(VLS2b) Violence as a Cultural Process II: Challenging Institutional Stories of Violence

How do people and institutions construct the meanings they attach to violence? This is a recurring session that aims to advance sociological theories, methods, and empirical explorations of how people come to understand violence. What conceptual frameworks and experiences enhance or prevent the understanding of the various meanings of violence? Part 1 of this session focuses on how institutions such as the state and the media produce “official stories” of violence. Part II, on the other hand, focuses on how survivors, activists, and scholars might challenge these official stories and shed new light into the uses and meanings of violence, from the perspectives of those most affected by it. Tags: Culture, Violence

Organizers: Natalia Otto, University of Toronto, Lily Ivanova, University of British Columbia, Marie Laperriere, University of Manitoba; Chairs: Natalia Otto, University of Toronto, Lily Ivanova, University of British Columbia

Presentations

Nujhat Jahan, University of British Columbia

From Silence to Violence: The Victims of 1971 Sexual Violence in Post-Independence Bangladesh

Sexual assault was one of the many violent crimes that took place in Bangladesh during the Liberation War of 1971, which resulted in the nations independence. The Pakistani Army targeted millions of Bengali women and used sexual violence as a weapon of war against them, aiming to abolish traditional culture and destroy their dignity. Despite numerous witnesses, the instances of women subjected to sexual violence were not accurately documented. The national narrative of the event remains male-centric. This secrecy, a form of historical silence, has influenced the lives of the victims, making it difficult to reveal their personal history in post-independence Bangladesh. This paper utilizes an archival method, specifically examining historical photographs and newspaper cuttings, to investigate the practices and experiences of these women in post-independence Bangladesh. The paper argues that the initiatives taken to restore them in society are layered with various forms of silence, including the unrecognized sacrifices they made, the economic injustices they faced, and their constant struggles for official recognition. This paper relates these layers of silence that continue to exist in society to various forms of violence that often go beyond observable forms. I draw upon the scholarship of renowned historian Michel Rolph Trouillot to understand the phenomenon of historical silence, while also relying on the insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Johan Galtung regarding the concept of violence. Thus, in order to understand this layered silence against the victims of sexual violence in Bangladesh today, I argue, one needs to understand the multiple forms of violence that they experience every day and how these incidents shape their lives. The findings of this study provide support for the idea that identifying sources of their sufferings, particularly in symbolic and structural forms, is deeply ingrained in the social environment to the point where it is perceived as a normal aspect of what is considered acceptable in society. 

Giovane Batista, Get Beyond Learning

The expansion of militias in Brazil

There is a new configuration of territorial control of clandestine groups in Rio de Janeiro, the militias. In this abstract, I highlight the factors that led to the multiplication of militia dominance, especially the use of tools such as creating the violence map to define effective strategies for public security in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Researchers in the area have been guided by the concept of effective public policies to tackle the problem and make a diagnosis based on data and evidence. I highlight that it is essential to strengthen democratic control of police activity, that is, to provide greater transparency and accountability for what is done in this area, which is very marked by opacity. At the same time, methodological and theoretical challenges must be faced. The sociological crime category has many theoretical classifications: strategic, interactive, symmetrical, asymmetrical, homogeneous, and heterogeneous criminality. Review of data analysis, Brazilian and international sociological literature, studying the political dimension of the problem and carrying out comparative studies between the cases of Colombia and the United States and the importance of ethnographic studies become fundamental for an accurate sociological assessment of the problem. I intend to identify the factors that led to the structuring of militias from the 2000s onwards. The two largest groups were the emergence of the Comando Vermelho in the 1970s, amid the military dictatorship, and the TCP (Third et al.) in the 1990s. Furthermore, how the militias managed to impose themselves as the hegemonic group in Rio in recent decades, reconfiguring the relations between armed groups. I intend to demonstrate that the militias were structured in two distinct periods. In the second half of the 2000s, the first was its economic practices, the presence of public authorities who participated directly or indirectly and the integration of the militia with neo-Pentecostal religious groups in the citys favelas. Starting in 2017, we have a second period of expansion of militia groups, and I intend to discuss the main factors that contributed to this growth. Rio de Janeiros economy, in decline from 2015 onwards, stopped paying police officers salaries and left the institutions responsible for public security in crisis. The solution applied was the worst possible: military intervention. The operations were uncoordinated and very violent towards the civilian population and did not prove to be effective in confronting the militia. In conclusion, assessing the impact of militias on Brazilian daily life is a complex issue because it involves analyzing not only public security but also a real threat to national institutions and the routine life of the population.

Harmata Aboubakar, University of Toronto

Shared History yet Divergent Memories: Reconstructing the Violence of Chad's Cut-Cut Massacre

This is a comparative study of the 1917 “Cut-Cut Massacre” in Chad, central Africa, in which French colonial forces beheaded religious leaders as a public punishment aimed at suppressing the influence of Islam. I explore the divergent perceptions of the massacre among the Chadian diaspora in the Western world and local communities in Chad. I seek to uncover how these groups construct meanings around - and interpret the memory of - this violent historical event. Drawing upon political sociology and the literature on memory and sense-making, this research investigates how these two groups construct and interpret the meanings of colonial violence, focusing on contexts, experiences, and conceptual understandings. Collective memories and interpretations of violent historical events vary widely and are frequently subject to debate. Indeed, various memory agents may hold differing views regarding the meanings attributed to events associated with cultural trauma, punishment, and atrocities (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 1995; Olick 1999). This case sheds light on how religious and cultural contexts offer tools and repertoires for interpreting historical violence among groups with a common history and shared religious beliefs. I apply theoretical lenses, such as sense-making theory (Weick et al. 2005), cultural trauma (Alexander 2004), and frame analysis, to archival materials in order to understand how each group perceives and makes sense of the violence surrounding the event. This comparative approach allows for an exploration of the political processes and meaning-making repertoires used in understanding the violent event and the distinct frames used among Chadians in the homeland and diaspora to make sense of violence.

Luiza Dutra, Pontifícia Universidade Católia do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS)

Policing and the Police Approach: social representations about the construction of the racialized suspect in Brazil.

The studies on policing, police approach, and social markers in Brazil have shown that the racial social marker is the most important marker, from the perspective of police selectivity and inequalities in treatment, from the definition of who will be approached to the options regarding the use of police force in each case. Marked by a tradition of abusive use of force and militarization of police functions, the institutional dynamics of the military police in Brazil, and the focus on ostensive policing, guide the fight against crime, legitimizing and increasing the excessive use of force by these agents as a response to the phenomenon of criminality. In Brazil, considering the fact that the creation of legal norms for the use of force by the State does not prevent violence from exceeding designated situations where it can serve as a tool, it is necessary to recognize that discretionary police activity goes hand in hand with bureaucratic institutionalization, encountering cultural and institutional difficulties in overcoming its historically built authoritarian and repressive structures. Moreover, in racialized societies like Brazil, the research agenda on unequal processes of criminalization based on the race marker is already consolidated in the field of Sociology of Violence, whether identifying the weight of this marker in the justice system as a whole or in identifying processes of racialization in the actions of civilian and military police. From these initial points, this research sought to analyze in what ways the racial social marker is present at the moment of police approach and in the construction of the suspects figure, based on the social representations expressed in the discourses of Military Police officers in 04 states of Brazil. The view of different social actors in these police-community interactions is central to understanding the complexity of legitimacy disputes in police approach. In this sense, the present study deals with ostensive policing, more specifically with police approach, analyzing the construction of the "innate suspect" based on the racial social marker. The main objective was to identify the social representations expressed in the speeches of military police officers in Brazil, in 04 states - São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and Brasília - regarding the presence and influence of this social marker in police approach, that is, how they perceive and justify police selectivity based on racial attributes that construct the figure of the suspect. In addition to a brief review of the most recent Brazilian literature on the subject, interviews were conducted with different military police officers, seeking to identify the social representations that shape - and are shaped by - these social actors about policing and the police role itself, as well as to identify how they perceive the influence of the racial social marker. Crossing the discursive data collected in interviews with quantitative data on police approach and racial issues, it can be affirmed that police approach is crossed by processes of racialization that carry with them the social construction of the "innate suspect". In other words, they demonstrate the existence of social representations based on narratives that highlight the mechanisms of racialization of suspects. This research seems to be relevant not only for presenting racialized violence as structuring a social institution in the context of a Latin American country but also as a way to complexify violence as culture in different social contexts.

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Non-presenting author: Rodrigo Ghiringhelli de Azevedo, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

Althea McIntosh, Western University

Crisis claims of trans genocide: towards a sociocultural account of transphobic violence

Public discourse on claims of trans genocide has been ongoing since at least 2015. Interlinked forms of patterned violence (symbolic, structural, and direct) materially hinge on definitional conflicts, both sociocultural and political. Conversely, trans genocide claims have their counterpart in reactionary claims of a threatening trans ideology or trans agenda (“transgenderism”), meriting investigation of how the respective actors iteratively reproduce these latent, but increasingly potent, crisis claims (Sendroiu, 2022). The key questions become: 1) how do such crisis claims reflect shifting sociocultural contexts, and what futures do they posit? And 2) how do actors choose to either change or persist in their thought and actions in either accepting or rejecting a crisis claim? Drawing on Ann Swidler’s (1986) concept of culture as a “repertoire”, and Ioana Sendroiu’s (2022a, 2022b) concept of crisis as a generative “crisis claim” (a social form of “guesswork” within “shifting sociocultural scaffoldings”), this researchs aim is theoretically assessing the changing contexts of these crisis claims. I pose these shifting contexts as macro-level political and cultural phenomena of discourse, existing in relation to the meso-level (interactional) production, articulation, and circulation of crisis claims’ discourses. By explicating how individuals’ crisis claims of trans genocide are experienced, conceived, and expressed, this research theoretically extends and deepens Graff and Koroloczuk’s (2022) inductively conceptual account of the opportunistic synergy between (often high religiosity) ultraconservative anti-gender activists and (relatively irreligious and/or secular) right-wing populists. Thus, crisis guesses are conceptually bound in a fourfold nexus, wherein crises either exist or do not, and crisis claims are either accepted or denied as “correct”. I similarly consider empirical research on anti-gender crisis claims, which is critical to understanding crisis claims of trans genocide , because drawing on an emic approach to the “ugly movement” (Avanza, 2018) of anti-gender crisis claims gives empirical purchase on theoretical analyses of trans genocide crisis claims. I argue that crisis claims of trans genocide and a trans agenda are both predicated on and subsequently condition macro-level changes in the cultural status of transgender people, alongside changes in their real and/or claimed relations to society. To theoretically grasp the political and sociocultural roots and ramifications of this “transgender debate”, I analytically explicate how the mutual exclusivity of the justificatory frameworks of these crisis claims shape sensemaking processes. The starkness of competing claims of gender crisis suggests their justificatory frames will be monosemous (i.e., formed by unambiguously exclusive and discrete categories). Relatedly, we must ontologically distinguish crisis claims of trans genocide from associated phenomena of varyingly systematic violence which trans people face, because a crisis has its own proper being in society. Correspondingly anti-genderist ideologies are only one frontier among other multifacetedly specific and contingent manifestations of the reactionary sociocultural and political projects of cisheterosexist patriarchy, undertaken for a complex range of motives among different interconnected actors. Thus, if activist-advocates have overstated crisis claims of trans genocide, opposition to the anti-genderist movement qua a key branch of this opportunistic synergy will still have been worthwhile for all those with an interest in emancipatory democracies and anti-hierarchical gender orders. In relation to praxis, what therefore may be most important about crisis-claims of trans genocide is the generative basis they offer in counterhegemonic mobilization against novel formations of cisheteropatriarchal violence. Crucially, by relating crisis claims of trans genocide to the aforementioned opportunistic synergy, my theoretical exposition both fosters the explication of individuals’ meaningful experiences, conceptualizations, distinctions, and responses to specific forms of transphobic violence via crisis claims of trans genocide , while opening onto a more international and transnational sociological perspective on the intertwined flourishing of anti-genderism and right-wing populism, now especially in the US-dominated Anglosphere. In the context of public polarization around trans people (Jones and Brewer, 2018), other things being equal, the exclusivity of the respective crisis claims drives a mutual repulsion and intensification which entrenches polarization. People who express assent or dissent to crisis claims of trans genocide or trans ideology do so in drawing on macroscale discourses that assign blame for a range of violences (symbolic, structural, individual), and in so doing contribute both to the dynamic reconstitution of discursive fields and thus to emergent patterns of different kinds of resultant violence between these groups.