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Rethinking Patriarchy, Culture and Masculinity: Transnational Narratives of Gender Violence and Human Rights Advocacy

2015; Bridgewater State University; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

1539-8706

Elora Halim Chowdhury,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Introduction Chronicling the vulnerability and suffering of marginalized populations in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, researcher Paul Farmer (2005) asks the critical question, what mechanisms, precisely, do social forces ranging from poverty to racism become embodied as individual experience? (p. 369). A remarkable feature of Farmer's analysis includes charting the biographies of victims of violence to bring to light the trajectory of suffering they experienced as a consequence of their gendered vulnerabilities. Farmer underscores the point that, Social forces at work [in Haiti] have also structured risk for most forms of extreme suffering, from hunger to torture and rape (p. 369). He demonstrates that in order to truly understand how and why certain victims met with tragic deaths by AIDS and political violence, one has to further contextualize their lives within the intersecting axis of colonialism, poverty, racism, and sexism. Farmer's methodological approach enables us to understand violence as gendered and as opposed to an act encapsulated within the contours of a single incident. In this article, I will argue that to truly understand the complexity and prevalence of the phenomenon of acid attacks and other violence against individual women and girls in South Asia, we must pay attention to the confluence of political, socioeconomic and historical forces that make certain social groups more vulnerable to such extreme violence and suffering. By examining case studies of survivors in the Acid Survivors Foundation Bangladesh commissioned report, Conflict Dynamics of Acid Violence: 10 Case Studies on Conflicts Dynamics of Acid (Patriarchal) Violence in Bangladesh (Acid Survivors Foundation, 2007), I hope to shed light on the way that acid throwing--a form of gendered violence--must be understood beyond the culturalist framework that predominantly shapes transnational human rights campaigns for gender justice. These campaigns rely on narratives that are made intelligible as human rights stories through the deployment of ideological and hegemonic categories of patriarchy and cultural difference. Through a powerful transnational media circuit, these concepts are assumed to be a logical analytic framework to explain why violence against women is seemingly more prevalent in certain cultures--namely those in the Global South. Instead, I believe that acid violence has to be understood within a broader structural inequality framework, which maps the vulnerability of the victims onto their life trajectories shaped by multiple complex forces of globalization, patriarchy and poverty. Deploying multi-disciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches including discourse, narrative and political economic analysis, and the use of primary and secondary sources, I argue the importance of examining historical, economic, cultural and political processes that make certain social groups more vulnerable to extreme violence. In addition, by examining the frames of gender violence deployed in narratives of human rights within NGO-reports, I want to draw out the underlying assumptions shaping responses to this phenomenon mounted by the state and transnational activist networks. Focusing on the systemic oppressions faced by vulnerable social groups and considering their contextual realities will aid in the development of what Karin Landgren (2005) describes as a more protective environment for marginalized populations to live freer of abuse, exploitation and violence. Narrative and Human Rights Campaigns In this paper, I want to draw attention to the importance of stories and testimonials in human rights campaigns, the ability of narratives in presenting experiential truths as well as in strategic mobilizing, and the ways in which human rights narratives contribute to both assisting and impeding transnational movement building. Though testimonials and stories are inherently about the individual, like Farmer, I am interested in the ways in which analyzing the life trajectories of an individual can be used to illuminate the factors related to gendered violence. …