(Re-) producing gender-based violence in Canada: The state of things, and the Ontario transitional and housing support program

Abstract

Gender-based violence in Canada is constant and ubiquitous, a social fact in many ways. In this paper, we seek to establish the social-historical context of gender-based violence in the current neoliberal political and social policy climate. Ours is not an origin story of gender-based violence per se, nor our paper exhaustive in its scope. We use an intersectional lens to trouble lay-public understandings of gender-based violence as individual pathology, and gender itself as binary. We specifically seek to uncover the interacting social structures, institutions, and hierarchies that (re-)produce gender-based violence. We structure the paper in two distinct parts. First, we discuss gender hegemony. We define and discuss the feminization, Indigenization, and racialization of poverty as shaping of individual lives and interpersonal relationships and yet crafted by colonialism and capitalism and other state institutions, and so problematically constitutive of gender-based violence. Second, we argue that law and social policies of the welfare state can maintain and perpetuate gender-based violence because they are constituted with this social-cultural context, considering the case of the Ontario Transitional Housing Support Program. Noteworthy is how we recognize contradictions and tensions, such as government funded responses to support women survivors of domestic violence when, meanwhile, violence toward trans* people remains known but any response less prioritized. Foremost, we choose to invite readers to dwell on the state of things and to develop a critical and nuanced understanding of gender-based violence as harms created by individuals and social relations.