Symbolic Violence within Different “Gender Regimes” in the Europe of Globalized Migrations

This paper discusses Bourdieu's approach to the reproduction of symbolic violence towards women within different “regimes” of women’s freedom considering different pattern of accessibility to women’s body. We are especially concerned with the risk of racialisation of gender-based violence through emphasis on “our” rights, in the mainstreaming European discourse. How is symbolic violence towards women reproduced in the Europe of globalised migrations, in which regimes of women's freedom confront supposed forms of traditional patriarchy?  However, in various groups of women, the meanings applied to “violence” may diverge greatly, according to normative and cultural perspectives, and in particular as regards family control over women’s bodies and gender display. Migrant women are exposed to a double challenge of loyalty: to their communities of origin, and to the system of presumed universal rights. The two systems are represented as internally homogeneous, but groups or communities of migrant origin have highly differentiated patriarchal characteristics. Moreover persisting phenomenologies  of violence against women, even in the most egalitarian European countries, highlights how post-patriarchal patterns still reproduce symbolic violence. The post-patriarchal structure of gender relations is far from being questioned. The theoretical key to this work aims at overcoming interpretative dualisms and neo-colonial approaches on symbolic violence towards women considering the pluralism of European societies, without losing sight of the distinctions within the hierarchies of symbolic power between men and women, native-born and migrants, dominating and dominated. Bourdieu's approach on symbolic violence allows us to re-interpret classic feminist theories as the “traffic in women” of Gayle Rubin, the sexual contract of Carole Pateman and the Iris Young’s discourse on gendered experience of living body.