Amy Piedalue, MA

University of Washington, Seattle

 


Contesting Gender Violence

There are many ways to conceptualize the relationship between poverty and violence. Gandhi called poverty "the worst form of violence," his words foreshadowing contemporary theorizations of structural violence, which draw attention to the temporal and spatial linkages between colonial legacies, the uneven geographies of contemporary global capitalism, and the violence of the conditions of impoverishment and deprivation in much of global South. My own research is interested in complicating our understandings of the relationship between poverty and intimate gender violence, and particularly in challenging developmental discourses which position domestic violence as a problem which can be solved by development. This includes critical attention to the socio-cultural and political-economic contexts of violence, as well as to how differently positioned subjects make sense of violence in their homes, families and communities. Within this frame, I am also interested in men and masculinities. Specifically, I am interested in unpacking developmental attention to men as perpetrators of violence, as well as the ways in which poverty and inequality position men and complicate static notions of what 'gender' means in relationship to violence.