Gender Violence in the Hurricane´s Eye: From Margin to Centre

This paper addresses the reactionary politicization of gender violence championed by the far-right in Spain since their return to institutions, in 2019. The far-right`s opposition has turned gender violence into a language of contention, at a time of intense feminist mobilization and influence in government. The paper draws from a field research of over a year that I have called an ethnographic drift. This included on line and direct participant observation of the far-right electoral campaigns and interventions in parliaments, combined with discussion groups with far-right voters, and interviews with survivors and workers of gender violence services, as well as archival research and feminist oral history to reconstruct the politicization of gender violence in the longer term. I will argue that gender violence politicization has entered a new stage, of uncertain consequences, shifting from margin to centre of the political conflict. The novelty is that male domination is neither taken for granted, nor part of a marginal gender agenda. Furthermore, in trying to re-establish the gendered boundaries of the state, where violence against women has imposed a permanent state of exception on women´s citizenship and human rights, the masculinist project of the far-right is fully revealed. Although survivors of gender violence and gender violence workers agree that regulation and public services have severe deficits – “Being a gender violence victim is no bargain” - the far-right insists on discrediting these services for wasting public resources, being inefficient and encouraging false accusations. The trope “Men sleeping in jail”, repeated in discussion groups, condenses a dystopia of male disempowerment, where a “feminist dictatorship” would be in place and, subsequently, the defence of men is justified. Besides exploring the Spanish scenario, this paper wishes to start a transnational dialogue on the new meanings, uses and abuses of gender violence, a key dispositive of male domination, in times of conservative backlash across Europe.