On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

Overview

A blazingly insightful, provocative study of violence against women from the peerless feminist critic.

Why has violence, and especially violence against women, become so much more prominent and visible across the world? To explore this question, Jacqueline Rose tracks the multiple forms of today’s violence – historic and intimate, public and private – as they spread throughout our social fabric, offering a new, provocative account of violence in our time.

From trans rights and #MeToo to the sexual harassment of migrant women, from the trial of Oscar Pistorius to domestic violence in lockdown, from the writing of Roxanne Gay to Hisham Mitar and Han Kang, she casts her net wide. What obscene pleasure in violence do so many male leaders of the Western world unleash in their supporters? Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence?

On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250849373
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jacqueline Rose is one of the world’s leading feminist literary and cultural critics. She is codirector of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, cofounder of Independent Jewish Voices, and a fellow of the Britsh Academy. Rose is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and The Guardian, among many other publications. She is the celebrated author of Sexuality in the Field of Vision, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Women in Dark Times, and Mothers.

Table of Contents

Introduction: On Violence and On Violence Against Women 1

1 I Am a Knife - Sexual Harassment in Close-up 35

2 Trans Voices - Who Do You Think You Are? 81

3 Trans and Sexual Harassment - The Back-story 137

4 Feminism and the Abomination of Violence 169

5 Writing Violence - From Modernism to Eimear McBride 199

6 The Killing of Reeva Steenkamp, the Trial of Oscar Pistorius - Sex and Race in the Courtroom 229

7 Political Protest and the Denial of History - South Africa and the Legacy of the Future 265

8 One Long Scream-Trauma and Justice in South Africa 293

9 At the Border 325

Afterword 359

Acknowledgements 369

Notes 373

Index 411

Editorial Reviews

02/08/2021

Rose (Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty), a lecturer in history at the University of St. Andrews, probes the causes, meaning, and persistence of sexual violence in this thought-provoking essay collection. She discusses rape accusations against Harvey Weinstein and South African president Jacob Zuma in exploring the links between sexual harassment and violence, and argues that male fragility is at the root of sexual violence (“Harassment is ruthless, but it also carries a whiff of desperation about it”). Through detailed analysis of literary works by Temsula Ao, Roxane Gay, Eimear McBride, and others, Rose examines the language and psychology of violence and its role as a maintainer of inequity. She also notes that transsexual people are physically assaulted and killed at higher rates than the general population, and analyzes representations of trans identity in popular culture, including Caitlyn Jenner’s 2015 appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair. Three chapters on South Africa explore the legacy of violence and the intersections between race, sex, trauma, political protest, and justice, and, in the final essay, Rose examines the degradation of female asylum seekers by immigration authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. Rose skillfully interweaves the work of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and other philosophers into her dense yet lucid analysis, and shows flashes of sardonic humor. This is a precise and original exploration of an essential subject. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"For all that Rose reveals, her book might be most intriguing in its strictures and refusals . . . She shies away from cheap pathos and struggles to avoid turning victims into figures of timeless suffering . . . For all her attraction to unruliness, Rose’s own sentences are cool, almost enameled in their polish and control."
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

"[Rose's] work remains surprising and original . . . The more I read her, the more I see the world through her questions . . . Her prose has the feel of spiraling in many directions; it is invigoratingly alive . . . Her real power, what makes her necessary as well as unique, may be how she teaches readers to ask probing questions on their own."
—Christine Smallwood, NYRB

"No stone goes unturned in Rose’s exhaustive inquiry into the enduring global crisis of sexual violence. Drawing on data and contemporary examples, while also braiding in the work of feminist philosophers like Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt, Rose builds a compellingly argued theory that sexual violence is rooted in male fragility. Rose’s framework examines how systemic power structures reinforce themselves, and how sexual violence intersects with gender, sexuality, race, and class."
—Esquire (Best Books of Spring)

"Esteemed feminist critic Rose tackles the broadest of subjects in her inimitable and thoroughly researched fashion in this latest title . . . In truth, any one of the topics Rose raises here could easily be expanded to create its own book. In-depth, complex, revelatory, and nearly overwhelming, this is an important, foundational account deserving of readers' full attention."
—Booklist

"Rose, a lecturer in history at the University of St. Andrews, probes the causes, meaning, and persistence of sexual violence in this thought-provoking essay collection . . . A precise and original exploration of an essential subject."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

04/01/2021

Historian Rose (Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty) writes a wide-ranging and provocative analysis of the ways in which multiple forms of violence intersect on and around women's bodies and create cyclical, systemic power structures designed to pit women against each other. Rose begins her study by addressing the ways in which language and laws defined by white men patrol all bodies; then she expands on how such discourses create the perfect conditions for the reiteration of gender-based violence as an accepted, normative, and even constitutive force. With chapters focused on specific topics related to sexual violence as it intersects with violence related to sexuality, gender identity, race, class, and ethnicity, Rose documents the clear ways in which violence against women is used by individuals in power in order to maintain that power. A powerful chapter focuses on the violence, both physical and emotional, that trans women continue to face. VERDICT This is an urgent book that deserves to be read in classes on feminist theory and gender studies. It's also meant for all readers who are interested in learning more about the ways in which power is literally mapped onto our bodies.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI

Library Journal

2021-03-31
A wide-ranging investigation of gender, power, and abuse.

British literary scholar and cultural critic Rose examines the impetus for and experience of violence, especially against women. Casting a wide net, she considers sexual predation and harassment; violence against transgender women, including by feminists who engage in “the coercive violence of gendering”; violence depicted in literary fiction; South Africa, where a woman is murdered every three hours and Cape Town is known as the rape capital of the world; and violence against migrant women and children. Although Rose focuses mainly on male violence, she argues that violence is not inherent in masculinity, and she takes issue with feminists who see women “solely or predominantly as the victims of their histories.” Nevertheless, she calls sexual harassment “the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power, which is true, but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.” Though she does not believe “that all women are at risk from all men,” she concedes “that a woman does not say she is scared of a man without cause and that when she does so, we must listen.” Drawing on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Rose sees violence as “part of the psyche,” characterizing violent behavior as “a crime of the deepest thoughtlessness. It is a sign that the mind has brutally blocked itself.” Feminists, she asserts, must reckon with “the extraordinary, often painful and mostly overlooked range of what the human mind is capable of.” Like Hannah Arendt, Rose sees violence as “a form of entitlement” inflamed by “illegitimate and/or waning power.” The abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, for example, reflects “the violence of colonial expansion” as well as a “fight to preserve the privilege of the few against the many.”

An intellectually probing analysis.

Kirkus Reviews