Seeing violence where It is unseen: Violence as a structure forming masculinities in political youth organizations

For the analysis of political masculinities, ‘violence’ becomes a central structure and a basic tool for the analysis of the ‘gendering’ of politics within political organizations. Beyond the structural level, the spheres of activity and experience of the individuals and groups within organizations enable a constant ‘being’ in relation to violence, politicizing violence and even theorizing violence.

As becomes clear, violence cannot be limited to men’s violence, as there is the danger of isolating violence from the rest of social life. Many explanations about the gendering of violence have focused on individual male psychologies, on socialization experiences of boys and men, on sub-cultures of men, on societal patriarchal structures and trans-societal processes. In the case of violence in political youth organizations and its connections to the formation of male subjectivities, ‘violence’ can take all the above theorizations. What becomes even more crucial for the understanding of violence and its gendering character, however, is that it becomes a structural pattern of men’s individual and interpersonal violence.

Individuals and groups within political youth organizations in Greece are subjected to state and institutional violence and are in the centre of structural relations of institutions that are historically violent, such as patriarchy and capitalism. Even if individuals have agency concerning the de-construction of dominant patterns of violence, this is indeed very demanding and often impossible, not least because this process is quite beyond individual control. At this point I might argue that certain moments of resistance and break with dominant violent practices, representations and discourses are constituting factors of various forms of masculinities within political youth organizations.