Sexuality And The Politics Of Violence And Safety

Sexuality and the Politics of Violence offers a timely and critical exploration of issues of safety and security at the centre of responses to violence. Through a multi-disciplinary analysis, drawing on feminism, lesbian and gay studies, sociology, cultural geography, criminology and critical legal scholarship, the book offers to transform the way we understand and respond to the challenges raised by violence. It breaks new ground in its examination of the rhetoric and politics of violence, property, home, cosmopolitanism and stranger danger in the generation of safety and security. Using interviews, focus groups and surveys with lesbians and gay men, Sexuality and the Politics of Violence draws upon 'real life' experiences of safety and security. It raises some fundamental challenges to the law and order politics of existing scholarship and activism on homophobic hate crime.

Winner, 2014 Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies Since the 1970s, a key goal of lesbian and gay activists has been protection against street violence, especially in gay neighborhoods. During the same time, policymakers and private developers declared the containment of urban violence to be a top priority. In this important book, Christina B. Hanhardt examines how LGBT calls for "safe space" have been shaped by broader public safety initiatives that have sought solutions in policing and privatization and have had devastating effects along race and class lines. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research in New York City and San Francisco, Hanhardt traces the entwined histories of LGBT activism, urban development, and U.S. policy in relation to poverty and crime over the past fifty years. She highlights the formation of a mainstream LGBT movement, as well as the very different trajectories followed by radical LGBT and queer grassroots organizations. Placing LGBT activism in the context of shifting liberal and neoliberal policies, Safe Space is a groundbreaking exploration of the contradictory legacies of the LGBT struggle for safety in the city.

Women have made significant inroads into political life in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred attacks, intimidation, and harassment. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name: violence against women in politics. Tracing its global emergence as a concept, Mona Lena Krook draws on insights from multiple disciplines--political science, sociology, history, gender studies, economics, linguistics, psychology, and forensic science--to develop a more robust version of this concept to support ongoing activism and inform future scholarly work. Krook argues that violence against women in politics is not simply a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence privileging physical aggressions against rivals. Rather, it is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors, taking physical, psychological, sexual, economic, and semiotic forms. Incorporating a wide range of country examples, she illustrates what this violence looks like in practice, catalogues emerging solutions around the world, and considers how to document this phenomenon more effectively. Highlighting its implications for democracy, human rights, and gender equality, the book asserts that addressing this issue requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure women's equal rights to participate--freely and safely--in political life around the globe.

A pathbreaking work for the next stage of the #MeToo movement, showing how we can address sexual harms with fairness to both victims and the accused, and exposing the sexism that shapes today's contentious debates about due process Over the past few years, a remarkable number of sexual harassment victims have come forward with their stories, demanding consequences for their assailants and broad societal change. Each prominent allegation, however, has also set off a wave of questions – some posed in good faith, some distinctly not – about the rights of the accused. The national conversation has grown polarized, inflamed by a public narrative that wrongly presents feminism and fair process as warring interests. Sexual Justice is an intervention, pointing the way to common ground. Drawing on core principles of civil rights law, and the personal experiences of victims and the accused, Alexandra Brodsky details how schools, workplaces, and other institutions can – indeed, must – address sexual harms in ways fair to all. She shows why these allegations cannot be left to police and prosecutors alone, and outlines the key principles of fair proceedings outside the courts. Brodsky explains how contemporary debates continue the long, sexist history of “rape exceptionalism,” in which sexual allegations are treated as uniquely suspect. And she calls on readers to resist the anti-feminist backlash that hijacks the rhetoric of due process to protect male impunity. Vivid and eye-opening, at once intellectually rigorous and profoundly empathetic, Sexual Justice clears up common misunderstandings about sexual harassment, traces the forgotten histories that underlie our current predicament, and illuminates the way to a more just world.

The challenge of violence against women should be recognised as an issue for the state, citizenship and the whole community. This book examines how responses by the state sanction violence against women and shape a woman’s citizenship long after she has escaped from a violent partner. Drawing from a long-term study of women’s lives in Australia, including before and after a relationship with a violent partner, it investigates the effects of intimate partner violence on aspects of everyday life including housing, employment, mental health and social participation. The book contributes to theoretical explanations of violence against women by reframing it through the lens of sexual politics. Finally it offers critical insights for the development of social policy and practice.

`This exceptionally interesting study provides an up-to-date and integrated perspective on organizations, violence, gender and sexuality. It pays particular attention to the power wielded by hierarchies of heterosexual men, and the ways in which this produces violence in different, carefully analyzed forms. This book is a major contribution to the construction of sociological and political knowledge that is not founded on the dominant definitions of heterosexual masculinities' - Professor Terrell Carver, University of Bristol`This is a wide-ranging and authoritative book. The authors draw attention to the huge amount of evidence now available that documents the gendering and sexualising processes at the core of organisational life. While they never nag about violation and inequality, they are nonetheless relentless in confronting the reader with the weight of evidence'- Professor Rosemary Pringle, University of SouthamptonThis book brings together the themes of gender, sexuality, violence and organizations. The authors synthesize the literature and research which has been done in these fields and provide a coherent framework for understanding the interrelationship between these concepts.The importance of violence and abuse, and particularly men's violence to women, children and other men has been well established, especially through feminist and some pro-feminist research. The insights of this scholarship have rarely been applied to organizational analysis. The authors draw on this literature and their own research, as well as relevant literatures on safety and risk at work; anxiety and stress at work; organizational policies on violence; sexual harassment and bullying in organizations; and male sexuality, to provide valuable information on violence in and around organizations.Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations breaks new ground in organization studies and will be essential reading for academics and students in both organization studies and all those studying issues of gender and sexuality in organizations.

Sexual violence against men is an under-theorised and under-noticed topic, though it is becoming increasingly apparent that this form of violence is widespread. Yet despite emerging evidence documenting its incidence, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones, efforts to understand its causes and develop strategies to reduce it are hampered by a dearth of theoretical engagement. One of the reasons that might explain its empirical invisibility and theoretical vacuity is its complicated relationship with sexual violence against women. The latter is evident empirically, theoretically, and politically, but the relationship between these violences conjures a range of complex and controversial questions about the ways they might be different, and why and how these differences matter. It is the case that sexual violence (when noticed at all) has historically been understood to happen largely, if not only, to women, allegedly because of their gender and their ensuing place in gender orders. This begs important questions regarding the impact of increasing knowledge about sexual violence against men, including the impact on resources, on understandings about, and experiences of masculinity, and whether the idea and practice of gender hierarchy is outdated. This book engages this diverse set of questions and offers fresh analysis on the incidences of sexual violence against men using both new and existing data. Additionally, the authors pay close attention to some of the controversial debates in the context of sexual violence against men, revisiting and asking new questions about the vexed issue of masculinities and related theories of gender hierarchy. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sex, gender, masculinities, corporeality, violence, and global politics, as well as to practitioners and activists.

`This exceptionally interesting study provides an up-to-date and integrated perspective on organizations, violence, gender and sexuality. It pays particular attention to the power wielded by hierarchies of heterosexual men, and the ways in which this produces violence in different, carefully analyzed forms. This book is a major contribution to the construction of sociological and political knowledge that is not founded on the dominant definitions of heterosexual masculinities′ - Professor Terrell Carver, University of Bristol `This is a wide-ranging and authoritative book. The authors draw attention to the huge amount of evidence now available that documents the gendering and sexualising processes at the core of organisational life. While they never nag about violation and inequality, they are nonetheless relentless in confronting the reader with the weight of evidence′- Professor Rosemary Pringle, University of Southampton This book brings together the themes of gender, sexuality, violence and organizations. The authors synthesize the literature and research which has been done in these fields and provide a coherent framework for understanding the interrelationship between these concepts. The importance of violence and abuse, and particularly men′s violence to women, children and other men has been well established, especially through feminist and some pro-feminist research. The insights of this scholarship have rarely been applied to organizational analysis. The authors draw on this literature and their own research, as well as relevant literatures on safety and risk at work; anxiety and stress at work; organizational policies on violence; sexual harassment and bullying in organizations; and male sexuality, to provide valuable information on violence in and around organizations. Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Organizations breaks new ground in organization studies and will be essential reading for academics and students in both organization studies and all those studying issues of gender and sexuality in organizations.