On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Again, the pandemic is offering up the spectacle of the rampant lengths, not only in terms of denial but also of false self-idealisation, to which those in power will go to burnish their sense and image of themselves. From the present incumbent of the White House post his brush with Covid-19 – I am writing this mid-October in the run-up to the US election when all the chips are down – describing himself as ‘the perfect specimen’, ‘extremely young’, running against ‘stone-cold crazy’ people ‘with big issues’ (the last of these a flagrant act of projection if ever there was one); to the UK prime minister being cheered by his foreign minister as a ‘fighter’, implying that his recovery was the result of unique moral courage and personal mettle; to the Brazilian leader declaring that the virus represented no danger, since his people could bathe in excrement and emerge unscathed (if not so deadly serious, this would be a joke which, no doubt unintentionally, gives the idea of ‘toxic masculinity’ a whole new gloss). For these male leaders, it seems, the only way to respond to a disease that is mowing down people in their hundreds of thousands is to proclaim their immortal perfection; to deny, amongst other things, that death is always stalking in our midst. This is masculinity bloated with an inhuman capacity over life and death. It is then hard not to make the link to the silent domestic abuser, charged up by his new lockdown powers, puffing out his chest, force-feeding his partner, forbidding her to leave the house for her hospital pregnancy scan, stopping her from washing her hands so that there is nowhere, inside or outside the home, where she can feel safe (all examples that have come to light).

  Whether on the political stage or behind closed doors, it is the presence of death that ratchets up the prowess, although it is not hard to discern its shadow behind the masquerade. The forty-fifth US President’s grandfather died of the Spanish flu. The loss was brushed under the carpet, which might help explain his father’s, and then his own, utter abhorrence of human frailty. Nothing quite like a pandemic, one might say, for confronting man with those realms in which he ‘cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy’; lines from Hannah Arendt that have been my refrain. These are not the only kinds of men who appear in these pages (I also know I am not alone in praying the three just alluded to will be out of their jobs by the time you are reading this book). As I argue throughout, not all men are the violent embodiments of their worst selves. There are men, though not enough, who recognise the lethal farce of the masculinity on offer, and want none of it – otherwise there would be no hope. Again it is the wager of psychoanalysis, one of its most radical, that both men and women have to be mentally straitjacketed into their allotted sexual roles. In the unconscious and in their deeds, everyone is capable, even under duress, of being more flexible in their identifications, less obdurate in their hatreds, always potentially other to themselves. Even while the fine, tenacious, threads which run from men in positions of political power to the silent abusers of women in their homes have perhaps never been so glaring.

  When I made violence against women my main theme, I could never have predicted the cruel shape it would assume under the weight of Covid-19. Although more men than women worldwide are dying from the virus, violence against women has dramatically intensified, a ‘shadow pandemic’ according to one UN report, or even a new ‘femicide’. In a non-pandemic world, fear of mortality and life’s fragility is more easily pushed to the back of our minds, stuffed into the mental closets through which we organise and protect ourselves. It has been the task of women through the ages – against such unconscious knowing – to make their partners, children and dependents feel secure in a messy and uncertain world, to sweep the dirt and debris away. As we have seen in these pages, this arrangement goes back at least as far as the Greek city-state when the drudgery of women and slaves was the precondition of political freedom for men who ruled as tyrants in the home. But in a time of pandemic, the expectation that women should clean up the world and the mind is one to which no woman can possibly be equal (nor at any other time, it should be said). Meanwhile the burden of care is falling back on their shoulders, as gains for women in the workplace and in relation to childcare and domestic labour in the home are in danger of being lost. The options for women are stark: back to the 1950s, the ‘Great Leap Backwards’ as it is being termed; or straight into the eye of the storm.

  Today women are being punished – sometimes paying with their lives – for a death that has become too visible, for the bodies that are failing and falling all around, as psychic defences start to crumble in the face of unbearable fear and grief. I find myself asking whether they are in double jeopardy, subject to a form of violence which, before lockdown, they at least had a chance to escape; but perhaps also the targets of something else, a type of revenge – ‘backlash’, as it is called – for the fact that, for many though by no means all women, in today’s world being shut in and isolated in the home is no longer the norm. These women are first and foremost scapegoats for the awfulness of the hour. But they are also being murdered for their hard-won freedom. To which one might add that women are being assaulted by men who, as they too find themselves confined to the home, feel as if they are being turned into women. It is not only our hold on life that is uneasy, an unease repudiated at any cost, but, as also seen throughout these pages, our most entrenched sense of who – men or women, both or neither – we are.

  I did not expect to be ending this book at such a time. But given how grim the world has turned, it is then all the more remarkable to witness the forms of resistance and fierce clarity to which the ugly new dispensation has also given rise. There are women who, in the midst of pandemic, escape their abusers even though the funds promised to the UK refuge sector barely match the cuts of the past decade. There are victims of traffickers who risk their lives to document in secret every single detail of their journey and find solicitors who, despite the hostile racist and misogynist environment stacked against them, make and win their anti-deportation case. There are the movements – Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans activism, Rhodes Must Fall, who have figured throughout this book – whose courage in unearthing buried wrongs seems to be limitless and who go on alerting the world to its historic and ongoing injustices in their struggle for a better life. There is the renewed attention to care, its life-saving process, its gifts and its necessary costs – whose place at the core of human life feminism has been urging for decades – as the emerging ethic for our times.

  Last but not least, there are the leaders – mostly, significantly, women leaders – who, according to a survey of 194 countries conducted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the World Economic Forum in summer 2020, are proving to be so much more effective against Covid-19: Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Finland’s Sanna Marin and Mia Mottley of Barbados – although the fact has received little attention. These women are more risk-averse with regard to fatalities, more willing to take risks with the economy which, for the majority of male leaders, is the inviolable domain. Perhaps it is because they are able to acknowledge the necessity of dying that they know a needless death when they see one. Taking the true measure of death, it would seem, is paradoxically the only way to prevent it carrying off thousands before their time. Mass testing in Barbados began before the first case had even been identified.

  It has been a core argument of this book that violence will not diminish, let alone cease, if violence continues to be something which people turn away from, blot from their minds, prefer – at least as far as they personally are concerned – not to talk or think about. Everything in these pages suggests that violence surely has to be included in our understanding of the ‘density’ of being human, which Arundhati Roy has recently stated is the only antidote to the crass, mind-numbing and crushing simplifications of resurgent fascism. The message of this book is finally twofold. To struggle against the forms of violence that are spreading with added virulence acros
s the globe and which the pandemic is making daily more visible for everyone. And to understand the inner force of violence, to resist the deadly temptation to make violence always the problem of somebody else. Meanwhile we keep our ears to the ground, as I have tried to do here, listening out for voices that travel the unsteady path between these two endeavours – those who show that reckoning with the violence of the heart and fighting violence in the world are inseparable.

  October 2020

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many occasions and voices inspired and provided the germ of these essays.

  Chapter Four was first delivered as the Diane Middlebrook/Carl Djerassi lecture at the Centre for Gender Studies, Cambridge University, on 3 November 2014. Thanks to Director, Jude Brown, Founding Director, Juliet Mitchell and Deputy Director, Lauren Wilcox, for hosting me so warmly in Michaelmas Term 2014. An earlier version was published in the thirtieth anniversary issue of Cultural Critique 94, Fall 2016.

  My thanks to the hosts of the Modernist Studies Association Conference held in London on 26 June 2014 and to Critical Quarterly 60, no. 2, July 2018, where part of Chapter Five was first published.

  Chapter Six was delivered as my inaugural lecture at Birkbeck, University of London, on 11 June 2015. Thanks to my Birkbeck colleagues for invaluable conversations at the Psychoanalytic Working Group. The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities continues to be a space of freedom where I learn and think.

  Thanks to Juliet Jacques, Roz Kaveney, Jay Prosser for crucial input into Chapter Two.

  My thanks to Richard Sacks, Tracy Morgan and their colleagues for welcoming me so generously to the New York Centre for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies where I first presented a version of Chapter Three on 17 November 2018.

  Chapter Seven was first delivered as the VC Open Lecture at the University of Cape Town on 16 March 2017. My thanks to Max Price for inviting me, to Jaco Barnard-Naudé for initiating and organising the visit, to Victoria Collis-Buthelezi for formally responding to the lecture, and to all those – Antje Krog, Karin van Marle, Nombuso Mathibela, Njabulo Ndebele, Nigel Patel and the UCT Trans collective, Deborah Posel, Albie Sachs, Mark Solms, Pierre de Vos – who made my time so memorable.

  Thanks to all the participants at the Stellenbosch Conference on ‘Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation’, held from 5–7 December 2018 at the Centre for Historical Trauma and Transformation under its inspirational director Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. The remarkable stories told at the conference led me to write Chapter Eight. Thanks to Mervyn Sloman of the Cape Town Book Lounge for inviting me to speak during this visit and to Lou-Marie Kruger for the discussion.

  The essays on South Africa have also benefitted from the experience and guidance of Rachel Holmes, Margie Orford and Gillian Slovo. Thanks to Natasha Walter of Women For Refugee Women and Amelia Gentleman for bringing the treatment of women refugees and asylum seekers in the UK to public attention. Any errors of fact or judgement are of course my own.

  Early drafts of several of the essays first appeared in the London Review of Books, which continues to be a vital intellectual home (40: 4, 22 February 2018; 38: 9, 5 May 2016; 38: 18, 22 September 2016; 37: 22, 19 November 2015; 41: 10, 23 May 2019; 41: 19, 10 October 2019). Thanks again to Mary-Kay Wilmers, to Paul Myerscough, Daniel Soar and to Deborah Friedell. As the pace of change has been so dramatic over the past years, each of these essays has demanded new attention and they have been substantially revised and updated for this collection.

  Some details in the Afterword are drawn from my essay on Camus’ The Plague, published in the London Review of Books 42: 9, 7 May 2020, and from ‘Living Death’, published in Gagosian Quarterly 16, Winter 2020, special edition guest edited by Jamieson Webster and Alison Gingeras. I am grateful to Jamieson Webster for inviting me to contribute.

  Thanks to Laura Hassan at Faber and Mitzi Angel at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for being such insightful and supportive editors.

  Tracy Bohan always knows how to anticipate my concerns, encourage my thinking, and keep me confident in a project to which she has contributed much over these past years.

  For loving support, friendship and understanding: Sally Alexander, Judith Butler, Sam Frears, Cora Kaplan, Elizabeth Karlsen, Margaret Reynolds, Alison Rose, Mia Rose, Jon Snow, Diana Stone and Clair Wills. In your unique ways, you all enrich me more than I can say.

  The book is dedicated to my cousin Braham Murray – a guiding spirit of my life.

  NOTES

  Introduction: On Violence and On Violence Against Women

      1.  Lucy Rahim, ‘Donald Trump Cuts Abortion Funding … Surrounded by Men’, Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2017.

      2.  Jessica Glenza, ‘Anti-abortion Bill Says Ectopic Pregnancies Must Be Reimplanted’, Guardian, 30 November 2019.

      3.  Liz Ford, ‘US Abortion Policy Amounts to Torture – UN Commissioner’, Guardian, 4 June 2019.

      4.  Conrad Duncan and Lizzie Dearden, ‘Reynhard Sinaga: Most Prolific Rapist in UK History Jailed for Life for Manchester Attacks’, Independent, 7 January 2020.

      5.  Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, London: Hogarth, 1938.

      6.  Sigmund Freud, ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’, Essay 2 of ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’, 1915, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 14, London: Hogarth, 1957, p. 297.

      7.  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1951, p. 301.

      8.  On the disposal of bodies, see Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos – Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone, 2016. On the drive of capital, anything by David Harvey.

      9.  Rosa Luxemburg, Redner der Revolution, Vol. 11, Berlin, 1928, cited in Peter Nettle, Rosa Luxemburg, abridged edition, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 250.

    10.  Patrick Butler, ‘Plan to Redirect Cash to Tory Shires from Urban Councils a “Stitch-up”’, Guardian, 20 January 2019.

    11.  Helen Pidd, ‘Why Duncan Smith Award Was “a Slap in the Face”’, Guardian, 4 January 2020.

    12.  Alexandra Topping, ‘Brexit Poses Threat to Rights of Women, Report Warns’, Guardian, 23 July 2019; Patrick Butler, ‘Universal Credit is Forcing Women into Sex Work, MPs Told’, Guardian, 30 July 2019; Sarah Marsh, ‘Actor’s Plea to Government: Stop Austerity Forcing Women into Sex Work’, Guardian, 30 July 2019.

    13.  Dennis Campbell, ‘Thousands Die Waiting for Hospital Beds – Study’, Guardian, 10 December 2019.

    14.  Gabriel Pogrund, George Greenwood and Emanuele Midolo, ‘Richard Desmond, “Boris Johnson Promised to Alter Gambling Rules for Me”’, Sunday Times, 28 June 2020.

    15.  For example, Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified – Discourses on Life and Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, and Are Women Human? and Other International Dialogues, Cambridge: Harvard, 2006; Andrea Dworkin, Pornography – Men Possessing Women, London: Women’s Press, 1981.

    16.  Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, She Said – Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 63

    17.  Ibid., p. 111.

    18.  Ed Pilkington, ‘Weinstein Faces Jail After Being Convicted of Rape’, Guardian, 25 February 2020.

    19.  Kantor and Twohey, She Said, p. 62.

    20.  Lauren Aratani, ‘Former Actor Tells Court How Weinstein Coerced and Threatened Her’, Guardian, 1 February 2020.

    21.  Deanna Paul, ‘Harvey Weinstein Says He Feels “Like the Forgotten Man.” His Accusers Are Furious’, Washington Post, 17 December 2019.

    22.  Anne Enright, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 24 October 2019.

    23.  Lanre Bakare, ‘Two Years On, Storyline is Far from Simple in Entertainment Industry’, Guardian, 14 October 2019.

    24. �
�Kim Wilsher and Simon Murphy, ‘I Stand by My Verdict on Boycott, Says Judge’, Guardian, 18 September 2019.

    25.  Susan McKay, ‘Belfast Rape Trial Verdict Does Not Erase Players’ Horrific Sexism’, Irish Times, 29 March 2018.

    26.  Decca Aitkenhead, ‘I’ve Had Vitriol Thrown at Me for as Long as I Can Remember’, Interview with Chelsea Clinton, Guardian Weekend, 26 May 2018.