A Syllabus on Violence Against Women
More and more women give voice to the violence we suffer
Men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority… (Rachel L. Snyder)
I don’t know if it would’ve happened without the #metoo movement. Maybe it’s something that’s been threatening to boil over for decades — kind of like the Black Lives Matter movement — so #metoo was simply the catalyst for it. Any way you slice it, the fact is that in the last few years, women have started, across different mediums and genres, openly and publicly articulating the different forms that violence against them can take shape.
Domestic abuse and toxic relationships are nothing new, and over the years, they have shifted from being fringe, almost taboo conversation topics to the center of public discourse, at least in Western countries. What we have witnessed lately, however, is a growing awareness that even in the nominally developed, democratic West, more subtle forms of violence against women — from vague/lax sexual assault laws to abortion access issues to toxic workplaces — have been systemically enshrined and are therefore less visible.
I’m sure that the shift in awareness has come about at least in part because many more women today feel empowered to give voice to their experiences and can make their work visible on different platforms, especially online.
They have been doing it as witnesses, as researchers, as collectors and bearers of testimonials, and as victims. And when I say “give voice,” I don’t just mean increasingly reporting sexual assaults and exposing sexual predators in positions of power, but also finding ways to weave narratives of violence into fiction — to work through trauma by filtering it through different creative lenses: films, series, memoirs, and novels.
By doing so, they have assembled an exceptional syllabus on violence. The titles mentioned below are only a fraction of the female literary output on this topic in the last decade or so and simply reflect what I’ve been reading in the past few years.
Women and violence through speculative fiction and dystopian futures
Well-known fictional books about violence against women, written by women, used to be few, and to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t really start to appear before the 1980s. (The one exception I can think of is Lois Duncan’s Daughters of Eve from 1979, but it was classified under YA fiction.) Most of them revolved around domestic violence, such as depicted in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), and later in the works of Toni Morrison.
Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale (1985) was, for the longest time, the best-known treatment of the broader political issue of violence in the context of women’s rights and equality (though not the only or the first one; nodding here to Suzette Haden Elgin). However, it didn’t deal with the issue as it existed at the time — it speculated about a future world in which the politics of violence against women was allowed to run its course unchecked and become institutionalized.
It was difficult to imagine that a country like the USA could devolve into the dystopian Gilead shown in Atwood’s book. The choice of writing about the issue through speculative fiction meant that, in the decades since its publication, the book was often read as a cautionary tale, rather than a commentary on real-world events. This made it easier to dismiss the ongoing blatant marriage of church and state in a supposedly secular country and later marvel at the election of Donald Trump as president.
A more recent crop of work on this topic has a distinct air of urgency about it, no doubt aided by political and cultural shifts we have seen in the last decade since the arrival of smartphones and social media.
It’s not enough to project into the future anymore — there seems to be a need to address both the many current facets of violence against women, as well as its nature as a global pandemic. Very importantly, voices from the LGBTQ+ community have been added to the conversation, complicating, expanding, and enriching it.
Good old intimate partner terrorism
Rachel Louise Snyder says that a more appropriate name for domestic violence is “intimate partner terrorism.” If you stop for a moment and are able to get past images of white men with guns on a rampage, or religious fanatics in suicide vests, you can see that an act of domestic violence has a lot in common with a terrorist act. For one, survivors of both experience the same consequences, often in the form of PTSD. The perpetrators of both, on the other hand, perceive themselves as victims and want to gain power and control over others.
Carmen Maria Machado has a lot to say about intimate terrorism, too. What sets her story apart is not that it’s true and happened to her, but that the perpetrator was a woman she was involved with while she was studying for her Masters degree.
In the Dream House is a memoir that walks a meandering line between memory, nightmare, and experiment to build a theoretical framework to help explain what happened. What Machado finds is that there is not a lot of literature out there on same-sex (domestic) violence that would help her make sense of it all. Her answer is to present the chronology of events as a sequence of dream-like short scenes, interspersed with accessible data on domestic violence.
The dream house refers both to the physical house that the two women shared, imagining it as a haven from their busy lives and nosy neighbors, and to the construct that we build when we fall in love with someone and fail to see the warning signs of impending danger. As Snyder points out,
it’s an absolute leap of cognition to imagine that this person you love, or once loved, this person you made a child with, this person you made a commitment to and vice versa, this person who shares every big and small detail of your life, would actually, truly take that life from you.
Machado never presents herself as just a victim: she traces the patterns in her own behavior that made it possible for her to become victimized in the first place. Even more importantly, she walks us through how she regained control over her life and what the emotional toll has been.
Violence as political appeal
Snyder also talks about narcissists who turn violent. These are people who are very socially adept, often charismatic, and very good at hiding their darker impulses. The French therapist Isabelle Nazare-Aga classifies such people as emotional vampires, subdivision “social vampire.”
… while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are often high-functioning, charismatic, and professionally successful. Such people are not easy to identify, in part because they have outsized people skills, and ‘we live in a world that is increasingly narcissistic. We extol success more than we extol anything.’ (Rachel L. Snyder)
The villain at the heart of Idra Novey’s Those Who Knew is exactly such a man — a powerful and charismatic politician on the rise, with a history of violence against women culminating in the murder of a college student he was having an affair with.
Novey is great not just at exposing such a personality, but also at pointing out the complicity of people who know about his dark secrets, but say nothing about it, either because they think nobody will believe them, or because they have secrets of their own that they don’t want exposed.
The narcissist as the political strongman appears only obliquely in Disappearing Earth, a strange, meditative novel by Julia Phillips. And yet the culture and history of places where such men get elected to positions of power informs the entire subtext of the novel.
The book opens with the kidnapping and disappearance of two young sisters in the Far East of modern-day Russia, but then shifts its focus to the everyday lives of women who gradually turn out to be in some way connected to this disappearance. With each new chapter, Phillips peels away yet another layer of political con- and subtext in modern Russia, from the plight of indigenous, non-Russian women, to the treatment of single mothers and lesbians, to domestic violence fueled by rampant alcoholism.
Both Novey’s and Phillips’ book speak to the recent upswell of democratically elected authoritarians around the world who campaign on violence against the Other and promise the return to a golden age.
Violence as nostalgia and regression
Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall is one of the standouts on this syllabus because it brilliantly catches the connection between violent modern men and their regressive, pre-modern political ideas. In this toxic mental swirl, anti-democracy, i.e. nostalgia for a golden historical age of a country (read: pre-immigration) is mixed with anti-feminism, i.e. the notion of building a family with an obedient, loyal, stay-at-home wife.
At the same time, Moss establishes that these golden pre-modern times — in this case, pre-Roman Britain — were equally, if not more, detrimental to women as our current age. Through the eyes of a teenage girl in thrall to her violent and history-obsessed father, we see that toxic masculinity has been around forever and women have been sacrificed at its altar at least since recorded history, whether through war, genocide, or ancient ritual defined by male priests.
The book is short and tense — at around 150 pages, I anxiously read it in two hours.
Violence as isolation and lack of access to education
What happens when you couple female illiteracy with religious fundamentalism? In some parts of the world, you get child brides who never return to school. In an ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia, you get a group of eight men — brothers, fathers, uncles, husbands — drugging and raping their wives, sisters, and daughters over a period of two years, and convincing them that those were attacks of demons and “the work of the devil.”
In her book Women Talking, Miriam Toews, herself an ex-Mennonite community member, tries to imagine what the reaction of these violated women in Bolivia could have been. As the women gather in secret to discuss next steps, what emerges is a powerful feminist manifesto. Toews literally gives these previously silent, invisible women a voice. They are scared, alone, and lost — they can’t even read a map to locate where in the world they are — but they are resourceful and determined to take action that will protect them and their children.
Denying women access to education, saddling them with children, and calculating their worth based on fertility is a time-honored way to keep them subjugated. Subjecting them to sexual violence on top of this, and blaming it on supernatural agents, is only a small step away. The voiceless have no rights, after all.
That is, until they decide that they do.
Recommended reading:
NON-FICTION:
Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays (2014)
Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto (2017)
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (2019)
Rachel Aviv. What if your abusive husband is a cop? The New Yorker: October 7, 2019 issue
FICTION:
Suzette Haden Elgin, Native Tongue (1984)
Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Naomi Alderman, The Power (2017)
Idra Novey, Those Who Knew (2018)
Miriam Toews, Women Talking (2019)
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019)
Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth (2019)
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir (2019)
Recommended viewing:
I May Destroy You on HBO
Unbelievable on Netflix, based on this investigative article
The Handmaid’s Tale
Happy Valley (UK)
Top of the Lake (New Zealand)
