Gender(ed) violence in neo-authoritarian times

Abstract

As conservative and neo-authoritarian tendencies in Europe move across political and geo-cultural borders, we bear witness to a renewed attack on gender and sexual rights. This is a challenge to democratic citizenship that demands that we think anew the pervasive and multifaceted violence that structures the social organisation of gendered and sexual lives. How to think about the relationship between the hindering of sexual citizenship and current debates about sexual and gender-based violence in a historical present marked by a growing and revived conservative reaction? How to re-articulate a critical analysis of gender and sexual based violence that also accounts for the violence of gender? How to orient the condemnation of gender and sexual based violence towards a deepening of democracy? Taking Spain as a point of departure, this article examines recent legislative developments and argues for an expansive, albeit differentiated, approach to gender-based violence, in line with citizenship rights. Articulated in intersectional terms, this approach, it is contended, should challenge the intensification of racism and other exclusionary discourses that are gaining traction in Europe, and recognise that violence against those who experience gender and sexuality beyond normative heterosexuality also amounts to gendered forms of violence. It is along these lines that it would be possible to think of a feminist critique of violence in pursuit of a more democratic and just society.