinary power. Visibility is always spatialised and dialogic. As Zukin (1990) notes, the production of place depends on decisions made about what should be visible and what should not, who should occupy the space and who should not. Pile and Thrift (1995) describe the way in which, within scopic regimes, visual practices fix the subject into the authorised map of power and meaning. The institutional landscape of the inner-city, Keith (1993) contends, creates a cultural reality that in part defines the frames...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Violence, sexuality and cultures and spaces of safety
• 2 Violence for safety
• 3 Attachment to hate: the emotional dimensions of lesbian and gay crime control
• 4 The limits of law and order: individual responsibility
• 5 The rhetoric and politics of property
• 6 Comfort and the location of safety - home
• 7 Cosmopolitan safety
• 8 Stranger danger: the use of estrangement and the politics of fear
• 9 Conclusion: the challenges of safety and security
• Notes
• References
• Index