Introduction

To speak of violence is to speak of bodies and their capacities to wound and to be wounded. To speak of the relationship between the bodies of violence – the bodies that wound and those that are wounded – is to address multiple layers of intimacy and abstraction. In the first instance, the body itself can be a weapon – hands, fists, musculature and weight, genitals, feet. Or weapons become extensions of individual bodies – the sword, the baton, the knife, the gun, the bayonet. Indeed, the weapons of combat for millennia were in essence simply such extensions of individual bodies.

It is only in the last century, with the invention of aerial bombing, that the violence of war could be so thoroughly abstracted, culminating in digitized and decontextualized images of “surgical strikes” and in verbal abstractions like “collateral damage.” These sorts of abstractions have become normative and normalized to such an extent that those who have reintegrated the individual body into violence – the suicide bomber who turns his or her body into a weapon or the machete-wielding perpetrator of genocide, committing mass murder one body at a time – enter the collective imagination as figures of particular horror. And yet, how does one rank the practices and experiences of violence on the basis of degrees of intimacy or abstraction?

Of course, violence does not only or simply involve individual bodies, wounded and wounding. It depends upon and is interwoven with institutions, structures of power, and economic relationships – all elements of social life that simultaneously benefit from or tolerate or legitimate certain kinds of violence and declare other forms of violence beyond the pale. Indeed, what “counts” as violence – and, concomitantly, what forms of violence are effaced or rendered invisible or unnameable as violence – results from critical contests over a range of ideological and material terrains.

And it is really this question – what counts as violence? – that animates the discussions found in this issue of the Scholar & Feminist Online. Surrounding this question are numerous other contextualizing questions: How does violence become visible and legible as violence? What are the conditions and rationalizations for violence? How do we count violence’s costs – and thereby, perhaps, help to identify the point at which it becomes too costly? What forms of analysis and activism can help to generate effective alternatives to violence? What practical, critical, and imaginative resources are at our disposal for interrupting the impact of violence on individuals, communities, and the current world situation?

We have named this issue of the journal, Reverberations: On Violence. Not long after we gave this name to an issue that explores feminist responses to violence and feminist analyses of the state of the world, I encountered an anthology of feminist essays responding to September 11, 2001 and its global aftermath that bears the title, After Shock. ¹ I was immediately struck by the overlapping sensibilities embedded in these two images. Both aftershocks and reverberations – seismic or sonic waves that follow an initial earthquake jolt or a first sounding – are percussive, and they register in the body materially as sensation and in the realms of spirit and affect uncannily as echoes, memories, or quotations. They are no less “real” for their non-originary status, no less evocative for their citationality. They remind those who experience them that the event – the earthquake, the sounding – is never singular, but merely the inauguration of a series of consequences temporally and physically removed from the epicenter and the moment of enunciation.

Reverberations: On Violence grows out of two distinct but related events that took place at Barnard College during the 2002-2003 academic year. The first event was a colloquium, “Responding to Violence,” that was organized by Janet R. Jakobsen, the director of Barnard’s Center for Research on Women, and myself and held in October 2002. The colloquium featured a plenary address by Nobel Peace Laureate, Jody Williams (of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines) and then a day-long set of conversations among activists and academics organized around short papers that participants had written in response to pre-circulated questions. ² “Responding to Violence” was organized in the weeks and months following September 11, 2001. September 11 was not our focal point, in spite of the fact that this spectacular occasion of violence had obviously transformed both the skyline of New York City and many global political, economic, and military alignments in its wake. The colloquium grew out of our shared understanding that, irrespective of the significance of September 11, violence constitutes one of the most profound threats to human well-being around the world. We invited academic specialists in international relations, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, human rights, religion, and women’s studies along with longtime peace activists, cultural workers, lawyers, and development professionals to explore international efforts toward disarmament and peace and to theorize feminist responses to war and other forms of violence. As a broadly construed feminist project, the colloquium’s conversations focused on the intersections between the global structures of violence – militarism, most obviously – and more localized and intimate forms of violence – police brutality, hate crimes, domestic violence, among others. We sought to keep in view the myriad structures of domination and exchange that sustain frameworks of violence: global and local economic inequalities, patterns of (forced and voluntary) migration, transnational trafficking in small arms, institutional and ideological structures that continuously legitimate violence as the default response to a situation of conflict or hostility. It was our hope that the colloquium would contribute to the development of new and more comprehensive vocabularies for analyzing violence and revitalized strategies for anti-violence activism. The essays that appear in Part I of this issue of the Scholar & Feminist Online represent just a small sampling of the conversation from “Responding to Violence.” Later this year, Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence, an anthology of essays (including versions of the contributions by Beckman, Runions, and Williams) deriving from the colloquium will be published by Palgrave Macmillan. ³

In February 2003, the Center organized its twenty-eighth annual conference, The Scholar and the Feminist. This year’s conference was devoted to the theme, “Why? Feminist Analyses of the State of the World.” Picking up on many of the themes of the “Responding to Violence” colloquium, the Scholar and the Feminist conference examined the theoretical, ethical, and material conditions that shape and constrain the current world situation. The increasing militarism and militarization of global cultures, and in particular the role of U.S. governmental and corporate policies and initiatives in blurring the lines between war conditions and peace conditions around the globe, played a critical role in the conversations. The morning session – whose papers are reproduced in Part 2 of this issue – explored the amplification of imperialist impulses in U.S. foreign policy in the wake of September 11; the increasingly opaque line between “home” and “the front” in contemporary U.S. culture and the role of gender ideology in that blurring process; the multilayered politics of oil in Central Africa and the entanglements of U.S. foreign policy and corporate interests in this region of the world; and the prospect that global feminist movements have the potential to offer a compelling and effective challenge to the assumptions and institutions of neoliberalism as they operate in the global arena.

The afternoon session of the conference brought together four activists whose efforts in struggles against the structural and entrenched character of poverty, widespread environmental degradation, the long-term effects of colonialism on native people, and the depredations that characterize the U.S. prison system reminded the audience of the overlapping and intersecting dimensions of both the deeply rooted causes and far-reaching consequences of institutional and institutionalized forms of violence. Moreover, the panel offered an eloquent model for understanding feminism’s brief not to be limited to traditional “women’s issues” or gendered analyses, but also to be accountable to questions concerning everything from poverty to the police, the state of the global environment and the painful legacies of colonialism, and beyond. A report deriving from the transcript of this panel discussion appears at the end of Part 2 of this issue.

Reverberations brings together the textual archive of these two events organized by the Center for Research on Women, but it expands its engagement with the question of violence through the accompanying art gallery curated by Hope Dector. Artists, whatever their media, have historically often been the most eloquent critical voices in addressing the ongoing effects of violence on individuals and communities. (Is it a surprise to notice, for example, the contemporary resurgence of interest in Francisco Goya’s devastating artistic indictments of war culture? What does it mean that, upon looking at the image and reading his famous caption – “No se puede mirar.” “Yo lo vi. Esto es lo verdadero.” [“One cannot look.” “I saw it. It is the truth.”] – one still experiences the uncanny frisson of recognition, long after the historical referent of a particular war atrocity has receded?)

Taking on a topic as capacious and hydra-headed as “violence” means that one will never adequately complete one’s task. As a consequence, the material collected in this issue of the Scholar & Feminist Online is necessarily only a fragment of the work that might have been brought into the conversation. (The resources that appear in the “Online Resources” and “Recommended Reading” sections of this issue offer some guidance for further reading and exploration of the many issues at stake in engaging with the problem of violence.) Every act of violence, every gesture of coercion or wounding – no matter its degree of intimacy or abstraction – produces its own set of reverberations and consequences. For whatever other work this issue might do (whether preserving a partial archive of particular conversations or documenting creative examples of analysis and resistance), it is my hope that it will also draw attention to the devastating and enduring effects of all forms of violence; to the corrosive capacity of violence to brutalize and coarsen the individuals and collectivities who both suffer and perpetrate it; and to the pressing need – indeed, the moral imperative – to articulate alternative visions and to build forms of social life that are not predicated upon force, coercion, and wounding.

1. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, eds., After Shock: September 11, 2001: Global Perspectives (Vancouver, B.C.: Raincoast Books, 2003).[↑]
2. These questions and short papers can be found on the website for the Center for Research on Women at http://www.barnard.edu/bcrw/respondingtoviolence/index.htm.[↑]
3. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Janet R. Jakobsen, eds., Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 [forthcoming]). See www.palgrave-usa.com.[↑]