Re/defining violence: Anticipating discriminatory violence as violence


Celeste Orr, University of New Brunswick; Alessia Mastrorillo, University of Ottawa

Alok Vaid-Menon (2020, 16), a trans non-binary person of colour, writes, “I still cannot go outside without being afraid for my safety.” Marginalized people fear and expect violence, often daily. This prompts us to ask, is anticipating violence violence in and of itself? Violence is tricky to define because, in part, it relies on a perceived expert to tell us the “truth” of violence: what violence looks like, how it manifests, what can be classified as violent. Typically, violence is defined in very rigid ways, namely physical (e.g. a punch). Given the usual narrow definition of violence as physical, and the oppressive power relations involved in who has the authority to deem something violent or not, scholars have long sought to broaden definitions of violence to name ignored forms of violence that marginalized people experience as violence: sexual violence against women, specifically women of colour (Hamad 2020); representational violence (hooks 1996); curative violence (Kim 2017); epistemological violence (Namaste 2009). These forms of violence are not always understood as such because they “do not map onto prototypical exemplars” (Hamby 2017, 167) and because they involve marginalized people who are overwhelmingly discredited as hyperbolic. Building on the work of the violence and trauma studies scholars (Westengard 2019; Root 1992; Brown 1991), critical race studies scholars (Washington 2021; Hamad 2020; hooks 1996), as well as feminist, gender, and queer theorists (Halberstam 1996; Berlant and Freeman 1992), we argue that anticipating discriminatory violence is violence in and of itself. To do so, we contest two commonly held assumptions about violence that are often reproduced in scholarly works (see Hamby 2017) and by organizations (see World Health Organization 2014). First, we question the idea that violence is intentional. The idea that violence needs to be intentional is a long-held myth that functions to deny various forms violence and absolve people who have enacted violence. Combatting the idea that violence needs to be intentional, the phrase “intent doesn’t equal impact” has gained traction (Utt 2013). Second, we challenge the idea that violence requires a clear perpetrator. Systems of oppression and discriminatory ideologies are violent and enact violence, but there often is no clear perpetrator (Dill and Zambrana 2009). When we are preoccupied with claiming that violence involves an intentional actor, we neglect to attend to the ways in which oppressive ideologies, systems, and discourses structure culturally devalued people’s daily lives and experiences of anticipating and experiencing violence. This line of argumentation is in part a response to psychiatric theories of trauma and violence (Freud 1895; Janet 1984; LaCapra 1994; Caruth 1996) that rely heavily on isolated events to locate the source of a subject’s injury. More contemporary work from trauma studies, decolonial studies, and critical disability studies, argue that violence, or the threat of violence, is bound up in the everyday lives of minoritarian subjects. Living under our current Western capitalist cisheteropatriarchal regime renders the “everyday,” rather than singular events done onto individual people, as a site of trauma and violence. We are interested in turning toward the intimate and unspoken yet quotidian dimensions of violence to render systemic oppression visible and to denaturalize the demonization of marginalized people under systemic oppression. This framework for reconceptualizing what “counts” as violence creates space to move beyond violence in its most traditional forms: the punch, the slur, the denial. Turning towards the anticipation of violence invites us to see violence, for marginalized populations, as a “structural underpinning of life itself” (Matties-Boon 2018). Anticipating violence is the logical consequence of insidious violence, insidious trauma, and living under systems of oppression that devalue people. When a group of marginalized people collectively anticipate violence and develop a geography of fear (Lawson 2007) – women/girls expecting violence from men/boys; 2SLGBTQI+ people expecting violence from cishet people; racialized people expecting violence white people; colonized people expecting violence from colonists – it is clear violence has already happened. The very act of anticipating discriminatory violence reveals violence is happening all around us and in the most innocuous ways. This paper is part of a broader panel that reconceptualizes anticipations of queerphobic violence, both past and present, as inherently violent phenomena that shapes queer ontologies and queer desires.

This paper will be presented at the following session: