Interrogating Violence Against Women and State Violence Policy through Gendered Intersectionalities and Intersectional Gender: Local, National and Transnational Contexts

This paper arises from collective work within the 5-year Swedish Research Council project, “Feminist Theorizings of Intersectionality, Transversal Dialogues and New Synergies”, organised within GEXcel Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (Örebro-Karlstad-Linköping Universities), with specific focus on violence seen as inequalities (Hearn, Sociological Review, 2012; Current Sociology, 2013). The larger project examines intersectionality in gender studies, in relation and dialogue with the diverse, sometimes conflictual, theoretical and political positions in feminist debates (Walby, Armstrong, Strid, 2012; Strid et al. Social Politics, forthcoming). The project is designed against this background of rich, diverse feminist traditions for theorizing of intersectionality, and informed by tensions between these traditions. This paper takes up this challenge in terms of violence, especially violence against women, and state policy thereon, addressing the place of violence in contemporary state regulation and intersectional gender relations. The paper examines the complex, situated and spatial relationship between theorizing on violence against women and state policy on such violence (Hearn and McKie, Policy & Politics, 2008; Violence Against Women, 2010). This focus continues feminist traditions on multiple linkages between practice, politics, policy and theory, in local, national and transnational contexts. More specifically, drawing on extensive comparative European data at local, national and transnational, it explores the concepts of gendered intersectionalities and intersectional gender by examining how multiple inequalities, long been prominent in feminist activism and intervention on violence, are made (in)visible and conceptualized in state gender-based violence policy and debates. Attention is paid especially to tendencies to degendering strategies in violence research and state policy. A key aim of the paper is to investigate how analysis can be a starting point for assessing if, how and to what extent the inclusion of multiple inequalities could increase the quality of policy, for both reducing and stopping violence, and assisting those subject to violence.