Violence in Everyday Life

Power, Gender and Sexuality

Aliraza Javaid

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781786997227
• eBook ISBN: 9781786997241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Violence in Everyday Life explores how identity markers such as gender and sexuality intersect with violence, synthesizing the themes of gender, sexuality and violence to offering a crucial and coherent framework for understanding the interrelationship between these concepts. Aliraza Javaid explores how violence is experienced at a local, regional and global level, and considers the ways in which hegemonic masculinities are reproduced through violence. Attention is given to the particular ways in which these constructions of masculinity are reflected in areas such as homophobic violence, transphobic violence, and violence against intimate partners. Drawing on new empirical data and his own personal experiences of violence, as well as identifying new areas for further research, Javaid's work represents a unique study of the interconnectedness of violence, gender and sexuality, and of how violence is fuelled by society's attitudes towards masculinity.

1 | CONTEXTUALISING AND UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES AND SEXUALITIES

Introduction

We are living in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. The perils and fragilities of everyday social life are what keep us locked in a paralysis of fear. Our lives are shaped by fear; that crippling entity is what controls what we do, say, or how we behave. Being afraid is derived from the unpredictability of social life. We are unsure about how socially appropriate we are doing gender and sexuality. Are we masculine enough? Are we sexual enough? Am I the right sexuality? We worry that if we do not eat and look the right way, present ourselves in the right way, construct gender and sexuality in the right way, and so on, we are susceptible to threats of violence and exclusion. In memory of him, Victor Seidler (2018) pays homage to the late Zygmunt Bauman, who died on 9 January 2017. Seidler describes Bauman’s words in his last ever interview before he passed away, and just days after the Brexit vote in the UK. Bauman had declared that we are:

living in a state of continuous uncertainty, which makes us afraid … We are walking … as if on a minefield. We are aware that the field is full of explosives, but we can’t tell where there will be an explosion and when. (Seidler, 2018: 46)

Bauman draws on this metaphor of ‘walking’ to signify the everyday routines, practices, and rituals that we are accustomed to – we are always on the go – in order to get by. We lose sight of what is important to us, so much so that the fear that engulfs us, stemming from the unknown in everyday social life, keeps us trapped in these everyday routines that restrain us while the insidious threat of uncertainty lurks in the background. Uncertainty grows and grows, growing, getting larger. We live our lives in the confines of fear. We do not know when violence will attack us, either culturally, symbolically, or physically. We are unaware of the fragilities in our lives, we know life is fragile and never guaranteed, but we are made to casually walk through public life while ‘landmines’ are omnipresent. Explosions can surface at any moment, without any sort of predictability. Gender and sexuality norms and values form part of our existence that should we deviate from these norms in a given culture, these landmines will go off. Bang! Even though they are constructs, any deviation from these norms will set you apart as the ‘other’, the abnormal, the deviant, inducing social and cultural exclusion – symbolic violence at its best. Violence may be unleashed against you to put those norms back in place.

The purpose of this chapter is to set out the context of gender and sexuality to provide some understanding of their roots, how they actively become constructed and enacted, even in the confines of fear, so that you can understand how ‘doing’ violence enables gender and sexual norms and values to be reproduced and reinforced. The execution of violence allows for gender and sexuality to be formed at the local, regional, and global levels. At all three levels, either discursively, symbolically, metaphorically, or materially, masculinities and sexualities become configured. The uncertainty of social life and the unknowns that govern us gives rise to fears about what I call ‘gender appropriation’ or ‘sexuality appropriation’ to mean whether we are, in a given social culture, enacting gender and sexuality in an appropriate manner towards others. For example, throughout my writing career and my life as a gay person, I have been trying to understand why gay men are positioned in relation to straight people so problematically. Why are effeminate and camp gay men positioned in relation to ‘straight-acting’ and more masculine gay men so problematically? The positioning aspect of everyday life intrigues me as we cannot divorce ourselves from social and power relations. Although, as Messerschmidt and Tomsen (2011) demonstrate, boys and men as perpetrators perpetrate the great majority of violence, women and girls can also engage in violence, though to a lesser extent. Thus, it is important to touch not only on masculinities, but also female masculinities and femininities, in this chapter. It must be remembered that boys and men can navigate through femininities or be positioned in them by others. For example, male attackers feminise other men as a way to reinforce their own hegemonic masculinity as it offers the legitimation of non-equal gender relations between men. Hegemonic masculinity cannot function without feminising and subordinating others. I believe we need to closely explore femininities by men and boys and masculinities by women and girls, and how they intersect with violence. The book will consider all of this, as well as the importance of hegemonic masculinity as a theoretical capsule. Reference to Messerschmidt (2019) reveals that hegemonic masculinity is still as popular as ever in masculinity and sexuality writings, because it captures the manners in which unequal gender relations are legitimated.

Having set the context early on for the book, so that I can attempt to make strong links between gender, sexuality, and violence throughout, this chapter will emphasise that masculinities, femininities, and sexualities are tied into a web of power and social relations, and manifest within a system of gender relations. To evidence this, I offer some historical context to understanding the evolution of gender and sexuality; here, I briefly go back to antiquity and then up to the present day, tracing the historical constructions of gender and sexuality. I examine the tensions between the so-called ‘sex role’ theory and the social constructionist ideology of gender and sexuality. Thereafter, I explore multiple formations of gender to illustrate the relationships and processes via which social bodies produce masculinities and femininities. When I discuss multiple masculinities, my intention is not to name fixed character types, but rather configurations of practice that are formed during certain social contexts within an altering structure of gendered relationships. Then, I apply the social constructionist argument to sexualities, whereby I argue that sexuality is located in a place of sexual and social relations, and one of hierarchy, observing sexuality as a structure of social practice.

Historicising Gender and Sexuality: Where Do We Come From?

History is important. It reminds us where we have come from. It can help us trace certain aspects of ourselves. In the midst of everyday individualism and always being ‘on the go’, we sometimes lose sight of the significance of history even though it surrounds us all like a hall of sparkling clean mirrors. We cannot escape history even though we might choose to avoid it. When ‘doing’ history, we are reminded how far we have come yet how far we have left to go. I want to provide some historical context, then, to understanding gender and sexuality. Tracing their histories can allow us to see how they have become historically constructed. The history of gender and sexuality shapes the futures of these important identity markers; we cannot function without them as social creatures. Our social bodies are historical formations. For example, James Messerschmidt (2018a) writes:

From antiquity to the beginning of the seventeenth century, male and female bodies were seen as having the same body parts, even in terms of genitalia, with the vagina regarded as an interior penis, the vulva as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles. (p. 4)

Therefore, what we would now call ‘women’ were regarded as the same as what we would now call ‘men’. The ‘men’ and ‘women’ labels are precisely historically and socially constructed. ‘Sex’ is socially constructed. During this historical time period, women had the exact same body as men; the only difference was that the positioning of the body parts was dissimilar. Women were historically constructed as ‘lesser than’ in relation to men. Prior to the seventeenth century, sex was socially constructed. Among many people today, we are led to believe that sex was a pregiven category: you were either male or female, rather than taking the view that the labels ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘masculinity’, and ‘femininity’ are all socially and historically constructed, not ontological, categories.

After the Enlightenment period, a sex divide emerged whereby one had to be either ‘male’ or ‘female’. There was to be no ‘middle ground’, what we would now call the intersexed. For Foucault (1980):

everybody was to have one and only one sex. Everybody was to have his or her primary, profound, determined, and determining sexual identity; as far as the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial or illusory. (p. vii)

After the Enlightenment period, then, the dichotomy between male and female, or the male sex and the female sex, was seen to be very real, in that both could be distinguished according to their body, soul, physicality, and moral aspect (Connell, [2005] 2016; Messerschmidt, 2018a). A hierarchy in the representation of man and woman emerged, in which women were positioned as inferior in relation to men. This binary between men and women persisted after the Enlightenment. There was now this conceptualisation that shaped how both were to be viewed in the political, cultural, and economic spheres of everyday social life. Women were now ‘naturally’ born to be passive, subordinate, and vulnerable in contrast to men; men were ‘naturally’ assumed to be aggressive, invulnerable, and in control. After the Enlightenment period, criminologists Albert Cohen (1955) and Edwin Sutherland ([1942] 1956) heavily drew on what was known as ‘sex role’ theory to explain violence and crime, particularly the link between gender and violence. They naturalised the gender roles of women and men without considering differences between men and women and among men. They maintained the view that an essentialist dichotomy occurred between men and women. The sex role theory during this time determined the types and amounts of violence that boys, girls, men, and women perpetrate (Messerschmidt and Tomsen, 2011). However, according to Connell (2005), there is actually very little difference between what we now call ‘men’ and ‘women’. They are exactly the same social creatures, but the labels we attach to them have different symbolic meanings and connotations. Though sex role theorists introduced the link between gender and violence, it took modern feminists to dismantle the common-sense view of gender and violence that was popular then.

As the biological positivistic ideology grew during the post-Enlightenment period, heterosexuality became ‘natural’ and a pregiven entity. The opposite sexes, male and female, included the view that they were ‘made for each other’: ‘the heteronormative assumption that women and men are “made for each other” is sustained through the common-sense definition of vaginal penetration by the penis as “the sex act”’ (Jackson, 2006: 113). Since the Enlightenment, it was now considered normal and ‘natural’ for men to flourish in the public sphere of society while women were to stay in the private arena of the home. Biology took the lead. Heterosexuality became the forefront of all other identity markers. Rapidly, heterosexuality became fused...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Contextualising and Understanding Masculinities and Sexualities
• 2 Unspeakable Acts: Sexual Violence Against Men and Women
• 3 Murder and Evil
• 4 Homophobic Violence
• 5 Love as Violence: Intimate Partner Violence
• 6 Transphobic Violence: The Fear of the ‘Other’
• 7 Global Violence
• 8 Secrets Untold: Tales of Violence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index