Doing Intersectionality in Gender-Based Violence: The Dynamics of Inclusion, Opposition, Coalition and Power

The paper asks how gender-based violence politics is inclusionary or exclusionary of other inequality projects. In understanding violence and gender equality as projects, the paper highlights how the boundaries between policy, implementation, and social movements are blurred, contributing to a new way of analysing gender-based violence politics. The paper distinguishes four different approaches, illustrating them empirically. 1. How are intersectional spaces negotiated, deliberated or struggled over in gender-based violence politics? What constraints and opportunities for intersectional politics are set up and provided by the political and policymaking institutions? Which civil society politics impact on this? 2. A focus on “doing intersectionality”. How do institutions and CSOs working on gender-based violence address intersectionality in practice? This prioritizes the question of how intersectionality is done in practice (service provision, cooperation between ‘gender organisations’ and ‘ethnicity organisations’, alliances, coalitions, hierarchies or co-optation. 3. To articulate how intersectionality plays out in opposition to gender equality within gender-based violence politics. Who is opposing and/or co-opting intersectionality in gender-based violence politics? How, in what ways, and why? Importantly, here the powerful are kept in sight, especially how the interests of majority groups are represented, created and ‘done’. Who is said to be losing from intersectionality? Are certain groups of women marginalised in certain practices? Is it gender solo that is opposed, or gender+? 4. The relations between different political domains (Walby 2009)? How is (sensitivity to) intersectionality in the violence domain affected by or affecting, developments in other domains (polity, civil society, economy)? Here social class is brought back into the analysis. The paper concludes by showing how the four approaches, together, provide a more comprehensive understanding of intersectionality and of gender-based violence. Paper with Sofia Strid