Does violence have a gender?

Women’s violence has long been a blind spot in social science research on violence, with a few rare exceptions. The link between “ women » on the one hand, and “ violence », on the other hand, remains mainly considered from the angle of the victimization of women. The double challenge taken up by the coordinators of the work “ Thinking about women’s violence », Geneviève Pruvost and Coline Cardi, is to bring together a large number of specific works on women’s violence, within varied fields and disciplines, while proposing in a long introduction a theoretical and analytical framework for thinking about women’s violence . The articles brought together in the rest of the work break down and illustrate these different narratives according to four main axes: political violence ; the private and the political ; the institutional treatment of women’s violence ; the representations and disfigurements of violent women.

Violence, its stories and its sources

The real strong point of this work is in fact not to limit itself to a collection of diverse works concerning different spaces and periods, from sociological, historical, anthropological or literary perspectives, but to include them in a solid theoretical framework. and original, creating in fact a new object of research. Because thinking about women’s violence is both thinking about its existence, its very possibility, outside of the naturalizing schemes which immediately exclude it, but also thinking about the process of its historical invisibilization within the various research on women’s violence. violence. Therefore, for “ exhume, denaturalize, contextualize, historicize, repoliticize women’s violence », the authors propose a performative definition of violence: this one “ cannot be dissociated from a qualification operation “. The preface therefore proposes a classification of “ great stories » violence against women and the processes leading to their invisibility, based on existing work but also non-existent work: forms of female violence which have not been studied or which have been denied, made invisible, such as political violence perpetrated by women. The work thus includes several articles which establish the participation of women in political violence, in contexts as varied as pre- and post-revolutionary Paris (Clara Chevalier, Jean-Clément Martin) ; the Commune (Quentin Duelermoz) ; contemporary Lebanon and Palestine (Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun) ; the armed struggles of Peru and Northern Ireland (Camille Boutron, Maritza Felices-Luna) ; the Rwandan genocide (Violaine Baraduc).

This ignored violence is qualified, within a first “ great story “, of “ out of frame »: they are the subject of a non-narrative, of a denial. This denial can lead to their pure and simple oblivion, or to an artificial observation of their novelty when the political and media gaze finally focuses on this violence. This is for example the case of women’s participation in urban violence and different forms of delinquency, which some consider to be a recent phenomenon. David Niget thus proposes a “ genealogy » of the moral panic generated by the so-called “ appearance » violence against girls: it shows that, contrary to the alarmist headlines in the press XXI^e century, the violence of girls, particularly from working-class neighborhoods, is far from being a novelty and that it has regularly been the subject of media and scientific attention since industrialization in XIX^e century and the appearance of the notion of juvenile delinquency. The lesser presence of violence against girls in the archives is, according to him, due to the differential treatment of violence committed by girls and boys and in particular to the absence of reformatories for girls, these being entrusted to the care of religious institutions. . The delinquent violence of girls is also highlighted by Dominique Duprez who presents the results of a survey on girls involved in criminal activities in Brazil: this participation of girls is almost never mentioned in the specialized literature while girls represent almost a sixth of minors brought before the courts.

To place female violence in its historical context and show its reality, Coline Cardi and Geneviève Pruvost propose systematically re-examining the police and judicial sources for recording this violence, despite the fact that the authorities for recording violence are dependent on of the political view given to them: violence which cannot exist will not be recorded, which leads to them being considered a posteriori as non-existent.

Gender is also one of the main factors in the greater or lesser perception of the dangerousness of a person and the seriousness of their actions, as shown by Maxime Lelièvre and Thomas Léonard with regard to immediate appearance trials. : women are almost systematically sentenced less than men, in equal situations. The statistical non-existence of women’s violence also implies its non-response by violence treatment authorities: this is for example the case, developed by Vanessa Watremez, of domestic violence committed in lesbian couples, who are excluded from domestic violence treatment protocols.

In their introduction, the directors of the book do not hide the role that the feminist movement may have had in this invisibility of women’s violence since, “ From a political and legal point of view, it seemed more important, not to say more urgent, to have women recognized, because of the violence suffered, as victims of male domination. » The inevitable hierarchy of struggles which followed contributed to the delay of research on women’s violence, but also to the establishment of public policies to deal with this violence.

Reduced and naturalized violence

Women’s violence cannot always be passed over in silence, and another process of storytelling, taking note of its existence, is then necessary. In this case, women’s violence is downplayed, or integrated into a reading that allows it to be normalized and reintegrated into a reassuring theoretical framework. The authors underline two antagonistic forms of supervision of women’s violence: either it is integrated into a naturalizing reading of gender, and thought of as the specific characteristic of the feminine which must be civilized ; or it is thought of as subordinate to that of men and as ultimately reinforcing male domination. The naturalization of women’s violence comes in several forms: culturalist ; biologizing ; psychologizing. These readings, for example, refer female criminals to a form of hysteria which induces a singular treatment of women’s violence: the placing under control of their bodies and their sexuality, considered responsible for their deviances. As a result, it is the medical-psychiatric institution that is most often responsible for treating women’s violence, when it is recognized, while men are subject to repressive authorities. classics »: police, justice, prison.

Another way to deprive women of responsibility for their acts of violence is to think of them as a backlash to men’s violence and male domination. The Arab women suicide bombers studied by Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun are thus seen as instruments – necessarily dominated – of male fanaticism while the women of Direct Action mentioned by Fanny Bugnon are lovers, victims of their feelings… From another angle, Violence committed by women within the couple is also often considered as a consequence of violence by the partner. Clothilde Lebas shows with regard to Algerian women in situations of family breakdown that they are not only victims of the violence of their husbands: they are sometimes also perpetrators of violence, including physical, against these same husbands, their children and return also often violence against themselves. This (re)appropriation of violence cannot be considered solely from the angle of reaction, which would once again deprive these women of their capacity to act. Clothilde Lebas suggests, on the contrary, that we consider these attacks of violence, certainly disproportionate and excessive, as an open door to “ places of possibility » where power can be regained. Women’s violence within the family is also the subject of Nehara Feldman’s article, which focuses on the almost daily violence of mothers against their children in a Malian village.

A disorder in the gender order ?

A third form of storytelling reverses the order of the sexes and leads, depending on the case, to the domination of men by women, on the mythical model of the Amazons, or to a lack of differentiation between the sexes. This third way of dealing with women’s violence is often found in artistic and fictional domains, since reality rarely leaves room for violence capable of overturning or subverting power relations between the sexes. Eric Fassin’s article evokes, for example, the modern figures of Amazons proposed by cinema, from Scum manifesto by Valérie Solanas at Fuck Me by Virginie Despentes. That of Raphaëlle Guillée focuses on the political violence of women in literature and shows to what extent the very possibility of this violence disrupts gender categories.

Women’s violence does not necessarily lead to a reversal of domination but can be part of a movement towards equality, particularly through women’s access to professions that use violence (police, army, etc.). .). Also, access to violence can constitute a first step towards access to political power, as Dominique Godineau shows with regard to the insurrection of May 1795. The introduction underlines the paradox of a feminist demand for access against violence for women, as opposed to an ideal of non-violence often put forward by feminist movements. Coline Cardi and Geneviève Pruvost show that thinking about women’s violence constitutes an issue distinct from demanding its exercise. It is therefore essential to recognize the existence of this violence and to study it in order to put an end to its recurring invisibilization which contributes to the construction of gender difference. Thinking about women’s violence thus allows us to question gender relations.

At the conclusion of their remarkable introduction, Geneviève Pruvost and Coline Cardi question the relevance of genre as a tool for analyzing violence. They show the need to rethink the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence, visible and ignored violence and finally between public and private. Thus, the entire work constitutes an essential tool for thinking about gender on the one hand, and violence on the other, by proposing both a theoretical framework for women’s violence and a large number of examples research that is still too rare on the subject.