The Spectacle of Violence

Homophobia, Gender and Knowledge

Gail Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134657193
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on in-depth interviews with women reflecting a range of experiences of verbal hostility, physical violence and sexual violence, Spectacle of Violence explores the issues surrounding violence and hostility towards lesbians and gay men.

Challenging current thinking, Gail Mason highlights the ways in which different identities, bodes and systems of through interact, and asks fundamental questions:

* Where does violence come from?
* What effects does it have?
* How do lesbians and gay men manage the risk of violence?
* What is the relationship between violence and power?

She argues for the importance of thinking about homophobic violence in the context of other core issues such as gender and race.

Focusing on 'real life' experiences of violence, The Spectacle of Violence is an important contribution to current thought about violence. Moving beyond issues of causation and prevention, it offers new ways of theorizing the relationship between identity, knowledge and power.

1

Looking Through Experience

Letter II. Plan for a penitentiary inspection-house.

Before you look at the plan, take in words the general idea of it.

The building is circular.

The apartments of the prisoners occupy the circumference. You may call them if you please, the cells.

These cells are divided from one another, and the prisoners by that means secluded from all communication with each other, by partitions in the form of radii issuing from the circumference towards the centre …

The apartment of the inspector occupies the centre; you may call it if you please the inspector’s lodge… .

Each cell has in the outward circumference, a window, large enough, not only to light the cell, but, through the cell, to afford light enough to the correspondent part of the lodge.

The inner circumference of the cell is formed by an iron grating, so light as not to screen any part of the cell from the inspector’s view.

(Bentham 1962: 40–1)

In 1787 Jeremy Bentham, while visiting Russia, read an item in an English newspaper that captured his attention. The item advertised the proposed construction of a ‘House of Corrections’. Employing ideas generated by his brother’s exposure to a Parisian military school (Gordon 1980), Bentham responded to the advertisement by designing a building that he initially referred to as the ‘Inspection House’ but which later became known as the panopticon.¹ According to Bentham’s original letters, the ‘central-inspection principle’ of this architectural design allowed it to be used for many, fundamentally identical, purposes: to guard the insane, reform the vicious, confine the suspected, employ the idle, punish the incorrigible, or educate the young (Bentham 1962: 40). In structural terms, the panopticon has a central tower with wide windows around its exterior. The tower is ringed by an annular building that is divided into cells and each cell occupies the full depth of this building. Within the central tower, a supervisor is located and, within each cell, a prisoner, patient, worker or ‘madman’ is housed. There are two windows in each cell, one on the inside facing the tower and one facing the outside world. In this way, sunlight is able to pass through the outer window to illuminate the interior space of the cell. This backlight effect is axiomatic to the design of the panopticon. By illuminating the cells it ensures that the occupants are visible from the tower.²

It was, of course, the architectural form and function of the panopticon that Foucault (1977) later transfigured into a visual and spatial metaphor for the disciplinary relations of modern western societies. Whilst Bentham and Foucault both express a deep respect for the panoptic schema, the rationale behind this respect is quite different for each. In Bentham’s case, the panopticon is a practical means of observation that literally renders a whole group of human beings visible. The ingenuity of the design is found in the fact that those individuals who inhabit the outer cells of the panoptic structure, whether they be school children or convicted offenders, are visible at any given moment to those who supervise them from the central tower. It is the knowledge afforded by this visibility, the fact that inmates know that the supervisors can see what they are doing, that enables the panoptic institution to effectively control a large mass of people. In Foucault’s panopticon, observation is also a medium to knowledge but the visibility it occasions has a figurative, rather than practical, significance to it. In appropriating the image of the panopticon to explicate his hypothesis on disciplinary power, Foucault suggests that human subjects become particular types of individuals according to the ways in which we are rendered visible within historically specific systems of knowledge. It is this visibility, the normative means via which we recognise ourselves and others, that facilitates the management and control of populations. In effect, this means that the very method through which Bentham sought to perfect his panoptic design – the production of a sense of abiding visibility – is the very feature that leads Foucault to characterise the panoptic schema as the symbol of an insidious form of power. The key to the panoptic mechanism, for both Bentham and Foucault, is found in this nexus between knowledge and visuality, in the idea that to render something visible is to make it knowable in ways that matter.

It is this correlation between knowledge and visuality that interests me in this chapter and, indeed, in many parts of this book.³ Whilst panopticism is about much more than methodology, I believe that the different ways in which Bentham and Foucault engage with the idea that visuality is a medium to knowledge is indicative of one of the primary debates in empirical research methodology today. This is the question of how we employ accounts of the personal experience of individuals. On the one hand, we have the idea that observation is an effective means of learning details about the daily lives of a particular group of individuals. This was Bentham’s assumption. So too is it the method by which the empirical researcher acquires forms of knowledge about his or her research subjects. Such observations might be made in the course of person-to-person interviews, ethnographies, participant observations, or the compilation of quantitative data. Although this approach to knowledge recognises that there are limitations on what can be observed, the overall intention is to treat empirical observations as visible evidence of that which took place. Indeed, in many cases, such observations may be the only means of attaining knowledge about a given phenomenon. On the other hand, we have Foucault’s more ambivalent treatment of visuality. In this approach, phenomena are not simply observed. Instead, the practice of observation itself brings these things into being in specific terms: in the panoptic model the human subject becomes visible as a certain type of individual through the struggles between various knowledge regimes to define him or her. This way of thinking raises a fundamental dilemma for the researcher who wishes to observe everyday experience as a means of knowing the empirical world. If the individual who ‘has’ such experience is situated within various relations of knowledge and power, how are we to understand the accounts that he or she provides of the ‘real’ world? Is it possible to treat these experiences as a straightforward body of evidence or do we need to acknowledge the cultural contexts to which they are indebted (including the research environment itself) and the discursive functions they might perform? If so, how?

In this chapter I engage with these questions. This is because qualitative accounts of experience form the empirical backbone of this book. These accounts are drawn from an interview research project into the perceptions and experiences of homophobia-related hostility and violence among Australian lesbians (discussed in more detail below). In the chapters that follow, I draw heavily upon these accounts to make a number of arguments about homophobia-related violence, difference and power. They provide me with an invaluable means of ‘observing’ violence and hostility on a collective scale. It would not be possible for me to make these arguments without this body of knowledge. So, whilst my reading of Bentham’s panopticon reminds me of the value of empirical observations of individual experience, my reading of Foucault’s panopticon reminds me of the poststructural imperative to refrain from relying upon such experience as an unproblematic form of evidence. It is the tension between these two approaches that has raised the most consistent, not to mention troublesome, epistemological issues for my research. It is this tension that I primarily address in this chapter.

In order to begin considering how we might bring empirical accounts of experience and poststructural theory into close proximity with each other, I provide a brief overview of some of the methodologies that have prioritised empirical research, such as post-positivism and feminism. I suggest that there is a tendency in these methodologies to treat experience as a selfevident form of knowledge which, in turn, relies upon a liberal-humanist model of the human subject. Taking sexuality as my example, and panopticism as my framework, I consider why this model of the subject is no longer convincing. In endeavouring to respond to the proposition that accounts of experience do not represent a foundational knowledge of the ‘real world’, I propose that it is important to engage with both the fields of knowledge that feed into the experience of violence and the constitutive functions that such experience performs. In the last section of the chapter I discuss some of the more practical aspects of this approach to experience. I describe the research project that has enabled me to highlight women’s experiences of homophobia-related hostility and violence. I then explain my approach to the critique of this experience as a question of looking for, and analysing, ‘statements’ of violence. My intention is to provide a basic framework for engaging with interview accounts of experience in the remainder of the book. Although the use of such material raises important methodological questions, I hope to demonstrate that these should neither discourage academic researchers from drawing upon observations of experience nor preclude us from taking a critical approach to such experience.

Experience as a Question of Evidence

The panopticon is a striking example of the importance ascribed to notions of visuality during the modernist era. Extending beyond the obvious fields of art and architecture, this fascination with sight and perspective infiltrated the development of western science (Foster 1988). Initially, it was the natural sciences that stressed the discovery of knowledge through disembodied and neutral observations. When social science later came to establish its own credentials, it emulated this approach by defining social facts as those observations that are independent of the knowing and/or experiencing subject. The dominant paradigm that has emerged relies upon a strict set of criteria for determining if a given form of knowledge is valid and reliable. Lennon and Whitford put it like this:

Within that framework knowledge is referential – it is about something (the object) situated outside the knower. Knowledge is said to mirror an independently existing world, as that world really is. Putative knowledge reaches these goals by conforming to a set of criteria for testing and validation. These criteria are universal… . Genuine knowledge does not reflect the subject who produced it.

(1994: 2)

Although challenges to this positivist ideal cannot be confined to any one historical period, it is fair to say that since the 1960s we have witnessed an unprecedented groundswell of dissatisfaction with the epistemological foundations and methodological conventions of social science.⁴ In the wake of commentators such as Thomas Kuhn (1962), a plethora of post-positivist methodologies have emerged. In general, these have sought to find ways of undertaking empirical research without buying into the tenets of traditional social science (Lincoln and Guba 1985; Reason and Rowan 1981). For example, they have attempted to: recognise the influence of the researcher in the knowledge that is produced; value the subjectivity and heterogeneity of research participants; engage with competing versions of the phenomena under examination; and allow research participants greater control over the research process and outcomes.

In the last twenty years or so, these methodologists have also been drawn to broader theoretical dissections of, and challenges to, modernist knowledge claims. Before discussing how these challenges relate to the specific question of experience, the point I wish to briefly make here is that it is the poststructural disavowal of foundational (not to mention objective) accounts of reality that has probably held the most appeal for post-positivists seeking to recognise the discursive registers that frame empirical narratives. At the same time, however, the anti-empiricist tendencies of poststructuralism (Rosenau 1992) have generated the greatest source of tension for those researchers who maintain a stake in empirical research. This tension tempers the extent to which poststructural theory is taken up in the methodological design of empirical research. In academic spheres with strong political roots, such as feminism, this seems to have led to an epistemological rift between those who are committed to the empirical generation of experiential knowledge, and those committed to deconstructing the very concepts that provide such knowledge (and the research methods used to produce it) with epistemic value in the first place; concepts such as woman, lesbian, subject, experience, victim, violence, etc.⁵ Given feminism’s long-standing commitment to acknowledge, and assuage, the injury and harm of violence it is hardly surprising that the vast majority of feminist research on men’s violence towards women falls into the former camp and, in some instances, expresses a deep suspicion of poststructural challenges to the authority of experiential knowledge and the identity categories upon which it usually relies (Hester, Kelly and Radford 1996). In order to begin to explore the sources of this tension let me look more closely at one of the major ways in which experience has featured in feminist research, particularly empirical research.

Feminism and Experience

Feminist thinking has produced some of the most influential challenges to the positivist tenets of social and behavioural science (Harding 1986; Reinharz 1979; Roberts 1981; Stanley and Wise 1983). Just as feminists have impugned the androcentric foundations of many academic disciplines, so too have they critiqued the methodological praxis through which these disciplines define themselves and the epistemological conventions that underpin this practice. Having revealed that claims to transcendence, objectivity and universality merely served to camouflage the male-centred source of much academic knowledge, early feminist commentators sought to articulate a philosophical approach to research that was capable of rivalling this masculinist paradigm.

One of the most significant elements of this challenge to positivism – and of particular relevance to research accounts of experience – was the prioritisation of women’s views of the world. Gradually, and borrowing from Hegel and Marx, these efforts crystallised into what become known as feminist standpoint epistemology.⁶ By rendering women’s experiences of the world more visible, standpoint epistemology sought to give a voice to those that had previously been silenced or marginalised. Although Hartsock (1983a) originally argued that a feminist standpoint was something that feminists had to achieve, many subsequent versions have adopted the concept of ‘women’s standpoint’ as a social given. As we see in sociology, psychology and black feminist studies, standpoint epistemology argues that research should start with women’s lives, or with particular women’s lives, and treat women’s experience as the grounds of feminist knowledge (Smith 1987; Gilligan 1982; Collins 1990). According to Harding, research that commences from this marginalised social situation is ‘scientifically better’ because it is capable of generating ‘less partial and distorted accounts of nature and social life’ (Harding 1993: 61, 65).

By juxtaposing alternate subjectivities, standpoint epistemology has been able to critique the supposedly objective and universal evidence of many disciplines. In addition, the prioritisation of women’s experience has challenged the positivist insistence that only certain types of data constitute real or scientific knowledge. Although experience has always provided a key ontological basis to the politics of feminism (it has been used to generate perceptions of collective oppression), the propensity of standpoint feminism to accord this kind of epistemic privilege to women as a group has attracted much criticism from other feminist quarters. Such critics have noted both a tendency to equate knowledge with experience (as if the act of knowing could be reduced to the realities of being) and an inclination to concede primacy to restricted understanding of identity (such as woman, black woman, or lesbian woman). For example, it is now well accepted that global concepts such as ‘women’s ways of knowing’ tend to essentialise the category of woman and minimise the way in which gender interacts with regimes of ethnicity, sexuality and class (Bar On 1993; Alcoff 1991/2). Although advocates of standpoint epistemology have responded to these criticisms in various ways, in the final analysis most empirical researchers who remain committed to a model of standpoint continue to position women’s experience as the foundation or starting point for knowledge and, in some instances, a superior form of knowledge.⁷

One of the problems that this raises for empirical research interested in poststructural theory, and the problem that concerns me in this chapter, is that standpoint epistemology continues to assume that the reality of social life is a ‘given’, a ‘preconceptual material fact’, and that women’s experiences provide us with access to these facts (Hekman 1999: 37).⁸ It is only possible to privilege personal experience in this way, as a form of unmediated evidence, if we accept the liberal-humanist proposition that the subject who has these experiences is an original and coherent source of the meaning of reality; or, as Scott puts it, if we accept that the things that the subject ‘sees’, and thereby knows, are a ‘direct apprehension of a world of transparent objects’ (1991: 775). The difficulty, of course, is that it is no longer adequate to assume that the experiences that individuals recount are simply an unmediated version of what took place. In part, this is because the idea of a pre-discursive and selfknowing subject has come under increasing challenge in recent years. This shift in thinking has significant implications for the way in which we engage with personal accounts of experience. Before considering these implications it is first necessary to articulate the parameters of this challenge and to consider what an alternate model of the human subject might look like. It is helpful to return to the question of panopticism in order to do this.

Panopticism: Bentham and Foucault

Jeremy Bentham sought perfection in the design of the panopticon. In his eyes, this meant constant and unrelenting surveillance. Realising the impossibility of this architectural ideal, Bentham’s solution was to contrive a structural means for the occupants of the tower to ‘see without being seen’. This was achieved in two ways. In the cells, the ubiquitous backlight effect ensured that inmates were always visible from the tower, although such visibility was usually in the form of a small shadow rather than a fully featured person. In the tower, a complex system of windows and blinds guaranteed that the supervisors had a constant view of the cells without ever being visible themselves. Bentham went so far as to speculate that if a whole family were housed in the tower (of course, only the head of the family need be paid), they would be sufficiently ‘amused’ by the scene to observe it during every free moment: ‘It will supply in their instance the place of that great and constant fund of entertainment to the sedentary and vacant in towns – the looking out of the window’ (1962: 45). Inmates would thus have the sense that they were under continual surveillance and, importantly, be prevented from determining anything to the contrary. In stark contrast to this axial visibility was the plan for complete lateral invisibility. Cells were to be perfectly individualised so as to prevent all communication between inmates: ‘He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault 1977: 200). In this way the panopticon was able to order a human mass into a neatly organi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: impetus
• 1. Looking through experience
• 2. Disorder
• 3. Different territory: a question of intersectionality?
• 4. Body maps: envisaging homophobia, violence and safety
• 5. Backlight and shadow: constituting danger
• 6. Violence: an instrument of power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index