12.

1 introduction to everyday violence

- How we characterize the difference between violence

On jokes
- Punch up, not down
o Aiming at people of power – jokes are powerful and important (allow us to say what
cant be said)
 Dominant voices that tell us what we can and cannot say
- Role of jokes
o Inclusion of that which cannot be said
o Structural function of the unconscious and the need for intersubjectivity
o End of the joke makes the meaning clear from the beginning (like a fetish)
- Bono
o Joke is literal reading of the seriousness of Bono’s Ernest efforts to do things
 Structural violence – bono clapping
- Me to We
o Caught in broad humanitarian frame – cant critique because it is inherently good (Until
there was scandal)
o Humanitarian organizations use the iconography of children to somehow put it beyond
critique (child meant to stand for third world - infantile action and civilizing mission)
o Structures of power and influence – form of structural violence (authorized forms of
giving)

Structural problems – everyday violence

- Organizations have become the real capitalists (preserving the system by doing all the work to
make the corporations socially responsible and accountable
o Not actually challenging the system, we are making it work better
o Structural violence that becomes symbolic change, doesn’t actually change the systemic
problems (superficial problem of the moment)

On everyday violence
- Subjective versus objective violence
o Death of Congolese vs Syrian child
o What we care about the moment (subjective participation) in objective violence
o The ones that you omit reflect a form of structural violence by not putting resources
behind them (e.,g. Haiti Cholera – result of UN intervention)
 Violence created by intervention than that aid that comes from the intervention
- Normally as a form of violence and violence of racism
- Adorno: poetry is barbaric after Auschwitz
o True trauma should render truth suspect
o inconsistency and unreliability as a consequence of true violence
o Progress can no longer be a viable concept
o Used best scientists, tech, etc. to do the most monstrous things
o Problem – too close to the thing that caused the problem, trauma doesn’t make them
objective
Systemic violence
- Violence inherent to the system (subtle coercion, exploitation.)
- People directly benefit from everyday violence

What are consequences

- Liberal communism
o Benefit by ruthless exploitation of the system
 Choose to give back (e.g. Bill Gates – ruthless business people amass huge
amounts of wealth but then become the greatest philanthropist?)
o Charity or humanitarianism is the mask of ruthless exploitation (okay that Elon musk
could solve world poverty but its up to him if he wants to do that)
o Principles

o Elon Musk bought the right to be the founder of Tesla (claims to be innovative)
- Structural problems
o The high wealth individuals become the marker for capitalism and we are unable to see
the structural problems
o We don’t see how normalcy has changed over time
 Subjective experiences make us think the world is objective
o What a chicken is
 From 1950s to now is very different – combination of breeding, industrialization,
science, progression, etc.
 Idea of what you buy and how you eat is normal is very much a social
context that makes you think that is normal

Normalcy
- The constitution of ‘problems’ in society à tells us more about society than the problems
themselves
- Normalcy Emerges in 1840
 o Idealize things
o What would a world without normalcy look like?
o Modern obsession with ideal-types, progress and mythological perfection
- What does progress mean
- We know getting rid of bad things is good, but if we replace them with bad things its not good
(e.g. Eugenics was copied from Germans)

The relationship between the margin in the center

- Grotesque
o Common person is different than what the normal should be
 Symbol of common people, ordinary life
o Transgressive inversion of political hierarchies
o Carnivalesque - Natural outlet for the inversion of hierarchies (Holidays)
 Considered an important part of social order, integral and not disconnected
 Poorest and make them a king for the day (holiday from experience/life – which
is still what holidays are)
 Holidays are a break from the normalcy
o Non-work
 Work 24 hours a day – tension in should work look the same for everybody
 Ethnography of the stock market – white males working 120 hours a week
(capitalism contingent on a very specific gender, age and racialized group doing
things in a specific way)
 Idea that the younger people should work insane hours – we cant
expect things to be the same

Emergence of middle-class ideology

- Western averages used to justify the concept of normalcy
o Utopian ideals emerging from conceptualizations of average
o Marxism rests on the average aggregation of working bodies
- Norm = majority must or should be part of that norm
- ‘normal distribution’ = creation of ‘deviants’, ‘outliers’, ‘aberrations’
- Early statisticians were eugenicists
o Concept of ‘race’ emerges from the Poor Laws in England
 Influx based on fact that he was scared rural folk were coming into the cities
o Society as a norm creates disabled bodies
 What people should do, act, think, etc. – no neurological ways of being different
o Fear of deaf race
o Alexander Graham Bell: feared that deaf-mutes would select deaf-mute as partners
creating a ‘race’ of deaf people
o Emma Goldman: birth control would prevent paupers, syphilitics, epileptics,
dipsomniacs (alcoholics), cripples, criminals and degenerates
- Normalcy produces violence

Normal distribution
- For the longest time the state was obsessed with stabilizing identity
o Criminals would just change appearance and name
All undesirable traits in one place
- Producing social normalcy by giving out ribbons
- Journal nature
o Approved nazi use of eugenics prior to ww2
- Criminal, tramps, tuberculosis, insane, mentally defective, alcoholic, disease from birth or
excess, feeble-mindedness
- Kansas 1920 state fair: fittest families, intelligence tests, medical examinations and venereal
disease tests
- Nature journal approved Nazi use of eugenics for sterilizing the disabled
- Madam Bovary
o Anti-Semitic and eugenic
- Structural violence is built into the systems and structures that we have
- Having different voices and diversity becomes catchall where it doesn’t result in different
outcomes
o Silence of marginalized groups is resisting (Ignorance as a strategy of whiteness is deeply
political and violent)

Reality, equality, equity, liberation

- Stealing access to paid sporting event – not getting access from the seats (why don’t they have
seats)
o Violence inherent in meme
- Also about allowing those who are differently able
- Violence in reducing to equity

When is violence acceptable

Steve D’Arcy (Huron)
- Voices of the voiceless
- Following MLK – the riot is the language
o rioting is an effort of marginalized people to find their voice
o Militant violence can be the way to give voice to the voiceless
o Grievance motivated, adversarial, confrontational collective action, typology of
defiance, disruption, destruction
o Producing silence through structural violence and inequality can be expressed through
violence
o Framing of violence has to do with what the majority thinks is appropriate behaviour
- Violence can be grievance motivated,
o Doesn’t necessarily result in positive ends, but expression when there is inability to
express elsewhere
- Liberal objection - refusing consensus-building and reason guided public discussion breaks
democracy
o Fixation between violence and nonviolence is a false dichotomy
o protester beaten by police office at RNC 2008 was undercover police officer – no
violence had taken place
- Fixation between violence and non violence is a false dichotomy
- Law and normalcy can produce effects on bodies which are not framed as violence
 - Three cases
o pushing a man to the ground to prevent him from stabbing a nearby child
o pushing a man to the ground to prevent access to the building I am picketing in the
context of a strike
o Push a man to the ground to express my contempt for his religion
o All use force, not all seen as violent
o Self-defense considered morally acceptable, we resist seeing it is violent
o Can understand the visceral difference between them – when is violence permissible
 Depends on the ways that individuals see violence

The problems of pacifism

- Pacifist: someone who rejects the use of physical force even when it could be used to advance
important or protect against harm
- is harming animals violence?
o is vegetal life valuable?
o Is self-defense violence?
- What is considered normal allows certain types of violence because we consider it morally just
to do so
o PETA – organization that does radical things to appeal to base (not trying to peal
everyone) , fish as sea kittens (dont have to agree with methods but they are trying to
shift what we consider violent and normal)
- Common view of armed force
o Armed Forces a bad thing, be minimized as much circumstances allow
o Armed force may nevertheless be sometimes justified or morally required to defend
oneself from injury or death
o Even when forces justified it must not be indiscriminate, or disproportionate

Defensive force vs right to rebel

- Armed ghetto uprisings 1943
o Poland defeated, Ghetto arming itself and rebellion against system they are in – is this
legitimate
- Black panthers
o Force justified, but should be minimized in self-defense
o Wanted to ensure voting rights, and everyone else carries weapons so why cant the
black panthers
- Catastrophic consequences from the smooth functioning of our economic system
- Government deprivation of resources, industry throws thousands of work, Detroit, policing,
racialized laws, discrimination, civilization
- If we grant too much right to use force or violence, the system doesn’t smoothly operate
o Indigenous uprisings – is it just

Famous examples
- Red army factions (Marxist group)
o fundraising bank robberies, broad popular activism, strategic bombings, and
kidnappings
- Acceptable peoples militia
o Operates on larger scale
 o non-militarist (has nonmilitary goals)
o broad support from the wider community
o refrains from targeting noncombatants
- Very contentious for different groups

Settler colonialism
- Why does defense of the land always fall on indigenous people?
- Settler colonialism - recognizing our role in and practices of occupation
– Police, military,
- Deaf to actual practices
– Mohawks tried discussion and negotiation
– blockade was a last resort, led by people most affected by the grievance
– empowered the community in terms of governance and practices, decentralized
decision-making
– Seeking reasonable solutions in common decency and common good

Militancy – Darcy
- Principles of militancy
o opportunity principle - it should create new possibilities
o Realistic prospects of success - if it is counterproductive, it shouldn’t be adopted
o Non-confrontational resistance should have proved to be ineffective, militancy is then a
civic virtue
- Hard for us to frame issues without reflecting on privilege and how we think about things

Resisting violence
- How does resisting violence comes through practices?
o Jokes, graffiti, etc. – punch in up/punching down
 Punching up because they are facing structural issues
o Can we see misbehaviour as a form of protest and activism
o Objective problem being expressed

The everyday
- How do we participate in violence
o Buying a produce (apple – suicide nets on building)
o Signing a petition (can work, but only if the leader is accountable to petitions – leaders
can do whatever they want)
o Attending a rally
o Mobilizing members
- Collective/Protest = Fuzzy Logic (Bordieu)
o a problem to be foregrounded but not overcome?
o Different definitions betray different goals

Gendercide
Gendercide and exclusion
- Gendercide – academic concept that doesn’t have legal status (not identified as a crime)
 o What can be said/unsaid or violence/non violence – gendercide is a description of
something that is happening but we don’t have legal framework or ability to assess it
properly
o Exemplifies this tension

Framing sexual violence through security

- Securitization theory
o framed in terms of existential threat (speech act); emergency action; audience accepts
or rejects action
o political process vs extraordinary event that is politicized
- A lot of stuff at the international level is framed negatively
o Sex trafficking, sex working as inherently bad because gendered through this lens of
protection rather than the realization that there is lots of labor that is inherently bad
o E.g. missing white women vs Trope that happens where missing and murdered women
just vanish and it is framed as a sociological problem
- Spectacle of sexual violence as a weapon of war
o Aid agencies, governments used to justify funding
- Commodity fetishism - eroticization of objects to grant them with value beyond their ‘objective’
worth
o Alienation of things from their context and the labor that produces them
o Subjectification which allows them to generate an economy and become the source of
trade
o Sexual violence is a spectacle that generates new interest, policy, revenue, etc.
 We turn into an object – take out of context to be able to talk about it (sexual
violence in wartime – people can become experts and talk about it to generate
this whole economy)
 Discover things that have been there all along but we didn’t treat
seriously

Gender and law

- Emerged very late
- ICC draft legislation
o Gender included in the Rome statute 1998 for the ICC
o disputed in the process of drafting (‘refers to the two sexes, male and female, within the
context of society’)
o Holy See and vocal conservative Arab states concerned about its conclusion as to
general
o ‘roles in society’ versus ‘functions in society’
- Refused to recognize more than two genders (seen as conservative success)
o Explicitly two sexes – reason is because the Vatican and conservative Arab states
defined gender and sexuality under law – reflecting hierarchies and who does/doesn’t
count
- Tensions built into the intersectionality in organization about certain types of violence

Statism
- Problem is that everyday violence undermines the presence of the modern nation state
 - Weber – ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the
legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’
o Claims are not always successful ( open to contestation and struggle)
o Conceptualizes resistance within the very concept of the state
o Entire history of domestic violence undermines this premise (massive blind spot because
it is not considered violence)
- We are able to exclude minority groups in majoritarian societies because we don’t count that
violence
o Rationalizes othering and not doing anything about it
- In international law legitimacy, becomes key to recognition
o 1991 – respect for democracy and human rights necessary
o Importance of the rights of minorities
o Democratically representative (internally, as group and externally as legitimate actor)
o There is a shift towards democracy as norm and practice internationally
o If Russia doesn’t recognize Kosovo, it doesn’t exist
o Post Cold War – human rights becomes more the norm, but states are still administering
rights (statism is gendered because the law itself reflects power and hierarchy)
 Legitimate use of physical force

Gender and torture

- Gender key practice of torture techniques
- Senate Torture Report about the U.S. post-9/11 torture regime (Owens, 2010; Richter-
Montpetit, 2007, 2014a, 2015). Featuring prominently among reported torture practices are
highly sexualized carceral practices aimed at feminizing male prisoners. The underlying
assumption is simple: The concerted effort at humiliating and destroying Muslim/Arab prisoners’
(presumed) sense of masculinity would “soften them up” and getting them to “confess” terrorist
crimes they had committed, were planning to commit, and/or share valuable intelligence about
other terrorists/insurgents 
- Gender as a colonial construct – it’s an encounter and part of a need to regulate society

State as individual
- 1. Frame issues in terms of international system and everyday violence, we have to understand
the state is autonomous
o State as a physical body analogous to an individual
- Relations envisioned as male – conflict/cooperation (Realpolitik) vs. social/ethics of care (ICRC)
o Formal state to state relations are framed in idea of high level theory vs social ethics of
care/humanitarianism (framed in terms of conflict)
- Violations as penetrations/violation/imagery of sexual violence
o Violation as justification of increasing enlargement (NATO)
- Individuals as non-reproductive (pregnancy in states), normal processes of self governance
o Reproduction is not allowed in the state system (e.g. Quebec separatism, UN rights of
indigenous Peoples rejected at first – idea that this would lead to secessionist
movements)
 Don’t want states to be reproduced
- 2. State as individual ‘private’ property
o Home/family versus work/public
o Torture (public) central in Post WWII international law (sexual assault (private) missing)
 - Corporations as ‘private’ in international law
o Cutler, ‘Law Merchant’
- Humanitarian tradition vs. non-intervention
o ‘Domestic’ abuse vs ‘monopoly’ of violence
o Facebook as normal progression of non-invasion?

First Nations people dying at higher rates

- Invisibility of violence built into data sets

Russia video
- Idea of domestic violence is politicized

Further impediments to statism

- Kantian ideal
o Respecting human rights and legitimate democratic representation = full international
citizen
o Illegitimate states = some rights but not full international citizen
o Human rights should push us to universal rights but have to be interpreted through
domestic rights
- International law rejects the framework that denies human rights of substate actors and
individuals
o Gender is not explicit, but the structures exist to be utilized

Actually existing international practices

- Limited numbers of women in power world wide – are these social practices reflected in political
practices
o Male norms functioning is the standard
o Few women in foreign service and international organizations (application
requirements, lifestyle, traditional societies)
- Gender norms as an impediment to democracy?
o Can a structure be democratic if 50% of the populations concerns can’t be heard?
o Weak feminism: Institute proportional representation
o Strong feminism: the necessity of women’s structures/voices/frameworks (new
structures?)

NGOs
- States block inclusion into these issues so NGOs step in
- UN inclusion as recognized participants
o Business NGOs/environmental NGOs
- More say in the decision-making process
o Canada/US consultation on beyond the border
- NGOs expand the definition of power/consent
o Less hierarchical, more representative
- Customary international law
o Has moments of tacit consent in it
o Follows traditional relationships and treaties
Social progress not supported by data
- CDC trends in pregnancy-related deaths
- Women dying at greater rates over time
- Racialized
o Restrictions to healthcare, tax, etc.
- Hard to find Canadian research
o Multiculturalism means that we shouldn’t consider racialized categories? There’s a
violence inherently in this because we don’t have data on these things
- Everyday violence, We don’t even have information to make claims about it – we cant be
reasonable without dates

The little mermaid

- Pre Disney little mermaid
o Idea that mermaid had to sacrifice her voice and would die if he married someone else
o If she can’t appeal without a voice she dies
- Central critique in terms of gendercide – inability to speak
o Missing gender analysis and the role of gender in developing threats
o highlight the lie at the center of securitization and the law – securitization of silence
happens all the time
o Women and men are being killed because of gender, yet we have no legal framework to
deal with it (so it doesn’t have a voice)
o Can securitize so quickly around threats to terrorism, war on drugs, etc. but stuff that is
everyday violence becomes Bernal
o Voice is excluded
- Leaders/actors securitize a referent object that is existentially threatened
o State, environment, economy - voice helps decide what the objects are

Security and law

- We have to think about what gets securitized and what the law is/isnt, which bodies
count/don’t cound
- Gendercide – bodily politics that are the blind spot of speech
- Security as silence
- women can’t report sexual violence as risk being securitized
o The existential threat to women is a successful securitization
- International security
o successful securitization would require as sufficiently powerful group of states, but
states consider these issues domestic/internal/social
- The problem stems from the linguistic character of bodies
o gender and sexual violence validates authorized forms of security
o Bodily politics are the blind spot of speech – why the ‘disappeared’ are so easily
excluded (female infanticide consistent 2-4% of the population, or 100m )

Role of women
- Not just about women, but also About men and masculinity
- ‘Woman question’
o Equality = normal, ordinary, natural
 o ‘women hold up half the sky’
- Societies do better with equal rights
o Peace-building, quotas, full-partners
o Peace-keeping problem race/sex/gender

Feminicide
- Issue that the broad based gender perception of what men should do and women should do
(normative categories)
- Gender is oppressive
- Femicide in Latin America – women are being murdered at night and this is being perceived as
them being sex workers, able to be targets, on the way home from work, etc.
o Men perceive them being out at night that their lives are disposable

Definitions
- Even if we use broad frameworks, we have a definition that was supposed to be for the targeted
death of women
o Death is Product of gendercidal institutions
- ‘Gender’ : ‘covering masculine and feminine roles and bodies alike, and all other aspects,
including the (biological and cultural) structures dynamics rules and scripts associated with each
gender group’
- Lempkin – ‘genocide’: ‘genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
- Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: 11 December 1946
that genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United
Nations and condemned by the civilized world

Raphael lempkin
- 1920’s and 1930’s establish framework for conveying the vulnerabilities social minorities
o Armenian genocide (mass murder?)
- Vandalism, barbarity?
o Genos ( race, tribe) cide (killing)
 Often mass killing but also destruction (cultural formations)
- Used to hang around the halls of the UN
o First published 1944 adopted 1948
-

Article II convention
- In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
o ( a ) Killing members of the group;
o ( b ) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
o ( c ) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
o ( d ) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
 o ( e ) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
- Lack of gender in the definition
o Why only these groups, why are we talking about births without women, why is it that is
absent and during times of war?
- Gender and genocide is both present and absent in the births/children but not women
- Tropes tacitly built into the genocide convention about gender which then allow us an inability
to address the substantive destruction of groups based on gender

Balkans as watershed in research

- Feminist activists prepared
o The ability to explicitly target sexual violence as a weapon of war
 Soviet soldiers post-World War II, Bangladesh 1971
- Crime against the female victim needs to be explicit
o 1907 ‘ family honor and rights’
o High percentage of women in UN refugee camps ( UNHCR 20+ million a day)
o Often rendered absent by males swept up in conflict
- Don’t identify or look at sexual violence against males
- Gendered norms about militarization contribute to or blind us to the way that happens
- Sexual violence against males is also a regular part of conflict
o sexual violence, castration, mutilation in Balkans and Rwanda
o Talking about idea of a group being intentionally targeted because of their gender (men
and women)
 Warfare explicitly recognizes and allows for gender differentiation and using this
as a strategy of warfare
- Need a word for the explicit sexualized violence in conflict
o Gendercide – traditionally ‘battle aged men’
o Thucydides, Homer, Hebrew Bible massacre of males, enslavement
o ICC - No consistency about what is included in sexual violence in wartime (because
gender tropes blind us to how we should deal with this)

Gendered nature of conflict

- Genocides normally target man first and then subsequent populations second
o Belgian Congo, stall and in USSR, Bangladesh 1971, Balkans 1990 ( 90% men)
o Cant target women without targeting men (to include two genders)
- ‘Cleansed’ populations are predominantly women and children
o Men killed, detained, incarcerated, fled, exile
o Demographic impact on countries, structural violence conflict on societies
o Inherently gendered

Gendercide
- Foregrounding of gender in mass killing
o Institutionally: Mass killing of infant girls, girls nutritional and educational deficits,
infanticde/ neonaticide/ foeticide, the maternal mortality, honor killing, witchhunts
(Federici ‘Caliban and the Witch’)
 witch-hunts – women doing things that people didn’t like outside the home
 o Perpetrators: Shoah/Holocaust: functionalist escalation (vs. intentionalists), Reserve
Police battalion 101 (15 out of 500 not participate), impact on psychology of group led
to industrial, modern tactics (gendered organization, brutalization escalates, trauma
inducing trauma)

Tropes invade all aspects

- continue as storytelling tropes
- Death of women used to animate men as a storytelling device

What does a gendered approach contribute?

- Gender integral to all conflict
- Interplay of gender is part of conflict (very Western as well)
o Feminization as tactic, masculinization as cohesive
o Cohn and ‘patting’ missiles (domesticating them)
o Just war – ‘pacifism’ versus ‘heroism’
- Need to look at how men and women participating in the mass killing
o Performances of gender in order to justify acts/resistance
o Spivak: ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ – Can the subaltern speak?
Can we hear them?
o Gendercide – men and women participate in different ways in mass killing
o Tacit everyday assumptions we make are part of the broad process of global violence
and injustice
o Reproduce gender norms even as we call out gender norms (we cannot escape
normativity)

Catherine MacKinnon
- Can we decolonize gender
o Both conscious and unconscious
- male is a social and political concept, not a biological attribute… It has nothing whatsoever to do
with inherent sex, preexistence, nature, inevitability or body is such’
o both conscious and unconscious
o pornography and saturation in Yugoslavia prior to the war, dehumanization of women
- Why do fetishes exist?
- What is prison sexual violence? Why do we tolerate it? Is it institutionalized toxic culture?

Missing and murdered Indigenous Women

- We have to consider that the Canadian experience is a slow-moving genocide of indigenous
peoples, and the missing and murdered indigenous women is just the gendered aspect of that
- We have known this for a while – disproportionate deaths and abuse
- Why does this happen?
o The state is the primary way we think about responsibility

Why #landback
- Keeps happening because the gender dynamics of the state (dysfunction theodicy of the state)
- ‘the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil’
o Government authority is legitimate, and its actions are competent.
 o As a consequence of 1, rational policies that induce suffering are the fault of the
sufferer's actions, or incorrectly applied policy (i.e. residential schools).
o As a consequence of 1 and 2, the state and those who sympathize with the state
inevitably reduce or minimize the suffering caused by the state, while asserting the
state's benevolence in actions going forward. (it is the past)
o Consequently, government and supporters deny the harm created by policies in the
present, assumes all harm is created by past/concluded decisions, and displaces
dysfunction onto the groups or actors involved. (get over it)
- We know that residential schools existed, but in order to function Canada has to pretend they
are not responsible
- Reconciliation as new effort to deal with this because it assumes government authority is
legitimate (from above vindication of divine goodness)
- Like to say the dysfunction is gone and in the past
o Even though we are confronted with the idea that this is ongoing (past and present at
the same moment)
o Trap of the dysfunction theodicy – state is never responsible because they are ‘doing the
best they can’ and this is how we end up with gendercidal institutions because they are
trying to do things but produce everyday systemic violence (while unable to address
why that’s the case)