Gender And Violence

Preying on Victims: Radical Christianity and Exploitation of Tragedy in the Name of God By Michele Stopera Freyhauf

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

It is our moral responsibility, whether we identify as Christians or not, to pray for not prey on the victims of... more It is our moral responsibility, whether we identify as Christians or not, to pray for not prey on the victims of tragedies.

Over the last month, dare I say years, society has witnessed or been subjected to an all out war from radical Christians across America deploying the wrath of God and reveling in the tragedy of others to perpetuate their apocalyptic message of rhetoric and terror.  As I hear the news over the last few months, an old Billy Joel song starts to play in my head “We didn’t start the fire.”  Whether we started the fire or not, we should not feed the flames of hatred but figure out a way to extinguish it.

Here is a brief synopsis of current events that reflect this hatred and radicalism perpetuated in the name of God – examples of Christianity terrorizing or preying on victims through their actions.

The Westboro Southern Baptist Church: Preying on Victims at Funerals and Thanking God for their Tragic Deaths

Women being “Raped too much?”: Fox News, Liz Trotta, and Rape Culture by Gina Messina-Dysert

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project

I may be a bit late to the conversation, but it is impossible for me not to comment on the infuriating statements made... more I may be a bit late to the conversation, but it is impossible for me not to comment on the infuriating statements made by Liz Trotta on Fox News about the staggering 64% increase in sexual assaults against women in the military since 2006.  Responding to reports from the Pentagon about women serving in combat, Trotta complained that money is being wasted on women in the military who are “raped too much.”  The statements by the Fox News pundit well demonstrate the existence of rape culture within our society and the continued problem of victim blaming and double victimization experienced by women who have been raped.

Ezama y Fontanil (2012).Trabajar para mujeres maltratadas, sus hijas y sus hijos.

by Esteban Ezama Coto

Anatomía de la violencia intrafamiliar

by Alma Elena Gutierrez Leyton

The Virtues of Dockside Dalliance: Why Maritime Sugar Girls are Safer then Urban Streetwalkers in South Africa's Prostitution Industry

by Henry Trotter

in Susan Dewey & Patty Kelly (Eds.), Policing Pleasure: Sex Work, Policy and the State in Global Perspective (New York: NYU Press, 2011), pp. 86-99

South African sex workers are exposed to different amounts of violence depending on the prostitution sector that they... more South African sex workers are exposed to different amounts of violence depending on the prostitution sector that they work in, such as the street, truck stop, hotel, agency, brothel, and dockside trades. By comparing the structural features of these sectors, we can not only gauge the likelihood of violence within each, but also devise more precise policy instruments to reduce violence at an industry-wide level. I focus here on the neglected dockside prostitution sector, showing how its structural characteristics enhance the women’s power vis-à-vis their clients. Detailed policy recommendations conclude the article.

Navigating Risk: Lessons From the Dockside Sex Trade for Reducing Violence in South Africa's Prostitution Industry

by Henry Trotter

Sexuality Research & Social Policy: Journal of NSRC, 4/4 (Dec 2007): 106-119

The diversity of South Africa's prostitution industry exposes sex workers to varying levels of violence. The street,... more The diversity of South Africa's prostitution industry exposes sex workers to varying levels of violence. The street, truck stop, hotel, agency, brothel, and dockside trades are characterized by different structural features that determine the prevalence of client, police, and third-party abuse against prostitutes. Comparing the structural elements of each sector allows not only gauging the likelihood of violence within a given niche but also devising more precise policy instruments to reduce violence at an industry-wide level.

This article, "Navigating Risk," focuses on the dockside prostitution sector in Cape Town and Durban, showing how its structural features enhance the women's power vis-à-vis their clients and the police. It discusses 5 key variables that influence the likelihood of violence within each prostitution sector:

* the social and legal status of the client
* the location of the negotiation
* the location of the sexual act
* the level of discretion in the solicitation process
* and the role of third-party involvement

Detailed policy recommendations conclude the argument.

Women's Bodies Are Battlefields

by Beth Speake

Christianity, Masculinity and Gender Violence in Papua New Guinea.

by Richard Eves

SSGM Discussion Paper 2012/2.

Homo Sacer: Power, Life and the Sexual Body in Old French Saints’ Lives

by Emma Campbell

Exemplaria, 18:2 (2006), 233-73

Saints’ Lives, Violence and Community

by Emma Campbell

in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. by Bill Burgwinkle et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 38-46

Diagramming Irréversible

by Diarmuid Hester

published in 'One+One: Filmmakers Journal' Issue 4 (September 2010)

Diagrammatically plots spatiality and the conjunction of time and space in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), and... more Diagrammatically plots spatiality and the conjunction of time and space in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), and contrasts his post-modern vision of twisted masculinity with W.B. Yeats' high modernist project.

Las muertas de Juárez. Bioética, género, poder e injusticia

by Jorge Alberto Álvarez-Díaz

Neoliberalising violence: of the exceptional and the exemplary in coalescing moments

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. 2012. Neoliberalising violence: of the exceptional and the exemplary in coalescing moments. Area 44 (2), 136-143.

This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can... more This paper sets out to develop two related ideas. First, it seeks to identify how both violence and neoliberalism can be considered as moments. From this shared conceptualisation of process and fluidity, I argue that it becomes easier to recognise how these two phenomena actually converge. Building upon this conceived coalescence of neoliberalism and violence, the second aim is to recognise how the hegemony of neoliberalism positions it as an abuser, which facilitates the abandonment of those ‘Others’ who fall outside of neoliberal normativity. I argue that the widespread banishment of ‘Others’ under neoliberalism produces a ‘state of exception’, wherein because of its inherently dialectic nature, exceptional violence is transformed into exemplary violence. This metamorphosis occurs as aversion for alterity intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against ‘Others’ comes to form the rule.

Violencia De Género, Salud Y Derechos En Las Américas: Informe De Uruguay; Gender Violence, Health and Rights In the Americas: Report of Uruguay

by Alejandra López Gómez

Bartered, battered, belittled: how American women dramatists deal with violence against women

by Marta Fernández Morales

La interdisciplinariedad como norma. Acercamiento al tema de la violencia contra las mujeres a través del teatro

by Marta Fernández Morales

The Land of the (Not Quite) Free: Women and Religion Behind Bars by Amy Levin

by Feminism and Religion

originally published on the Feminism and Religion Project.

The sun was setting on an early Friday evening in October 2008 as I pulled into the parking lot of the Iowa... more The sun was setting on an early Friday evening in October 2008 as I pulled into the parking lot of the Iowa Correctional Institute for Women, a maximum level security prison housing nearly 700 inmates. Though the serene drive on Iowa’s main highway lasted a mere 40 minutes from Grinnell to Mitchellville, my co-teacher and I felt worlds away from our tiny utopian bubble of books and booze. As we gathered our teaching materials for a course we designed called “Feminist Playwriting,” we made sure not to bring in any contraband, one of the many precautions given during our orientation for students participating in Grinnell Liberal Arts in Prison, a program created in 2003 that allows students to design liberal arts courses in either a men or women’s Iowa prison. My experience interacting with an incredible roomful of women, some who would suffer behind bars for the rest of their lives, was needless to say a life changing experience. That semester ignited a fire in me for prison rights, which recently has manifested in a concern for the nexus of religion and prison.

Many Americans view prison and prisoners through a binary lens – the good are free, and the bad are behind bars, or at least should be. We also tend to pride ourselves on the fact that we value freedom, but when Francis Scott Key invoked the phrase “Land of the Free,” he must not have predicted that the United States would imprison more people than any other country on the planet. America incarcerates roughly 2.3 million Americans, 208,000 of which are women. As a New York Times article in 2008 put it quite shockingly: “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.” These statistics do not even touch upon the staggering disproportionate number of African Americans in prison, and it certainly doesn’t tell us anything about women’s experiences in prison.

Hagar: A Portrait of a Victim of Domestic Violence and Rape

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion Project.

This week Twitter has been a flurry with information for victims of  domestic violence and rape.  This... more This week Twitter has been a flurry with information for victims of  domestic violence and rape.  This ranges from the U.S. redefinition of rape to include men to Nigeria’s first anti-rape toll free hotline for women.  There is even a male movement to stand against rape.  This problem is an ongoing issue, one that shows no sign of diminishing or going away.  According to Amnesty International, one in three women worldwide have been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused and their abuser is normally someone they know.  As I contemplate this very difficult issue, I am reminded of the Biblical Hagar in Genesis 16. The story of Hagar and Sarai is abundant

Men Can Stop Rape (http://www.mencanstoprape.org/)

in ethical situations that draw in the reader and presents complex issues that can be very troublesome.  If you take the text hermeneutically, through an ideological examination in its English translation, we have an Egyptian woman, who is also referred to as slave or concubine, forced to engage into sex with her owner’s husband for producing an heir.  Here the abuser is a woman with a docile and obedient husband portrayed by Abram.  What can we  glean from such a story for today’s battered women?  Hope or horrific defeat?

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, But Obedient Ones are Rewarded in Heaven: An Examination of the Re-Invention of the Bengali Tradition of Sati By Michele Stopera Freyhauf

by Michele Stopera Freyhauf

originally published on the Feminism and Religion Project

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History is a book authored by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  This has become a... more Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History is a book authored by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.  This has become a well-known phrase used by most feminists to imply a meaning of disobedience or stance against the patriarchal structure of society.  Often in error, the credit of the invention of this phrase is attributed Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe.  Their image, and especially the image of Monroe, will often appear with the slogan on merchandise as a means of marketing and raising revenue.  Ironically, reinvention or reuse is prevalent in history when it comes to tradition or ritual for the same reason – monetary gain.  This practice is common and the benefit of reinventing or reinterpreting an old tradition is an automatic connection to the past giving continuity, which, according to Eric Hobsbaum, instills strong “binding social practice,” (p. 10) including loyalty and duty in the members of the group.  This is especially effective in manipulating the poor and uneducated who usually display strict obedience and blind acceptance of tradition. The Bengali reinvented tradition of satî is an example of this.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the ritual of satî in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Examining the historiography of this tradition through post-colonial deconstruction, Spivak reveals that the ritual of satî in Bengali tradition as an invented tradition rooted in hegemony.  Externally, this tradition is a façade, presented to the outside world as an ancient tradition of ritual p

urity and means of cultural preservation.  Internally, it is anything but pure; it is a means of power and control over the subaltern widow, which through self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre, results in the forfeiture of inherited property she is entitled to upon her husband’s death.

The Harlot Shall Be Burned with Fire: Biblical Literalism in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo By Sarah Sentilles

by Feminism and Religion

Published at the Feminism and Religion Project

(spoiler alert)
Against my better judgment, this past weekend I went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,... more (spoiler alert)
Against my better judgment, this past weekend I went to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher who’s best known for Fight Club and The Social Network. I didn’t like the book; it unsettled me that a novel filled with sexual violence against women—a novel that seems to take pleasure in the violence, to offer it up for readers to consume—became such a sensation. But I’m a sucker for a trailer and a good soundtrack, and I was curious, so I bought a ticket.

The plot revolves around a missing girl and the serial killer believed to have murdered her who uses the Bible like a handbook. He takes passages from Leviticus—21:9 for example: The daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, she profanes her father. She shall be burned with fire—and enacts them on women’s bodies. On Jewish women’s bodies.

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Sarah Sentilles is a scholar of religion, an award-winning speaker, and the author of three books including A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit (Harcourt, 2008) and Breaking Up with God (HarperOne, 2011). She earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale and a master’s of divinity and a doctorate in theology from Harvard, where she was awarded the Billings Preaching Prize and was the managing editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. At the core of her scholarship, writing, and activism is a commitment to investigating the roles religious language, images, and practices play in oppression, violence, social transformation, and justice movements. She is currently at work on a novel and an edited volume that investigates the intersections of torture and Christianity.

tags: Bible, biblical literalism, david fincher, fight club, film, girl with the dragon tattoo, leviticus, misogyny, Phyllis Trible, rape, the social network Feminist Theology, Rape Culture, Review, Sexual Violence, Bible, Fiction, Film









on a novel and an edited volume that investigates the intersections of torture and Christianity.