Jane Kilby

Introduction to Special Issue Theorizing Violence

This special issue asks ‘What is violence?’ and as such it makes good on sociology’s neglect of what, by any account, constitutes a pressing reality for millions. Indeed, while the ‘scale and pervasiveness of violence today call urgently for serious analysis’ (Bernstein, Leys and Panitch, 2008: 6), sociologists and social theorists have been slow to respond. The contributors to this special issue are helping sociology to catch up, reflecting, as they do, on what is also an incredibly complex reality. Indeed, because violence is complex, the contributors do not offer any easy answers as to how we might understand it; nor do they provide a unified response, since doing so would be at odds with the aim of this special issue, which minimally is to render violence more complex, not less: violence will remain a ‘slippery concept’ (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004: 1). That said, violence is not just one concept among many, but a meta-concept (Bishop and Phillips, 2006); and as such it demands meta-analysis, which includes not only a questioning of the ontology of violence, as Sylvia Walby argues (2009; 2012), but a concomitant questioning of what we, as sociologists, can know of violence and how. Theorizing violence, that is, requires an interrogation also of what it is we mean by ‘understanding’ violence, and what makes understanding a ‘possibility’. But for the moment the question remains: why does sociology lack a tradition of studying and theorizing violence? Why is there no ‘sociology of violence’, when, as Walby makes clear, ‘the deployment and regulation of violence are social processes’ (2009: 216): with violence itself ‘socially patterned, embedded in institutions and regimes of inequalities’ (2009: 217)? Why, then, as Walby also writes, has the ‘importance of violence for people’s well-being’ been ‘much underestimated’ and ‘frequently rendered invisible’ within the canon of social

The visual fix: The seductive beauty of images of violence

This article questions the value of photographs of violence and suffering. Taking Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois’ anthology Violence in War and Peace (2004) as a point of departure and return, it will explore the significance of the inclusion of images of explicit violence when they readily acknowledge they risk both indifference and voyeuristic interest. Key to my analysis is the centrality of the body to the images. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois are wary of reducing questions of violence to bodily suffering, but the admission of so many images of physical violation undercuts their critique of the primacy of the physical in our accounts of violence. The use of the body as a brute signifier of violence is deeply problematic, not least because it is tied to questions of race. Ultimately, it is argued, they attempt, unconsciously, to fix the nature of violence – which they deem slippery because it is irrefutably social – in the (visualized) body.

Judith Butler, incest, and the question of the child’s love

In contrast to Judith Herman, who understands incest exclusively in terms of power, Judith Butler insists on the importance of the child’s love for our understanding of incest. Butler’s thinking in this respect is suggestive but underdeveloped, while also holding considerable implications for how we might understand the role of violence in social life. This article develops and assesses her thinking on the child’s love and its relation to the question of violence and trauma more generally. At issue is the question of how we are to understand violence. Is it always motivated? Is it always destructive? And finally are there limits to what can be understood?

Redeeming memories: The politics of trauma and history

In my view, Frigga Haug’s (2001) analysis of sexual abuse campaigns gets off to a bad start. Let me explain. Beginning her analysis with a description of a trip she made to Toronto in 1992, Haug cynically paints a picture of a social and political world seized by women’s desire to disclose memories of childhood abuse. Whether standing in an airport lounge watching TV, having lunch, taking classes or attending social events, Haug details how she is party to endless disclosures of childhood sexual abuse, and how, as a result, she experiences a creeping doubt with regard to the power of feminist discourse and a growing scepticism in the face of the demand that she believe ‘that almost every girl in Canada was in some way or other a victim of sexual abuse by her father or uncle’ (2001: 56). For Haug, the ‘success’ of feminist and public campaigns around childhood sexual abuse is questionable, not least because they focus on the crimes of individuals and not the economic and global abuses of neoliberalism. Going on to cite the hard facts of international trade in child prostitution and pornography, Haug argues in sum that: ‘The outrage against individualized misdeeds masks large-scale crime as it currently occurs under the heading of neoliberalism or liberalization of the markets’ (2001: 68). By pointing up the compromised if not complicit power of what are understood to be politically radical campaigns, Haug’s analysis is a germane and timely interrogation of the relationship between feminism and childhood sexual abuse in the context of global and economic exploitation. Indeed, given her critical attention to the economic forces of neoliberalism, her account can read as an attempt to re-establish the Marxism underpinning her early and influential writing on memory work (Haug et al., 1987), which would explain why she narrates a near inability to recognize its reception among Canadian students for whom memory work is automatically taken as a method for discovering an incestuous past (Haug, 2001: 56). For Haug, memory work is a method that should take us beyond domestic history, and in the context of her explicit argument it is difficult to question Haug’s desire for a politics of remembrance that does not elide the structural inequalities promoted and sustained by the world trade in children. Indeed, in the light of a more general ‘memory fever’ (Radstone, 2000), the contemporary status of memory and history is a question for politics in general and not just 201

The future of testimony : interdisciplinary perspectives on witnessing

Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the ground breaking Testimony, this collection brings together the leading academics from a range of scholarly fields to explore the meaning, use, and value of testimony in law and politics, its relationship to other forms of writing like literature and poetry, and its place in society. It visits testimony in relation to a range of critical developments, including the rise of Truth Commissions and the explosion and radical extension of human rights discourse; renewed cultural interest in perpetrators of violence alongside the phenomenal commercial success of victim testimony (in the form of misery memoirs); and the emergence of disciplinary interest in genocide, terror, and other violent atrocities. These issues are necessarily inflected by the question of witnessing violence, pain, and suffering at both the local and global level, across cultures, and in postcolonial contexts. At the volume’s core is an interdisciplinary concern over the current and future nature of witnessing as it plays out through a ‘new’ Europe, post-9/11 US, war-torn Africa, and in countless refugee and detention centers, and as it is worked out by lawyers, journalists, medics, and novelists. The collection draws together an international range of case-studies, including discussion of the former Yugoslavia, Gaza, and Rwanda, and encompasses a cross-disciplinary set of texts, novels, plays, testimonial writing, and hybrid testimonies. The volume situates itself at the cutting-edge of debate and as such brings together the leading thinkers in the field, requiring that each address the future, anticipating and setting the future terms of debate on the importance of testimony.

Introduction: Thinking Through Feminism

With contributions from some of the most important current feminist thinkers, Transformations traces both the shifts in thinking that have allowed feminism to arrive at its present point, and the way that feminist agendas have progressed in line with wider social developments. A thorough reassessment of feminisms place in contemporary life, the authors engage in current debates as diverse as globalization, technoscience, embodiment and performativity, taking feminism in fresh directions, mapping new territory and suggesting alternative possibilities.

Saving the girl : a creative reading of Alice Sebold’s Lucky and The Lovely Bones

In the late 1990s, Alice Sebold is writing what will become her phenomenally successful novel The Lovely Bones (2002), but she finds herself having to abandon it in order to write her critically acclaimed rape memoir Lucky (1999). She did not want, she says years later, Susie Salmon (the novel’s dead narrator) doing “work for her”, but wanted Susie free “to tell her own story”. Lucky would be the “real deal” about rape, while The Lovely Bones would be a fantasy. And yet, the memoir and novel are similar in many respects; and nearly identical to begin with. The Lovely Bones opens with the rape, murder and mutilation of a young girl – Susie – while Lucky opens with reference to the girl who was raped, murdered and mutilated in the tunnel Sebold was also raped in. This girl, Sebold maintains, always haunts her. Thus, I will argue, it is not possible to read her novel, which some critics have dismissed as “timid and sentimental”, without reading her gritty autobiography; and vice versa it is not possible to read Sebold’s rape memoir without reading her novel, which in a complex way bears witness to that unnamed girl, if not for all dead, unnamed girls. The question is, then, how does the intertextuality of Sebold’s novel and memoir, and, more broadly, the interrelationship of truth and fantasy, impact on our reading of Sebold’s work, especially her memoir? Keywords Rape, fact, fiction, truth, lie, reading, writing, creative witnessing, wishful thinking, utopia

In letting the perpetrator speak: Sexual violence and classroom politics

Abstract Purpose The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to explore the difficulties and potential of turning to the perpetrator of sexual violence; and to track the affective economy of engaging with perpetrator accounts. Design/methodology/approach This chapter will consider one of the earliest feminist studies of incest, Sandra Butler’s (1978) Conspiracy of Silence: The Trauma of Incest, followed by an analysis of Philippe Bourgois’ (1995, 1996, 2004) ethnographic study of Puerto Rican crack dealers. These are important studies for the fact that both Butler and Bourgois let the men speak freely of their violence, which for the Puerto Rican cracker dealers include tales of gang rape. Findings The chapter endorses the need to study the perpetrator, arguing that it is imperative to ensure the demythologization of perpetrators. It finds also that feminists must explore how they will teach emotionally difficult material, and how they negotiate the legacy of radical feminism. The chapter concludes that there are times when politics requires little theoretical innovation, requiring instead a willingness to repeat known insights and to fight back with words. Social implications This chapter has implications for classroom practice. Originality/value The value of this chapter is its demand to reconsider the doing of feminism in the classroom when the split between feminist theory and activism appears greater than ever.

An interview with Michel Wieviorka Violence, evil, and good

Michel Wieviorka is a leading French sociologist, who is interviewed here, because of his long interest in the ‘dark side’ of society. This interest began with his prizewinning comparative analysis of Italian, Peruvian, Basque, and Middle Eastern terrorist groups published in English as The Making of Terrorism (Wieviorka, 1993); continued with his research on racism, including racist violence and his research during the mid2000s on the violent protest witnessed in France; and finds current expression in his conceptual works, Violence: A New Approach and Evil (Wieviorka, 2009; 2012). The major influence on Wieviorka is Alain Touraine; indeed, as Wieviorka acknowledges below, Touraine, who was his doctoral supervisor, is his ‘intellectual father’, helping shape both Wieviorka’s approach to violence and his understanding of sociological research more broadly. Key, then, to Wieviorka’s approach is his determination to understand the subjective rationale of violent actors: violence always has some meaning for the perpetrator, no matter how illusory or perverse. This approach, then, places Wieviorka in clear opposition to those in sociology who would explain violence in instrumental or structural terms. Indeed, at the core of both Violence and Evil is a demand for a new approach, which as outlined in the Introduction to this special issue, requires an understanding of the subjectivity of the violent actor, and which leads Wieviorka somewhat surprisingly and with distinct provocation to argue for a break with traditional approaches by making a non-social principle central to our analysis. In short, he is now arguing for ‘a concrete sociology of evil’.