Exploring symbolic violence in the everyday : misrecognition, condescension, consent and complicity

The empirical material for the article was collected during a project funded by FAS (now FORTE), the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare.In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'misrecognition', 'condescension' and 'consent and complicity' to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because it provides a richer insight into the 'workings' of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men.PostprintPeer reviewe

The postsocialist ‘missing other’ of transnational feminism?

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Reconstructing the history of women's participation in the nationalist movement in India, 1905-1945

The nationalist struggle in India against British colonial rule brought about the political mobilisation of both men and women. The nationalist leaders required the participation of women in the nationalist movement because the movement's importance and success was dependent on women's contribution to and involvement in it. While the existing research has contributed to my understanding of women's interaction with political life in India, this study attempts to reconstruct the dominant interpretations on women's political involvement. In doing so, it deconstructs concepts such as 'active', 'private', 'public' and 'political'. The argument in this thesis is shaped through three inter-related themes. First, it problematises women's emergence into the public sphere from a purdah-bound domestic existence. Secondly, it locates the domestic as an equally important site of nationalist activities as the public sphere. Thirdly, in the light of the above themes, it is suggested that dichotomous concepts such as public/private do not help to explain the interaction between these spheres, which facilitated the complex process of women's emergence in the public sphere. Moreover, the associated concepts of political/apolitical do not take into account women's political contributions from within the domestic sphere. Within the domestic sphere, women's nationalist identities were continuously re-negotiated to accommodate values of ancient Indian culture and the new Western influences. These identities shifted from an educated domestic woman to a nonviolent and non-antagonistic public woman to a public woman aware of challenging Western ideas, yet primarily confined to the domestic sphere. The nationalist movement also served as an important vehicle for encouraging middle-class women to engage in activities and to adopt new role models. The representations of women constructed by the nationalist project enabled women to play a political role through the avenues they opened, in both the public and domestic domains. However, women's political past and their varied contribution to the struggle was not effective in undermining gender inequalities or improving their status in society. The ideas in this historical study are shaped primarily through oral narratives and Hindi vernacular literature. The interviews with Indian activists, as a non-Western researcher, made me aware of the negotiable category 'Other'. Official and unofficial sources provided an initial framework for the study of this historical period

Nationalist memories: interviewing Indian middle class nationalist women

This article explores the difficult terrain of documenting personal testimonies as a non-western researcher. My respondents were ordinary middle class women whose nationalist activities had not been documented before. The process of conducting the interviews made me aware of the significance of the family context, where my identity was continuously negotiated both by the respondents and their extended family. I was simultaneously positioned both as an 'outsider' and an 'insider' in these interviews. I also realised that recovering and interpreting respondent's memories of the nationalist movement raised issues of the construction of self and subjectivity. The ways in which respondents perceived their activities within the domestic sphere challenged the constructed historical knowledge, which associated only the 'public' as 'political'

Epistemic modalities of racialised knowledge production in the Swedish academy

The central aim of this article is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. Through autoethnography as an alternative methodological entry point, we analyse our embodied racialised experiences of navigating through historically white universities within a geo-political context framed through a supposedly “colour blind” and “post-racial society”. Our analytical reasoning is presented through several steps. First, we discuss how academic habitus and affiliations maintained in various scientific forums is informed through established, racialised norms and if/whose knowledge is marginalized, devalued, or/and is included due to the reductive representation. Second, we discuss how an uncultivated sense of epistemic entitlement, within different academic settings and communities, constructs indisputable knowing subjects and generates (un)earned (un)comfortable zones. Third, we argue how managing the existing accent ceiling becomes a mode for navigating the norms of whiteness

Conceptualizing xenophobia as structural violence in the lives of refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa

This paper highlights the embeddedness of xenophobia in institutions through a theoretical but empirically under-researched concept of structural violence. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interview data with refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa, we explore the empirical utility of the concept of structural violence in shaping refugee women’s everyday experiences of xenophobia through three analytical themes: (a) unequal access to resources (b) constrained agency and (c) dehumanization. While keeping an empirical grip on experiential narratives on xenophobia, we draw attention to three public institutions that enhance the vulnerability of those already vulnerable: The Department of Home Affairs, The South African Police Service and Public Hospitals. Our paper elucidates how refugee women experience xenophobia and how they manage their “everyday” in these circumstances- an aspect that remains underdeveloped in existing research.Licens fulltext: CC BY-NC-ND License</p

Indian “Native Companions” and Korean Camptown Women: Unpacking Coloniality in Transnational Surrogacy and Transnational Adoption

The article argues that transnational adoption and surrogacy from South Korea and India are shaped through US and British imperial and colonial histories in Korea and India respectively. We focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early British India and kijich’on (camptown) women in post–World War II Korea. The management of native women’s sexuality was crucial for maintaining social order, political stability, and for consolidating capitalism through the commodification and devaluation of colonized reproductive labor. The configuration of historical legacies is unpacked through the idea of coloniality, the constitutive dark side of modernity, which reproduces subalternity and exploitation of racialized bodies. The reproductive labour of Korean birth mothers and Indian surrogate mothers is formed and shaped by the colonial and imperial formations of gender, sexuality, kinship and family, in which white supremacy and exploitation of Indian and Korean women was at the core. We argue that these formations are re-configured in the present through three mechanisms that enable contemporary practices of adoption and surrogacy: the transformation of waste into profit, the erasure of non-white mothers, and the trope of the white savior