Kevorkian, Nadera Shalhoub

English

Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)

CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME202Book ReviewsThe volume of collected essays, Vio-lence In the Name of Honor, advo-cates for feminist analyses that wouldenable the development of a femi-nist epistemology regarding the crimeof femicide. In doing so, the authorsconstruct a critical approach that isinformed by an anti-racist under-standing of violence in the name of“honour,” which takes into accountthe global, local and national con-texts in which femicide occurs. Inthus contextualizing the crime, theeditors and the authors in the vol-ume attempt to both exceed andcounteract the orientalist limitationsthat traditionally prevent a cogentand anti-racist analysis of femicide,even within feminist critical prac-tices. As the  essays suggest through-out, attempts to critically understandfemicide often disintegrate under thepressure of an “us”/ “them” binary.Through the collection of essays,Mojab and Abdo reveal how com-bating femicide on both a materialand theoretical level, as well as inchallenging the pervasive gender warson women, not surprisingly, encoun-ters serious resistance from the patri-archal powers in place. which in turncontrol the production and repro-duction of epistemic practices thatVIOLENCE IN THENAME OF HONOR:THEORETICAL ANDPOLITICALCHALLENGESShahrzad Mojab and Nahla Abdo,Eds.Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi UniversityLibrary Press, 2004REVIEWED BY NADERASHALHOUB KEVORKIANfind a variety of expressions in lan-guage, law, religion, education, cul-ture, the popular media and more. Intheir introductory chapter, Mojaband Abdo identify several factors thatmitigate our understanding (even ifto limit it) of femicide. Broadly stated,they are as follows: the androcentricnature of gender relations; legal andextra-legal inequalities that exist; thestate’s reluctance to educate and in-tervene; Western racist tendenciesthat identify male violence as an en-demic component of the “nature” ofthe Other. As Mojab and Abdo statein their introduction, femicide, or asthey name it, “violence in the nameof honor,” carries a “complex web ofcontradictions between conscious-ness and reality, knowledge and prac-tice, the individual and the state, theagency and the institution, national-ism and feminism, religion and poli-tics and culture and politics.”The book is divided into four mainsections. The first section is a theo-retical exploration of “honour” kill-ing. Here Mojab’s contribution looksclosely at the origin of gender rela-tions that perpetually (re)produces aregime of violence against women,and presents various ideas that mayaid in preventing femicide, while shediscusses both short and long termstrategies for intervention. In hercontributions to this section, NicolePope discusses the way honour kill-ing is an instrument of patriarchalcontrol, and compares violenceagainst women in Western and inIslamic societies. She concludes bystressing the importance of promot-ing local initiatives to combat suchcrimes. The rest of the chapters inthis section focus on specific case-studies: Nukhet Sirman looks at theTurkish case, Nahla Abdo looks atthe Israeli and Asa Elden writes aboutSweden. In keeping with the generalintent of the volume, all three chap-ters require the reader to contextualizetheir analyses and understanding inculturally specific ways, while keep-ing in mind, as Abdo explains, thehistorical, structural and institutionallevels of society to more fully under-stand the propagation of such crimes.Additionally, the contributors to thissection ask us to look closely at thesocio-economic, political, and juridi-cal forces of the state that come intoplay when examining the causes andeffects of gender violence. Abdo paysparticular attention to the coloniallegacy of gender violence, and Sirmanlooks at the post-colonial state.Elden’s contribution pays particularattention to the voices of actualwomen who have been victims andsurvivors of gender violence.The second section of the bookreflects the unique, activist efforts bythe contributors and communitycentres, as exemplified by the essay“Community Struggle Against Hon-our Killing” both in Turkey andSweden. What struck me the mostabout these contributions was theconstant attempt to build interven-tions on behalf of the women bylistening to those voices, as well asusing the voices themselves as acts ofwitnessing and a way of speakingback to the violence perpetratedagainst them. Despite the specificityof the contributions, on some levelsthese essays transcend the specific.For example, when reading aboutthe experience of Turkish womenwith gender violence, I become cog-nizant of, and applaud the progressmade by, the Turkish communityorganizations; but I also understandthe burden we all carry as women,feminists, and citizens of the planet,when crimes are committed in thename of cultures and traditions.Nabahat Akkoc sums up the tran-VOLUME 25, NUMBERS 1,2 203scendence of the ostensibly “cultur-ally specific” when she writes in herconclusion “the cultural reasons forthe punishment of women in onesentence; it is possible to collect hun-dreds of practices of different cul-tures under a single heading: Tomaintain the secondary status ofwomen.”Similarly, in advocating for a hu-man outcry against crimes of genderviolence and specifically “honour”killing, as opposed to one that isspecifically a feminist, or woman-centred opposition, Leyla Pervizatstresses the need to re-define honourkilling within the community, toexpose the ways in which male fam-ily members also become victims ofan antiquated masculinized ideol-ogy—and calls for the need to createspace for long-term changes withinthe culture. Such a “space” and thecreation and possible interventionsof such a “spatialized” language, shestates, could offer individual men anexcuse to avoid violence, while itdoes not marginalize or abandon thelarger project of a human rights dis-course to provide a framework withwhich to speak back to the dynamicsof gender violence.Section three starts with an articleby Yakin Erturk, the UN specialreporter on Violence AgainstWomen, that is entitled: “Violencein the Name of Honour Within theContext of International Regimes”.She stresses the ways in which theglobal patriarchal nature of genderrelations continually (re)produces thesubordination and inequality ofwomen. She connects the liminalconcept of “honour” to power, andargues that understanding of “[t]heissue of honor … in diverse ways indifferent parts of the world, is impor-tant from the point of view of theintegration of the individual into thegroup.” She suggest that while crimesof “passion” generally involve vio-lence against women by an intimatepartner, femicide is always alreadyimplicated within a collective iden-tity that is socially (re)configured bythe public reputation of all the actorsinvolved. Hence, she believes thatdue to the collective nature of thecrime, the empowerment of womenthrough international agendas, hu-man rights laws, state, community,and the family is crucial. She con-cludes by stating: “Last … there isneed for deconstructing hegemonicmasculinities and engaging in a dia-logue and alliance with alternativemasculinities that are opposed tooppressive uses of power.”Christina Curry’s contribution“Acting With Honour: Justice NotExcuses In Crimes of So-Called‘Honour’ ” calls on us to use the term“honour” in a different way. She iscalling on men and women to actwith honour and show respect foreach other. She states: “I see a state of‘acting with honour’ not when ittakes steps to protect all women inthat state from violence and to pre-vent violence against them—becausethis is their obligation before thelaw—but when they are world lead-ers in doing so.” Her contributiontherefore challenges Turkey as a stateto “act honourably” and become aworld leader in campaigning againstviolence against women.Additionally in section three, incontrast to the investigation of “hon-our” killings in Turkey, the Swedishcontribution raises the importanceof recognizing other communitystruggles, mainly the effects of theincrease of both hidden and appar-ent racism in Sweden, and how suchracist perceptions mitigate reactionstowards honour crimes. This essayby Niklas Kelemen takes an innova-tive approach, whereby the author’sdiscussion centres not on women asvictims of gender violence, nor onhuman rights or feminist activists,but rather on men. Kelemen’s essay,“The Dialogue Project to PreventViolence: Discussions with Fathersand Sons,” juxtaposes the voices ofmen with the voice of a Syrian girlwho discusses the “ethical” (or un-ethical), perceptions of men towards“honour” killings.Section four is a useful appendixof research on violence againstwomen that any researcher on thetopic should find very useful. Theappendix is divided into sub-catego-ries, which allows for an even moreefficacious usage of the informationpresented.The main contribution of this ed-ited volume lies in its investigation ofWestern epistemic practices, whichhowever well meaning, have oftencreated neo-orientalist ideologies thathave in fact denied specific groups ofpeople a contextual understandingof their struggles against oppression,and often eliminated serious inquiryby further subjugating them to theunproductive dynamics of an “us”/”them” binary. This volume doesmuch to examine the ways in whichWestern theoretical positions, some-times even feminist ones, have shapedpolicies regarding violence againstwomen, policies which have often(however unwittingly) prevented theformation of a more complete un-derstanding of violence againstwomen, and in understanding thecomplex political, economic and his-torical forces in which such violenceis often mired.Since no one can expect a singlevolume of essays to cover or addressevery issue that is endemic to such acomplex social issue as the crime offemicide, I present the following re-marks not so much as criticism but aspossible venues for further study.One of the issues that needs furtherattention is the way in which vio-lence against women is individual-ized in the West, while it is demonizedas a cultural phenomenon elsewhere.When notorious cases of violenceagainst women surface in the West,they are always analyzed as individualaberrations, not as representations ofthe violent tendencies of Westernmen as a collective. Critical researchstudies need to address how suchperceptual inconsistencies affect ouranalysis not just of the crime of femi-cide, but violence against womenmore broadly.As a whole, the volume raises veryimportant issues pertaining to femi-cide, and these issues are con-CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME204textualized in culturally specific ways,ranging from its consideration inPalestine to Turkey to Sweden etc.Thus covering the issue from theperspective of various societies andvarious contexts enables the authorsto shed light on the salient issuesfacing us as feminist activists whendealing with femicide. I do wish thatthe voices of the women who havebeen directly or indirectly affectedby femicide were more seamlesslyintegrated into the volume, ratherthan used somewhat sporadically. Iadmit this is a personal bias, in thatin my work not just on femicide, buton women’s issues in the region gen-erally, I prefer to have the voices ofthese women speak as directly aspossible. However, I would like toconclude by saying that this collec-tion by Mojab and Abdo is a goodstart for those who would like tolearn about femicide, and under-stand the ways in which Westernperceptions of the crime and West-ern critical tendencies have affectedour understanding of it.In the heat of the summer of 1986, afriend was raped, in her own bed onthe third floor of her house, by aserial rapist who had been stalkingher Toronto neighbourhood look-ing for an easy access through a screendoor or open window. The policeknew what he was doing and weretracking his path. They asked her ifshe had been sleeping in the nude orwearing a provocative negligee. Awoman at the hospital rape crisiscentre introduced herself as an ex-THE STORY OFJANE DOE:A BOOK ABOUTRAPEJane DoeToronto: Random House of CanadaLimited, 2004REVIEWED BY MARION M.LYNNpert on rape. When my distraughtfriend asked this expert about herrape, she retorted that she had neverbeen raped, but was a professionalexpert on rape through her studiesof rape and by helping rape victims.In the fall of 1986 I was taking acourse on violence against women.Lori Haskell, one of the instructors,brought a woman into the class tospeak to us about rape. This womanhad also been raped in the summerof 1986, by a different serial rapist,stalking a different Toronto neigh-bourhood. He entered apartmentson third and fourth floors throughlocked balcony doors. She did notspeak about studies of rape or herwork with rape victims, but fromher own recent experience. She wasto become an expert on rape. Shewas the woman now known as JaneDoe. This book is her story.It is also much more than herstory. It is the story of the intersec-tion of the personal and the politi-cal, of the act of rape at the particu-lar, institutional, social and politicallevels. The book presents a uniqueanalysis of rape and of one woman’sresponse to having been raped, show-ing in part that this is a profoundlytraumatic act of violence againstone woman by one man, and at thesame time it is a deep, systemicattack on all women by all men.The Story of Jane Doe, written infirst person by the woman herself, isillustrated with drawings, newspa-per reports, her personal journal writ-ing and funny cartoons. It is a dis-turbing, personal, and tragic, story.It tells how one act on one night candestroy a woman’s life, as she knewit, resulting in years of poor physicaland mental health, sleep terrors, se-crets kept from her family. At thesame time, the story of this rapeunfolds within a brilliant frameworkas a public and political act. Jane Doeturns this violent act against her per-son into a public act involving otherwomen who have been raped – fiveby the same man. She engages femi-nist support groups such as WomenAgainst Violence Against Women(WAVAW), convenes communitymeetings and sues the Metro To-ronto Police. She raises questions asto who benefits from this sociallyconstructed and systemically sup-ported form of violence againstwomen. If three-quarters of menwould not commit rape, what dothey do to prevent this violenceagainst their friends and loved ones?And how does one explain the evi-dence that up to 80 per cent of rapesare committed by men who areknown, who are “friends” and “lovedones” of the woman?The book is not just about thehorrors of rape and the injustice ofthe justice system. There is life afterrape; as Jane Doe says “you can’tkeep a good woman down.” It in-cludes poignant examples of unwa-vering support and love, from herfamily as she was growing up to herfriends who were her lifeline duringthe years after the rape. This womanis Jane Doe only in terms of her legalfight; in the rest of her life she worksin publishing, teaching and film, hasa name and friends, lives an appar-ently normal life.Above all else this book is about awoman suing the Metro TorontoPolice for negligence in their failureto protect, and of Charter violationsin the subsequent investigation ofthe rape. It provides great detail aboutwhat is needed to carry out such afeat. Immediately after the rapeWAVAW members help her put up

Violence in the Name of Honor: Theoretical and Political Challenges

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Violence in the Name of Honor: Theoretical and Political Challenges

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Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme (E-Journal, York University)