Genres of Gender Violence

Abstract

This panel considers the narrative genres through which gender violence across time and space might be theorized. On the one hand, these papers together suggest that gender violence is a genre of far-right politics – that is, stories about sexed and raced bodies are one narrative form through which the far-right’s politics of power are articulated and enforced. However, our papers also suggest that compulsory gender and violences against non-normative bodies are also more than just variants of generalized violence; rather, our papers argue that gender violence is constitutive of psychic, state, and colonial violence in turn. Gender and sexuality – and their affective and embodied dimensions – are thus also the genre through which subjects live relations of power. Our papers consider how genres of gender violence have constructed historical forms of control under colonialism (Kaku) and the transition to capitalism (Hanley), as well as how more contemporary gender fantasies like sexed identity (Canale) and grotesque heterosexuality (Gambino) structure collective vulnerabilities and responses to violence. Finally, and with emphasis on how affective scripts govern the relationship between gender, sexuality, and politics, each of these papers in interdisciplinary in scope, borrowing concepts from history, media studies, queer theory, and literary criticism to consider how political theorists might develop new approaches to the study of narrative form for politics.

Title	Details
Regarding the Grotesque Fantasies of Heterosexuality	View Paper Details
Body Horror: How Perceived Threats to the “Sexed Identity” Form a Cornerstone of Far- Right Political Thought	View Paper Details
Sinister Beyond Belief: Horror, Fantasy, and the Orient	View Paper Details
Witches, Witch Hunts, and the Feminine Sexual Being	View Paper Details
We are family, or are we? Understanding the Authoritarian Mobilization of the Family with Queer-Feminist Materialist State Theory	View Paper Details