Gender and violence: tools to think with

Abstract

There is so much that could possibly be said about gender and violence. The prospect of producing a comprehensive Handbook engaging with all possible dimensions of gender and violence, thought together (how might we understand ‘gender violence’? is violence gendered? is gender violent?) and separately (what does it mean to associate ‘gender and violence’? what do these concepts mean and how do they function in the world, in our knowledge claims?), is daunting indeed. In fact, the idea of a comprehensive Handbook is an illusion: a venture such as this one can only ever be partial, and, as such, is necessarily limited and exclusionary. It seems important to acknowledge this partiality openly, to explain how and why the decision was made to include certain topics and not others, and to ensure that this volume is positioned as a single intervention into an ongoing space of debate and contestation. That is, in part, the purpose of this chapter. I begin by outlining how I came to research gender and violence, and why I was interested to curate this collection of essays and engagements with these topics. In the second section, I provide an overview of the organization of the Handbook into three sections: concepts, representation and contexts. The chapters in the section on concepts elaborate on the tools we use to think with in our work on gender and violence (not only the concepts of gender and violence but also related concepts like sex, sexualities, patriarchy and security). The section on representation includes chapters on the different ways in which gender and violence are constituted in and through various representational practices, including film, policy and online. Finally, the section on contexts is devoted to the examination of gender and violence in various empirical settings, including different spheres of activity, from economic to juridical. The Handbook concludes by drawing out some thematic connections across the collection and addressing some of the limitations that can be addressed in future research.