Introduction to the gender violence, emotion, and the state symposium

This symposium emerged from a panel presented at the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in which we explored how emotions related to gender violence are expressed, negotiated, and shaped by broader political economic forces and processes. A primary goal was to challenge the tendency to consider emotion as tied solely to interpersonal relationships and instead to examine how emotions are central to, and constitutive of, statecraft-in-action through analyses of gender violence, a longstanding concern of feminist anthropology.

Social scientists studying state formation had traditionally overlooked the role of emotion in statecraft, precisely because the realm of the emotional had been considered antithetical to logic, reason and conventional (i.e., masculinist) politics and action. When the relationship between the state and emotions had been more fully explored, emotions were often treated as derivative after-effects of state policy (Reus-Smit, 2014). Moreover, while many feminist ethnographies have explored the experience of gender violence as part and parcel of patriarchal gender formations in different cultural contexts, only some have focused squarely on gender violence as a phenomenon unto itself, even as it takes different forms through a myriad of state interventions (e.g., Beske, 2016; Bloom, 2023; Davis, 2006, 2019; Friederic, 2023; Gribaldo, 2020; Hautzinger, 2007; McClusky, 2001; Mulla, 2014; Parson, 2013; Plesset, 2006; Zheng, 2022). The contributors to this symposium build upon these ethnographies of gender violence by addressing the entangled politics of emotion at the site of the state and body politic, highlighting the felt, bodily, everyday experiences of people embroiled in gender violence from a variety of positionalities, informed by shifting power relations and cultural meanings (Merry, 2009). We analyze the ways gender violence often provokes viewers, recipients, and perpetrators of the violence to experience an intensity of feeling, shaped by the particular historical-social formation from which the violence derives (Das, 2006b; Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Together, these articles contribute to feminist anthropology by providing richer analyses and insights into the entanglement of gender violence, emotion, and the state to understand, mitigate, and eliminate gender violence.

Feminist anthropologists have always been attentive to the ways that gender violence is multiply constituted by various forms of violence, despite a tendency in archaeology and biological anthropology to place undue emphasis on male-to-male physical violence (Nelson, 2021). As many feminist scholars of gender and violence have shown, diverse types of violence—including psychological, sexual, economic, patrimonial, emotional, and structural violence—deserve our unflinching attention. Taking place in often-intimate realms of social life, these forms of gender violence constitute the “hidden assaults…meted out in small doses” that eventually accumulate and affect a person's physical and mental health, not to mention their “personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value” (Nelson, 2021, 1; Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004, 1). Gender violence, “an interpretation of violence through gender,” encompasses a wide range of assaults and harms “whose meaning depends on the gendered identities of the parties” (Merry, 2009, 3).

Towards the end of the 20th century, anthropologists engaged in groundbreaking scholarship on the anthropology of gender violence particularly focused on rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and women's variegated forms of resistance (e.g., Counts et al., 1999; Levine, 1959; Sanday, 1981). Inadvertently, however, the emphasis of this early research on gender violence was on the physical aspects of gender violence. In more recent work, we still see that physical violence (or identifiable evidence thereof) often takes analytical precedence precisely because of its visibility, legibility, and power in legal-judicial proceedings (Hlavka & Mulla, 2021; Mulla, 2014). At various points, however, feminist anthropologists have clearly emphasized emotion as an aspect of gender violence, including domestic violence. In the 1980s, Burbank (1988) argued for the importance of recognizing Australian Aboriginal women's feelings of anger expressed in violent aggression and defense and their refusal to become victims of violence from both men and women. Scheper-Hughes (1992) foregrounded broader forms of violence in her ethnographic research in northeast Brazil, exploring “everyday violence” at the intersections of structural, gendered, and physical violence, and their impact on emotions. More specifically, she examined poverty-stricken women and their children's suffering, and women's attenuated love for infants who were ill and died in high numbers due to a social context of state repression and economic inequality in Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, 1992). As noted, Nelson (2021) also recently emphasized the need for all anthropologists to prioritize as worthy of study the harm, risk, and trauma that are commonly experienced as a result of structural and emotional violence. She argued that dismantling the “hierarchy of bad acts” in anthropology that has prioritized physical violence, at the expense of emotional violence, “will enable us to understand the impacts of inequity in power and risk experienced in the familial and interpersonal relationships often experienced in daily life” (Nelson, 2021, S93). Clearly, there is still a need to broaden the study of gender violence with respect to emotion. The articles in this symposium do this by discussing the state's role in generating historically specific emotional experiences and forms of emotional gender violence in diverse societies.

Violence itself can take many forms and can often defy categorizations, as can individual and social responses to violence across different settings (Burbank, 1988; Merry, 2006; Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Survivor responses to gender violence can include embodied somatic complaints, reconstruction of survival narratives, physical retaliation, silence, or sudden bursts of emotion. The variety of experiences and responses speak to the need for agile feminist activist methodologies among researchers (Craven & Davis, 2013; Das, 2006a; Davis, 2014; Davis & Craven, 2022; Harrison, 2007; Jenkins, 1994; Lamphere, 2016; Stephen & Speed, 2021; Tapias, 2006; Wies, 2013). Embodied emotions that emerge from gender violence are expressed and experienced in a much wider sense as well, as emotions are also experienced by family and community members who witness the violence, or even professionals, state authorities, and frontline workers. Though emotional responses to violence are commonly expected, they are often deprioritized or dismissed, especially because they can be deemed politically insignificant in a legal-juridical model of gender justice. However, as we contend in this symposium, emotions and feelings experienced in response to violence become important arenas for asserting dignity, shaping help-seeking, making meaning amid everyday life, and molding political strategies for intervention. Whittaker (2020), for instance, asserted that Indigenous women in the rural south of Mexico City felt they had the power to change their circumstances, which included experiencing varied forms of gender violence. She drew on the concept of “felt power” to center “Indigenous women's experiential, embodied, and spiritual knowledge in addressing the gender-based violence they often experienced” (Whittaker, 2020, 288).

The analyses in this symposium draw from a long history of feminist anthropologists who theorize emotion itself (e.g., Lutz, 1986, 2017; Lutz & Abu-Lughod, 1990; Lutz & White, 1986; Mascia-Lees, 2016; Rosaldo, 1980; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987) and emotion in relation to gender violence, specifically (e.g., Burbank, 1988; Das, 2008; Jenkins, 1994; Scheper-Hughes, 1992; Theidon, 2016). While each contributor to this symposium theorizes emotion from a different perspective, a shared view is that emotion is historically, culturally, and socially constituted, and an intersubjective and embodied experience. Emotions involve morality and inspire action. When people think of emotions relative to gender violence, they usually think of emotion as tied to interpersonal relationships, but rarely look beyond them to the state. However, we show how the state (including policies and various forms of soft power) shapes, affects, and enlists emotions.

Building on feminist anthropology's literature on gender violence in particular state contexts (e.g., Adelman, 2003, 2004; Hautzinger, 2007; Razack, 2000), the articles in this symposium examine the politics of emotion at the site of the body politic, addressing the ways the state initiates, sanctions, or ignores discourses and practices of gender violence. Emotions may motivate change in a society, shape the harms of everyday life, be deployed in governing social orders, or inspire political possibilities (Lutz, 2017; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987). The authors thus interrogate how state reforms, policies, and modes of governing, as well as how broader political and economic forces, affect plural emotional experiences of gender violence in Ecuador, Vietnam, Cuba, the US broadly, and Puerto Rico. In these articles, we reveal how emotions can motivate action and new ways of contesting the various forms of gender violence, such as household interpersonal violence and obstetric, carceral, and structural violence.

This symposium begins with Karin Friederic's article, which examines how campaigns, discourses, and laws related to women's rights and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Ecuador have effectively “isolated” IPV as a discrete phenomenon, emphasizing its “wrongness,” the validity of righteous anger, and the importance of legal-juridical modes of justice. Twenty years ago, however, women in rural coastal Ecuador understood and responded to IPV as one strand of social suffering embedded in rural life and managed through collective idioms of distress. Thus, Friederic shows how the Ecuadorian state has used and encouraged certain emotional states and reactions to violence as a way of constructing contemporary feminized citizenship. Next, Lynn Kwiatkowski examines the Vietnamese state's recently changing responses to domestic violence. In her article, we see how cultural conceptions of domestic violence are informed by socioeconomic reforms instituted by the socialist state in the 1980s, the related state revival of Confucian gender ideologies, and global influences in recent decades on approaches to domestic violence. Using the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, Kwiatkowski looks at ways diverse emotional experiences of violence among men and women in northern Vietnam provide insight into patterns of help-seeking and interventions into marital violence.

Analyzing gender violence and the mobilization of emotions in relation to another socialist state, Hope Bastian explores obstetric violence as a form of gendered structural violence in Cuban public hospitals. Her article analyzes how the politicization of health and gaps in the health care system create conditions leading to gender violence in public maternity hospitals. Applying a feminist ethics of care approach, Bastian assesses the relationships between the State/Revolution, public health system, health care providers, and patients, and explains how emotions of fear and gratitude are mustered in these relations to obscure gender violence and maintain the hierarchical institutions of the state and obstetrics. She also points to ways women exercise ambiguous agency to protect themselves in an environment of obstetric violence. Nicole Kellett's paper builds upon Bastian's emphasis on the gendered and emotional dimensions of state-produced violence, in this case focusing on the racialized neoliberal dimensions of carceral violence in the United States through an “intimate ethnographic” approach. By telling the story of one formerly incarcerated woman and friend named LaTasha, Kellett uncovers the rich emotional complexity of navigating reentry after spending 25 years in the US prison system. Kellett reveals “the intersectional and invisible spaces through which states enact racialized carceral violence” by both demanding individual responsibility of re-entering subjects and simultaneously denying and flattening their emotional selves. These forms of affect demanded and produced by the US carceral state act as a form of gendered violence that further delimits the agency of formerly incarcerated women as they reenter society.

Further expanding the scope of analysis of the entanglements of states, bureaucracy, emotion and gender violence, Waleska Sanabria León and M. Gabriela Torres interrogate ways that the Puerto Rican state's responses to recent cascading disasters (including hurricanes, earthquake swarms, and the COVID-19 pandemic) and its attempts to minimize increasing cases of gender-based violence and feminicides have led to the reproduction of patriarchy in the territory. Sanabria León and Torres explore the extraordinary practical and emotional experiences of frontline service providers in the context of cumulative disasters to demonstrate how disaster mitigation protocols come to reflect the broad exclusion of gender based violence mitigation by the Puerto Rico state. They also point to the agency of activists in their analysis, who have recognized the absence of up-to-date statistical information on feminicide and see accurate statistical reporting as part of their political project of reconstruction and recognition of gender violence.

In her Commentary, Louise Lamphere provides a powerful summary of the “evocative ethnographic” approaches followed by each of the authors in this symposium (Skoggard and Waterston, 2015). As she details, each article draws on feminist anthropological theory to interrogate state policies and practices by privileging emotion, feeling, and sentiment. By using diverse analytical lenses within feminist anthropology, the symposia authors also provide powerful theoretical and methodological insights for feminist anthropologists to address and eliminate gender violence within historically specific cultural and political contexts. More specifically, Kwiatkowski and Friederic both approach gender, emotion, and the state from the framework of feminist critical medical anthropology, Kellett provides an intimate or “evocative ethnography” of state violence and incarceration, Bastian foregrounds a “feminist ethics of care,” and Waleska and Torres interrogate the colonial politics of state knowledge production. All of these conceptual approaches illuminate the entanglements of gender violence, emotion, and the state in new ways. Furthermore, because these cases examine state practices across settings characterized by distinct cultural meanings and relations of power, the collection as a whole illuminates the nuanced mutual effects of culture, power, and the state. We hope readers will find much to draw from in the case studies and analytical frameworks presented here.