On Violence and On Violence Against Women
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A blazingly insightful, provocative study of violence against women from the peerless feminist critic.
Why has violence, and especially violence against women, become so much more prominent and visible across the world? To explore this question, Jacqueline Rose tracks the multiple forms of today’s violence – historic and intimate, public and private – as they spread throughout our social fabric, offering a new, provocative account of violence in our time.
From trans rights and #MeToo to the sexual harassment of migrant women, from the trial of Oscar Pistorius to domestic violence in lockdown, from the writing of Roxanne Gay to Hisham Mitar and Han Kang, she casts her net wide. What obscene pleasure in violence do so many male leaders of the Western world unleash in their supporters? Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence?
On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rose (Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty), a lecturer in history at the University of St. Andrews, probes the causes, meaning, and persistence of sexual violence in this thought-provoking essay collection. She discusses rape accusations against Harvey Weinstein and South African president Jacob Zuma in exploring the links between sexual harassment and violence, and argues that male fragility is at the root of sexual violence ("Harassment is ruthless, but it also carries a whiff of desperation about it"). Through detailed analysis of literary works by Temsula Ao, Roxane Gay, Eimear McBride, and others, Rose examines the language and psychology of violence and its role as a maintainer of inequity. She also notes that transsexual people are physically assaulted and killed at higher rates than the general population, and analyzes representations of trans identity in popular culture, including Caitlyn Jenner's 2015 appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair. Three chapters on South Africa explore the legacy of violence and the intersections between race, sex, trauma, political protest, and justice, and, in the final essay, Rose examines the degradation of female asylum seekers by immigration authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. Rose skillfully interweaves the work of Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and other philosophers into her dense yet lucid analysis, and shows flashes of sardonic humor. This is a precise and original exploration of an essential subject.
