Feminist consciousness raising groups, social workers, women’s advocates and therapists have already done the difficult work of de-pathologizing women’s responses to violence and abuse. Where a therapist without an understanding of VAW might identify Nadia’s “symptoms” (suicidal ideation, depression) as the presenting concerns and attempt to treat Nadia individually, a therapist working from a feminist or relational perspective would rightly identify Nadia’s symptoms as commonly occurring responses to living with violence or abuse. If I were working with Nadia, I might wonder about how to attend to the imminence of both, suicidal ideation and the potential for violence being directed at Nadia from people other than herself. Do individual “symptoms”
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I am reminded particularly of Himani Bannerji’s work in The Dark Side of the Nation (2000) in which she argues that under the insidious discourses of state-enforced multiculturalism, struggles of class, security, police violence, racism etc. that immigrants face get translated/transmuted into issues of ethnicity, religion and culture. A privatized understanding of community becomes the only venue through which issues that immigrants face are publicly intelligible. In this context, “ethnic” communities often form male leaders who participate in the political realm on the community’s behalf, perpetuating a self-concept and performance of themselves and their racialized community as inherently patriarchal – a patriarchy which cannot be challenged because it is part of this unchangeable, unquestionable thing called “culture” (an arrangement suitable both to the patriarchs in the community and the patriarchal anglo-canadian state) (cite). Bannerji’s insight might help me find a language for the complex negotiations of nationhood, culture, home/belonging, whiteness and racialized disempowerment that manifest themselves as the policing of racialized immigrant women’s bodies, femininities, and sexualities, and to make room for Nadia to explore the consequences of “cultural” ideas and
I am reminded particularly of Himani Bannerji’s work in The Dark Side of the Nation (2000) in which she argues that under the insidious discourses of state-enforced multiculturalism, struggles of class, security, police violence, racism etc. that immigrants face get translated/transmuted into issues of ethnicity, religion and culture. A privatized understanding of community becomes the only venue through which issues that immigrants face are publicly intelligible. In this context, “ethnic” communities often form male leaders who participate in the political realm on the community’s behalf, perpetuating a self-concept and performance of themselves and their racialized community as inherently patriarchal – a patriarchy which cannot be challenged because it is part of this unchangeable, unquestionable thing called “culture” (an arrangement suitable both to the patriarchs in the community and the patriarchal anglo-canadian state) (cite). Bannerji’s insight might help me find a language for the complex negotiations of nationhood, culture, home/belonging, whiteness and racialized disempowerment that manifest themselves as the policing of racialized immigrant women’s bodies, femininities, and sexualities, and to make room for Nadia to explore the consequences of “cultural” ideas and