Addresses the many forms of global violence against women and shows how the psychology of individuals, institutions, and societies perpetuate the oppression of women. In this eye-opening study, the author asserts that institutionalized definitions of masculinity and femininity, along with the social and economic inequality among the sexes, help perpetuate the daily and deadly violence against women all across the world. This second edition of a classic work examines the latest discussions on gender relations, including the current debate over whether prostitution and pornography should be deemed inherently violent and the role of western countries in the global response to violence against women.
Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy reveals the centrality of violence to Fascist rule, arguing that the Mussolini regime projected its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination, and other everyday forms of coercion. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.
Ordinary social violence, - i.e. recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people - structures social relationships in Africa, and in the world. Studies of violence in Africa often refer to ethnic wars and explicit conflicts and do not enter the hidden domain of violence that this book reveals through in-depth anthropological studies from different parts and contexts in Africa. Ordinary violence has its distinctive forms embedded in specific histories and cultures. It is gendered, implicates witchcraft accusations, varies in rural and urban contexts, relates to demographic and socio-economic changes of the past decades and is embedded in the everyday life of many African citizens. The experience of ordinary violence goes beyond the simple notion of victimhood; instead it structures social life and should therefore be a compelling part of the study of social change.
Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe.
One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.
In Every 90 Seconds, Anne P. DePrince argues that to end violence against women, we must fundamentally redefine how we engage with it-starting by abandoning the idea that such acts are a problem involving only those who abuse or are abused. Instead, DePrince explains how violence against women is inextricably linked to other issues that stoke our greatest passions, including healthcare and education, immigration, economic security, criminal justice reform, and gun control.
The informative and controversial findings in this book are based on two path-breaking national surveys of American families. Both show that while the family may be the central locus of love and support, it is also the locus of risk for those who are physically assaulted. The book provides a wealth of information on gender differences and similarities in violence, and on the effects of gender roles and inequality.Two landmark American studies of violence from the National Family Violence survey form the basis of this book. Both show that while the family may be the central locus of love and support, it is also the locus of risk for those who are being physically assaulted. This is particularly true for women and children, who are statistically more at risk of assault in their own homes than on the streets of any American city. Physical Violence in American Families provides a wealth of information on gender differences and similarities in violence, and on the effects of gender roles and inequality. It is essential for anyone doing empirical research or clinical assessment.
David Hartsough knows how to get in the way. He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has crossed borders to meet “the enemy” in East Berlin, Castro’s Cuba, and present-day Iran. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines. Waging Peace is a testament to the difference one person can make. Hartsough’s stories inspire, educate, and encourage readers to find ways to work for a more just and peaceful world. Inspired by the examples of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hartsough has spent his life experimenting with the power of active nonviolence. It is the story of one man’s effort to live as though we were all brothers and sisters. Engaging stories on every page provide a peace activist’s eyewitness account of many of the major historical events of the past sixty years, including the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States and the little-known but equally significant nonviolent efforts in the Soviet Union, Kosovo, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Hartsough’s story demonstrates the power and effectiveness of organized nonviolent action. But Waging Peace is more than one man’s memoir. Hartsough shows how this struggle is waged all over the world by ordinary people committed to ending the spiral of violence and war.
This series of articles portrays the state of the art on family violence and abuse research, crystallizes the key interdisciplinary issues confronting family violence and abuse researchers, and suggests a research agenda for the coming years. Although the chapters cover a broad spectrum of issues and controversies in the areas of wife abuse, child abuse, the sexual abuse of children, and marital rape, a number of common themes and issues emerge. First, many chapters share the perspective that violence and abuse emerge from the nature of social arrangements. Second, even though many different forms of family violence and abuse are discussed, several chapters explore their commonalities and important etiological differences. A number of articles examine the common effects of victimization across various forms of family violence and abuse. A third common theme of the papers is an expansion of research efforts to groups other than victims of family violence and abuse, as there are chapters that examine the individual and social characteristics of male perpetrators of both wife abuse and child abuse as well as chapters that focus on the attitudes and behaviors of professional groups concerned with the treatment of victims of family violence and abuse. The volume shows great methodological diversity and attention to theoretical detail; the research presented reveals the possibility of a more comprehensive social science approach to the study of family violence and abuse. In work related to theory building, one chapter explains a number of findings in the child abuse and neglect literature using propositions derived from evolutionary biology; another paper distills propositions from several theoretical traditions. In conjunction with these efforts, several chapters report research designed to test competing propositions. Chapter references and research data are provided.
How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.
