Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: Gender violence and its interpretation
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3622
L’articolo affronta il tema della violenza di genere attraverso l’atto della testimonianza e della denuncia pubblica da parte delle vittime. Partendo da un commento critico su alcuni argomenti sollevati nel recente forum della rivista Hau dedicato a forme e rivendicazioni del movimento #MeToo, individuo le difficoltà che incontra l’antropologia nell’analizzare la violenza di genere. Il focus sulla violenza domestica come forma specifica di violenza di genere mi permette di affontare l’intreccio tra intimità, agency e consenso nell’esperienza della violenza. Sottolineo le specifiche dinamiche che caratterizzano la questione del denunciare/non denunciare la violenza da parte delle donne e che sono alla base di pregiudizi analitici. Quindi illustro come queste complessità si ritrovano nella valutazione e stima della violenza di genere come fenomeno globale. Concludo con una riflessione sulla violenza e la denuncia delle donne come una opportunità per il sapere antropologico nell’affrontare la dichiarazione di verità, l’intimità e l’aspetto sessuato della presa pubblica di parola.
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Alessandra Gribaldo
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Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: Gender violence and its interpretation
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2019-03-11
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Alessandra Gribaldo
2019/07/31
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Università di Bologna, Italy
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Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: Gender violence and its interpretation
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                                               2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 7-30




Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements
Gender violence and its interpretation
Alessandra GRIBALDO
Università di Roma Tre




ABSTRACT: In this article, I address gender violence through the act of witnessing and
speaking out by the victims. Starting from a critical comment on some arguable points
raised in the recent Hau journal forum aimed at discussing forms and claims of the
#MeToo movement, I let emerge the conundrums that anthropology faces in dealing
with the issue. A focus on domestic abuse as a specific form of gender violence allows
me to delve into the twine of intimacy, agency and consent in the experience of the
victims. I detect the specific dynamics that characterize the issue of speaking/not
speaking out against violence by abused women and that underpin analytical biases.
Then, I illustrate how these complexities can be found in the general assessment and
measurement of gender violence as a global phenomenon. I conclude with a reflection
on violence and women’s voices as an opportunity for anthropological knowledge to
deal with truth telling, intimacy, and the gendered act of speaking out.

KEYWORDS: GENDER VIOLENCE, INTIMACY, VIOLENCE ASSESSMENT, WITNESSING, #METOO.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alessandra Gribaldo
Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: Gender violence and its interpretation
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 7-30.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3622
8                                                                  ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO



   Credibility, authenticity, proof, testimony are the largely shared modalities
through which the truth of a fact is judged. Regarding the phenomenon of
gender violence, the fact in question is both the violent act and the subject
victim of the act, that is the subject who publicly speaks out against
violence. The ways gender violence can be denounced are diverse and
feminist movements take on the responsibility to convey collectively into
the public sphere the singularity of witnessing and experiencing violence. It
is known that the act of denouncing, witnessing and public speaking out of
one’s own experience of violence is particularly demanding for the victim.
The reasons are diverse and span from trauma, practical and material
conditions to denounce, the lack of proof, biases about credibility, the
potential involvement with the perpetrator.
   In this article1 I wish to focus on a specific aspect, which is the conundrum
represented by gender violence and the possibility of its certification and
acknowledgment. How is anthropological knowledge questioned by the ways
gender violence is attested or denied?
   I illustrate my argument following three points. First, starting from a
recent section of the last number of Hau journal about the #MeToo
movement, I highlight the most problematic aspects related to the reception
of the public speaking out against gender violence. Second, I identify the
issue of intimacy as crucial to deploy the difficulties to deal with violence
against women, referring in particular to domestic violence. Finally, I show
how the trouble to identify the violent act can also be found in data
collection and surveys on the phenomenon of intimate partner violence.
Conclusions are drawn on the chances for anthropology to analyze social
events that are characterized by – rather than difference and alterity –
involvement, contiguity, proximity, and the already known.

Shortcuts
   The Shortcuts section on the #MeToo movement in the last issue of Hau
journal represents a sign of the engagement by anthropology to deal with
issues – such as the collective manners to convey personally experienced
gender violence – that are non-orthodox for the discipline, providing
acknowledgment and dignity of object of research and analysis. The journal
section has been recently introduced to invite scholars to briefly reflect on
specific under debated issues that can challenge the discipline. In that issue,

1. Research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the Independent Social
Research Foundation (ISRF). I wish to thank the three anonymous Anuac referees for their
insightful comments.


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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                              9


the authors – Di Leonardo, Williams and Woodstone, Eriksen, and La Cecla –
present different perspectives, drawing on theory, ethnographies, personal
experiences and evaluations on a movement that has had a wide resonance
notably in European and American countries.
   Nonetheless, excluding the sharp contribution by di Leonardo, the debate
appears somehow pervaded by many approximations and naivetés. In the
opening of her introduction, the section editor Stavroula Pipyrou wonders,
after having asserted the subjective variability of appropriateness of sexual
behaviours, whether questionable sexual conduct maybe understood within
the social and historical context or it is to judge “universally” unacceptable;
if wrongdoings should be addressed legally instead than through social
media shaming; what if the indicted is a woman, and moreover a feminist
(Pipyrou 2018: 415). The quite predictable reference to the need of
contextualization in order to judge what is legitimate or not, counterpoised
to the notion of universality, flattens a rich debate in anthropology on
gender and rights (Merry 2006, 2009). Moreover, the insistence on the notion
of context can prove particularly thorny when gender violence and intimacy
are addressed, as it can foster a vicious circle of opacity and indecidibility in
respect to violent acts (Gribaldo 2014; Gribaldo forthcoming).
   What is most striking is the view of the movement #MeToo as problematic
inasmuch it represents a mass of mainly women who intend to have justice
by their own, avoiding legal devices and rules. This approach sounds
particularly deceptive, in primis because few are the cases in which the
perpetrator has been called on personally – the Weinstein case lent itself to
highlight the everydayness and pervasiveness of a system – and therefore
the wish to punish the perpetrator has rarely been the main focus of the
action. Secondly – as di Leonardo’s contribution underlines – addressing the
law is particularly difficult for crimes that relate to gender and sexual
violence, intimate partner violence, harassment. Various contributions to
the section share a questionable view that to speak in legal terms has a
decisive, effective and symbolic value in the definition of victimhood.
Moving into an institutional dimension is perceived as a milestone that
acknowledges that violence has been perpetrated, that the testimony of this
violence is truthful, and that women are political subjects. It is well known
how the pressure on the victim of violence to speak about the factual events,
about herself and her relationship with the perpetrator and to denounce him
before the law has vast implications and effects of revictimization.
   In one of the contributions, together with the invite not to essentialize
sexual difference, men are invoked who refuse “to give up forever the idea
that their deep physical accomplishment is based on an encounter with
women’s great physical depth” (La Cecla 2018: 438), referring apparently to

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10                                                          ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


the (hetero)complemetarity of the sexes. On the one hand the issue of
gender is denied based on the claim that the difference in power lies in
vulnerability, not in gender (Williams, Woodston 2018: 428). On the other
hand, it is reasserted through the image of the crooked paths of desire and
the encounter between the man and a female “other”, which implies the
inescapable mutual hurt (La Cecla 2018). The fact that desire is not a choice
and it is not governable by imposed morality or a contract cannot erase the
fact that it is deeply affected by political and cultural processes. Regarding
the complex issue of consent, to attribute to a “certain line of radical
feminism” (La Cecla 2018: 436) the criminalization of sexuality and desire is
particularly misleading. The contemporary debate within feminism and its
queer and transsexual components as well as within the BDSM communities
is clearly advanced in questioning desire and the importance to respond to it
beyond moralizing stances. These movements radically rethink the relation
between identity and expected sexualities and go beyond sexuality as an
extractive dual relation, towards more intersubjective modes of desire and
intimacy (Demian 2018).
   It is not my intention to propose an analytic review of the section’s
contributions. What I would like to highlight is that the general approach of
the section reveals a peculiar stance in the urge to “judge” the movement:
whether it is significant, effective, dangerous; whether it is riddled with
rigidity, fostering uncontrolled denigration, sexophobic and puritan anxiety,
false consciousness masked by political correctness. Even from the very title
(“#MeToo is little more than mob rule vs #MeToo is a legitimate form of
social justice”) rather than an analysis that refers to anthropological
literature on the issue, the section is aimed at taking a stance on the very
opportunity to speak out and consequently on the emerging collective
subject. The use of the word “mob” is telling: it refers to the gap with a
political pre-existent stable collective subject, identifying an inarticulate
sub-political mass (Thompson 2013), which is furthermore prone to shared
hysteria.
   In the last two decades, anthropology has acknowledged the relevance of
the social and political dimension of violence and suffering, leading to
unprecedented interest in the mutual implications of violence and the
production of subjectivity, and to interrogation of the notion of everyday as
the site of the ordinary, in which experience and agency are shaped
(Kleinman, Das, Lock 1997; Das et al. 2000; Quaranta 2006; Biehl, Good,
Kleinman 2007). The theorization of interpersonal and structural violence
has allowed a shift towards the relationship between subjectivity and power,
focusing on the production of the subject as gendered (Moore 2007; Ortner


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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                             11


2005). Nonetheless, the section addressing the #MeToo movement does not
bring into the debate any reference to subjectivity, violence, social suffering.
The tangential claim to the need to address structural violence instead
results in little more than a displacement device.
    I believe that this approach and the consequent indifference to recent
anthropological and feminist reflections (to which Malinowski’s and Žižek’s
ones are preferred by the editor), is due to the peculiarity represented by
gender violence as everyday violence: it is not only invisible and normalized,
as literature attests since decades, but it is also implicated in a shared knowledge
that deeply questions the sphere of common experience and intimacy.
    The underlying question is: who is entitled to speak about gender violence
and how? Not the single woman, nor the many, nor the feminist movement:
the shift from personal sufferance to social acknowledgment should pass
through institutions. The single witnessing of suffering seems to tell very
little about the phenomenon and apparently much more about the
incapability of the alleged victim to understand ambivalences and
complexities of life. Witnessing in the #MeToo movement is judged as biased
because decontextualized: the entanglement with the everyday and the
broader social relationships makes it not substantive. Either women do not
know (or, worst, do not acknowledge) the difference between harassment
and desire or they simply lack in innocence (Ticktin 2017). In fact, they are
not expected to be “mere victims” as they may have “their own agendas”
(Eriksen 2018: 433). The pervasiveness of gender violence is therefore a
socially acknowledged fact (no one denies it), and at the same time it bears
the features of non-recognition, its public attestation proves uncertain.
    Behind the anthropological shortcuts on the act of speaking out gender
violence and the need to express a judgement over analysis, we may glimpse
a way to cut short the reflection on the theme because of the embarrassing
complicity of the #MeToo movement with the exploitation of violence and
morbid penetration in emotional intimacy by the media (Dei 2005: 18-19).
Declared intimacy and pain achieves a suspicion of implausibility,
unrestraint, inappropriateness: mass media and especially social media
exemplify the fiction related to the request of recognition of victimhood,
which is often gendered. Moreover, bearing witness to suffering and the act
of listening has been identified as privileged objects of a contemporary
social-political language that is dominated by an “ethos of compassion”. The
use of this language has seen a sudden upsurge in recent years (Fassin,
Rechtman 2007). Subjects learn to express their own inner being in words
and images through various mechanisms of governmentality that weave
together state policies and psycho-pedagogical discourses; these mechanisms
also entail exposure to popular and entertainment modes of expression that

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revolve around what is essentially an accumulation of discourse about the
self, discomfort and suffering, and the exploration of intimacy of the
relationships. The context surrounding testimony of intimate violence
victims is clearly affected by these peculiar contemporary modes that bring
into play gender differences, the presentation and display of the self, proof
of authenticity and appeals for compassion.
    By underlying the “complexities” of the movement and trying to eschew
political correctness, the Hau debate on #MeToo ends up endorsing a
common view regarding testimony of gender violence victims, following
what is a general bias about battered women. The notion of harassment is
subject to interpretation, the alleged act of violence is supposed to require
specific contextualization, the victim is supposed not to be entirely capable
to read the whole complexity of the event, the very experience of violence is
subject to verification, and suspects are raised about an excess of sensitivity
and, at worst, a manipulatory intent. Women who use the tropes of
authenticity by speaking out on line about past harassment are not mere
victims nor strategic agents alone. The voices of women who experienced
harassment that spread in the media as much as those of whom have
suffered intimate partner violence and testify in institutional contexts, are
filtered by similar devices that make them sound inappropriate.
    Working as an anthropologist on domestic violence has given me the
opportunity to deal with the stratification of subjects, actions, testimonies,
and the modalities of judgement that are involved in the possibility to know
and better understand the phenomenon of gender violence and the act of
denouncing it. Through ethnography it is possible to grasp the diverse
meanings speaking out achieves in different spheres, the authority’s efforts
and biases, the difficulties women face in the act of denouncing, their
hesitations. Diverse works on domestic violence present a complex frame in
which victims and perpetrators are enmeshed in opaque relationship of love
and possession (Ferraro 2006; Mills 2006). The fact of being abused exposes
victims to the blame of not to being aware enough to identify an adequate
partner. The interviews I had with abused women during a research in the
city of Bologna, Italy2, let emerge how this blame often became self-blame:
the regret not to have been smart enough enmeshes in stories of romance,
quarrels, revenge, male violence and female forgiveness. The claim to live a
life free from violence is entangled in a widely shared heteronormative
imaginary. Women are often not extraneous to dynamics of seduction,
courtship, dependency, romantic love which frames and sometimes forecast

2. I refer to a research carried out in the frame of a European action-research project in 2010
-2011. See Creazzo 2013 for results and author’s contributions (2013, 2014, forthcoming).


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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                               13


abuse. Moreover, media culture provides a constant overlap between the
seriousness of the violent acts and their trivial context. Italy is a good
example of the modalities through which femicides are represented by the
media: recurring images of her and him, about how the couple was normal
and happy, the irrelevant reasons behind the violence, the ambivalence of
passionate love and the consequent risk of “blindness” (Giomi, Magaraggia
2017).
   I wish to let emerge, through a focus on domestic violence, the specific
dynamics that characterize the issue of speaking/not speaking out against
violence by abused women whose acknowledgment might avoid analytical
biases, such as those found in Hau forum.
   Ambivalence and the fragile relation with testimony is often the mark of
women’s stances on violence. This perceived lack of determination and
clarity in the statements and stances of women who have suffered violence
by their intimate partners is acknowledged: social workers and law
enforcement express this frustration in posing the infamous Freudian and
ultimately unanswered question, “what do women want?”. Victims of
domestic violence appear either too difficult or largely uncooperative, “there
is no way to tell what victims really want” (Mills 2006: 48). Ambivalence
towards pressing charges is often taken by social workers as a lack of
responsibility and trustworthiness. The possibility/urge to denounce and the
acknowledgment of subjects’ credibility entail a view of the victim that
requires action and expression, where agency is the pre-requisite of
emancipation and awareness (Gribaldo 2013).
   The questionable nature of this view has been widely discussed by
anthropological debates, highlighting the underlying bias towards those who
do not speak out. In fact, if the act of speaking out – reporting the incident
and expressing one’s experience as the victim of violence – is widely
commended as a political and progressive reference, the ways in which
stories of violence can and must be made public is not limited to breaking
the silence (Ribeiro Corossacz 2018). The idea that speaking clearly and
pressing charges are the only means of expression creates its own violence.
As Veena Das emphasizes, the boundaries between saying and showing when
violence is expressed are to be protected from the imaginary of unveiling and
unraveling:
      It is often considered the task of historiography to break the silences that
      announce the zones of taboo. There is even something heroic in the image of
      empowering women to speak and to give voice to the voiceless. [...] when we
      use such imagery as breaking the silence, we may end by using our capacity to
      “unearth” hidden facts as a weapon (Das 2007: 57).



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   Gender violence is a social event that often finds its certification through
single witnessing of personal experience; as such it is subject to interpretation.
The Hau debate focuses on this capacity of interpretation: what have these
women really experienced? Can it be defined as violence?
   The well-known recent open letter by Deneuve and colleagues on the
male right to harass3 – mentioned quite uncritically in the introduction by
Pipyrou as a defensible stance among others – deploys several clues that are
at least controversial for a critical thought as it substantially holds up a
virulent declaration for heteronormative sexuality (Lebovici, Zapperi 2018).
A passage of the open letter is particularly telling: “we are not reducible to
our bodies. Our inner freedom is inviolable”. As recently noted by Kipnis,
this is an exceptional reduction of freedom to the sacred locus of inner mind
(Kipnis 2018: 262). I wish to underscore that this modality to identify
violence starting from the inner perceptions discloses an unavoidable
intractability, leading to the conclusion that if violence is not perceived or
denounced, it does not exist. The subjective interpretation is crucial for the
crimes that most of the times do not involve other witnesses beyond the
victim and the perpetrator. The characteristic of the violent act is that, in
order to be recognized, it has to be perceived as such by the person who
suffers it. This is a debated issue in anthropological reflection and in the
ethnographic knowledge on violence, what Veena Das calls “the complexity
of the inner” (1998: 187).

An intimate social fact
   The relation between gender and violence in anthropological terms has
identified the historical relationship of tension between feminism and
anthropology as a privileged space to rethink the crisis of representation in
social sciences and the issue of ethnographic knowledge in its political
meaning. It is not a case that the analysis of the contrasting senses of rape
among prostitutes in the UK (Day 1994) summarizes the conundrums of a
conclusive definition: violence and sexuality are intertwined with gendered
power relations. In this sense the “awkward relationship” between anthropology
and feminism (Strathern 1987) lies in the double perspective of a theory of
the historically produced dominance and the adhesion to a political feminist
project that entails – on the one hand – a story and a definite perspective,
and – on the other – the anthropological practice not to superimpose taken

3. “Nous défendons une liberté d’importuner indispensable à la liberté sexuelle”, www.le-
monde.fr/idees/article/2018/01/09/nous-defendons-une-liberte-d-importuner-indispensable-a-la-
liberte-sexuelle_5239134_3232.html. Accessed on 04/06/2019.


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for granted notions, languages and experiences to ethnographic contexts. It
is a critical perspective that is epistemological and ethical at once (Josephides
2015). What kind of political commitment is possible, in which way can the
context be considered, how to render meaning, how to report the experience
of violence inasmuch as
      the objectification and disassociation involved in the politics of naming and
      revealing requires the imposition of absolute values on particular practices
      regardless of how these are understood by those involved (Gow, Harvey 1994: 5).

   In the effort to go beyond the practice of modernist feminism to
generalize from the experiences of western, white, heterosexual, middle-
class women (Abu-Lughod 2002; Fusaschi 2011), the relationship between
experience and identity has become the focus of a reflection on gender,
violence, and dominance.
   Domestic violence or intimate partner violence is a specific aspect of
gender violence: its demonstration, as a social fact in sociology and as a
single event that requires penal judgement in the legal field, can provide
productive hints for the debate. Domestic violence is a non-orthodox subject
for anthropology, an awkward and minor theme of anthropological research;
too obvious and widespread to constitute a novel issue, it is the
quintessential non-exotic subject. A number of studies in various
environments – from the legal space and social services to everyday life –
have turned the ethnographic gaze towards domestic violence (Hirsch 1998;
Abraham 2000; Merry 2000; Trinch 2003; Plesset 2006; Hautzinger 2007;
Lazarus-Black 2007; Wies, Haldane 2011, among others). However, the
theme of intimate partner violence remains relatively marginal in the
general disciplinary debate and in particular the anthropology of violence 4.
   The taking over of the issue of violence by anthropology involves a
process that in the last decades of the past century has been connected to a
profound political and epistemological rethinking within the discipline. The
novel view regarding forms of violence has addressed the nature of wars,
conflicts and mass violence. Attention to violence and its spread over time
and space has been capable to analyze identity and religion issues and the
spread of large-scale terrorism. Nonetheless, gender violence has had
trouble being considered on equal footing in the framework of anthropology
of violence. The overlap between violence and armed conflict and the focus
on the collective dimension of suffering has prevented acknowledgement of

4. In the Companion on Moral Anthropology edited by Fassin the entry on violence explicitly
leaves out domestic and family violence due to the fact that it is little studied in
anthropology (Hinton 2012: 501).

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16                                                          ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


interpersonal gender relationship as a space for relevant anthropological
reflection. Even analyses of crime in peace-time (Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois
2004) that highlighted the structural dimension of violence due to social and
economic inequalities (Farmer 2004) have marginalized everyday interpersonal
violence against women as a private sphere.
    The tension between individual and society plays an important role in the
anthropological difficulties in theorizing violence. The effort to identify
ritual violence as inclusive devices (Héritier 1996: 30), apparently does not
reduce the effects on the subject over whom violence is exerted. The risk lies
in considering “a transcendent, universal, unembodied subject”, subsumed
by collectivity, a subject that does not count (Beneduce 2008: 34, in note).
The understanding of collective violence as a means to annihilate the others’
culture, a device to erase the very meaning of victims’ everyday life (Dei
2005), risks to overshadow the gendered and intimate dimension of violence,
where women are viewed solely as the main custodians of collective identity.
    Intimate partner violence in particular, because of the intercrossing of
various fields – psychology, pedagogy, law, and social services – is rarely
chosen for theorization within anthropology as disciplinary tradition.
Furthermore, domestic violence remains largely absent from an emergent
ethnography of militancy and civil movements because of its lack of epics, as
it identifies anti-heroic subjects: not only are they largely women, but they
are also victims. Given the impossibility of finding class and generational
constants, or significant correlations with socio-cultural aspects, domestic
violence emerges as a latent element that is found everywhere – albeit in
different forms – as a quasi-natural dimension of gender relations. The
theme of domestic violence appears too structural to circumscribe, it is both
not political enough and at the same time too politicized, and thus relegated
to feminism as a stand-alone ideology and theory: it represents one of the
few cases in which there is a remainder between the relevance of the
phenomenon and the theoretical responses provided by the social sciences
(Hearn 2012).
    Violence in intimate relations enters into a daily, domesticated, normal
dynamics of gender relations, beyond the state of exceptionality. It is a
violence of the most personal sort, one-on-one, often committed in the most
private context (the home), by the most intimate person (the partner).
Outside witnesses are sporadic at best and often, except children, no one
else is familiar with the facts of the case. The agency, experience, and
perception of the victim in intimate relationship with the perpetrator draw
the boundaries of the phenomenon.


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   Following Graeber’s reflections on violence and bureaucracy, we may
consider intimate partner violence as one of those “dead zones of the
imagination” (Graeber 2012), that eludes a critical analysis, not so much
because of a lack of relevance, but rather because it represents somehow an
excess of relevance, and deals with fields of common experience that do not
lend themselves to a rich and meaningful narrative, therefore representing
an authentic disruption of expectations. We may speak of a violence degree
zero, as a much-debated issue and at the same time an “area of violent
simplification” (ibidem: 106). It is a social phenomenon that is globally
recognized as evident and as constitutively submersed: the potential for it to
emerge is related to the possibility that victims have of recognizing it and
conveying it socially.
   An example of the issue to consider victim’s subjectivity can be drawn
from a renowned work by Aihwa Ong. In describing the processes that build
gendered citizenship in America among refugees’ communities, Ong (2003)
addresses the complex relationship between feminist issues as empowerment
and the response institutions give to domestic violence. Ong’s reflection
poignantly illustrates a white middle class feminist pastoral power, and the
ways feminizing technologies shape minority subjectivity. Compassioned,
patronizing and racist stances towards Cambodian American refugees,
identified as backward and patriarchal, find their ways through social work:
social workers seek to empower women and encourage them to leave
abusing partners, classifying dominant subjects and victims of patriarchy.
Ong identifies a female subject, defined through ethnic Cambodian
customary family norms represented as of unchallenged male power, who
manages strategically for her own ends the logics of US social assistance. If
Ong’s analysis is revelatory in calling attention to the pervert role of state
logics that exacerbate family tensions, nevertheless the woman who
denounces violence is sketched in terms of judgement. At play here is the
truth of the couple relationship that lies in intimacy. The collapse of this
sphere through the intervention of the social services creates ethnicized
men victims of essentialized women recipient of rights. Nonetheless we may
wonder: can the fact that men are punished for behaviour perceived to result
from cultural patriarchalism, shift attention from the violence exerted and
the fact that women may wish to escape from it? Can a “shrewd woman who
expertly used social workers, the police, the court system, and the self-help
group to turn things in her favor” against a disempowered desperate
husband (Ong 2003: 164) be a recognizable victim of domestic violence? Can
her attempt to use the law to “punish and discipline” her husband and
sometimes even “operating in her own self-interest” at the “moral costs” to


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18                                                                     ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


her family and community (Ong 2003: 166) mean a wish not as much to
dominate her husband, but to live a “different” intimacy, distant from
menace and the constant threat of violence? What can be known about her
choices, desires and strategies as much as ambivalent and disruptive they
could appear? Moreover, can a victim be strategic?
   Veena Das, one of the authors who have more deeply investigated the
tangle of violence, intimacy and subjectivity, raises two points that highlight
the difficulties in addressing domestic violence. The first one refers to the
issue of intimacy and emotions: the very notion of intimacy is hardly
compatible with a broad definition of violence that even includes harsh
language. The second point is the difficulty in conceptually identifying the
question of consent (Das 2008: 292-293). These themes are evidently
interconnected.
   Feminist critiques have debated the notion of subjectivity, revealing the
liberal order as a historical product, and problematizing the exclusively
negative conceptualization of liberty according to which agency carries
liberal-style visions of autonomy, control and individual action, possession
and commodification (Brown 2000). Feminist jurisprudence in its different
versions not only considers the formal and de facto constraints that impede
women’s access to a state of individual autonomy, it also calls into question
the features of the concept of autonomy as they have become consolidated
in liberal thought and its application. The issue of consent, experience and
the dimension of corporeality are a privileged space for reflection on the
gendered subject and the law. Sexual offences have a particular ability to
reveal the problematics of law and a sort of “moral magic” that consent
entails (Cowan 2007: 66). As it is well-known, law’s claim to truth in rape
trials unavoidably frames an alternative: consent is to be presumed
whenever the lack of it is not established, leaving out considerations such as
the constraints inherent in various degrees of intimacy, submission and fear
of violence. This is a vision that assumes a notion of free consent in a state
of nature, not marked by historical and social dynamics, in which coercion
and consent are general logical axioms that precede sexuality (Butler 1997b:
95). How can we consider an illocution that doesn’t respond to the
requirement of being taken up by the interlocutor and therefore is not
“fully” successful? As Fricker suggests,
      in sexual contexts at least, a woman’s ‘No’ does not receive its required uptake
      from a man, with the result that her would-be illocution thereby fails to
      communicate — it fails even to be the illocutionary act it would have been
      (Fricker 2007: 140-141).




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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                             19


   Nonetheless it remains more than noise, haunting both legal and
anthropological reasoning.
   The notion of intimacy is key to reflections on domestic violence and the
production of subjectivity. Intimacy and violence in late modern societies
are in an apparently contradictory relation; love and intimacy have been
identified as sites of active trust, where the romantic relationship enables
the subject to express him or herself: intimacy between partners is the
epitome of modernity (Giddens 1992). In the familial abuse context, the
occurrence of violence brings together love, trust, relationship, desire and
sexuality as exemplary sites of the gendered true self. The space of intimacy
presents a constant tension between ambivalence, ambiguity and the
authentic production of the subject (Sehlikoglu, Zengin 2015). Thus,
intimacy shares the duplicity and elusiveness that can be found in the notion
of violence. It is a space of scarring experience and at the same time a field
of irreducibly ambiguous meanings, in some cases even in the perceptions of
the subjects involved. The intimacy of past or present couples implies a kind
of complicity, sharing and affection, forms of trust and dependence that
include material conditions of mutual care, the daily sharing of space, shared
children, common plans and money.
   The vision of an equation between intimacy, reciprocity, solidarity and
trust has been called into question in feminist approaches that have
destabilized the assumption of the domestic and reproductive sphere as a
safe core. The questions of connection and relatedness, which imply
intimacy by definition, have been identified by several scholars as
historically associated with sociability, and laden with constitutively positive
aspects (Edwards, Strathern 2000; Berlant 2008; Broch-Due, Ystanes 2016).
In his analysis of the relationship between witchcraft, kinship and intimacy,
Geschiere suggests that the phenomenon of witchcraft might represent the
dark side of kinship. While questioning the tenacious vision of kinship and
intimate relationships as indisputable spaces of reciprocity (Geschiere 2013:
xviii), his perspective emphasizes that addressing intimacy in anthropology
means “to follow what people themselves define as intimate – what is
‘inside’” [...] “what people mark as a separate domain”, privileged and
“immune for general understanding” (ibidem: xx). The coalescence between
the Latin meanings intimus and vis in the expression intimus vis as “effective
violence” (ibidem: 26), shows that the notion of intimacy can be understood
as an attribute of powerful operational violence. In this respect, violence
may be viewed as the dark side of intimacy.
   These reflections on intimacy and violence are useful for an investigation
of the ways law and institutions deal with domestic violence and strive to
verify it. This dimension of separation, or rather, of identification of a

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20                                                              ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


personal space that isn’t reducible to a shared discourse articulated in
abstract terms marks the experience of intimate violence. This form of
immunity, this resistance to knowledge and understanding is crucial to the
anthropological analysis of domestic violence and to the ways it is treated by
the institutions. The victim’s intimacy and her ability to express it as a space
in which to investigate, understand, give meaning to, detect and finally
prove violence is decisive precisely in as far as it has to force the limits of the
legibility of intimacy in order to become shared. This dark side of intimacy is
at the same time already known, and somehow expected. Vulnerability and
violence, and the knowledge and discourses about them, are gendered in
their very essence.

Measuring and interpreting
   These theoretical conundrums in analysis are evident in the debates on
the evaluation of the magnitude of domestic violence. The general lack of
data from several countries is not simply due to the reluctance, idleness or
incapacity to see the phenomenon as relevant by the state or the local
institutions. In fact, several obstacles arise when investigating intimate
partner violence using quantitative methods, such as the complexity of
standardizing elements including the degree of gravity and the variables
surrounding motive and intentionality. The available statistics are moreover
often difficult to compare due to their use of different methods and indexes.
   Strikingly, the very issue of intimacy challenges the definition of a violent
act. The complication lies in how victims define violence, and in the
influence of the context on the possibilities of talking about violence.
Victimization surveys may present biases due to the multiple ways in which
violence can be experienced and described: ethnographic research shows
that, instead of abuse and victimization, violence may be read as normal acts
of discipline, naturalized as relational gender dynamics. The data relating to
recourse to the law are not significant, and are even paradoxical: the number
of criminal charges and the extent to which violence reaches the surface can
even be inversely proportional to its pervasiveness.
   Merry and Coutin have recently analyzed the deadlock regarding the
statistical measurement of social facts and data gathering to meet the need
for responses by policy makers. They have emphasized that technologies of
knowledge are not at all objective, but include cuts, omissions and
selectivity in the definition of the phenomena and their relevance. Indexes
and measuring systems condition the legibility of the phenomena they want
to investigate, producing regimes of truth. Discrete and objective unities


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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                                21


inevitably obliterate the complexity of events and relations, leading to a
flattening of experiences, underplaying of contradictions, erasing of some
facts and highlighting of others. The introduction and problematization of
variables such as nationality, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class
can endanger the possibility of indexing domestic violence:
      Global surveys require categories that can travel across such cultural borders
      while remaining commensurable. This situation creates a paradox: The survey
      categories need to be translated into local terms to measure local ideas and
      behavior accurately but need to retain their universal meanings to make
      comparisons possible across these borders (Merry, Coutin 2014: 6).

   The difficulties related to the definition of violence in intimate relations
are echoed in the reading of the phenomenon itself: the interpretability of
the character of domestic violence is such that there exist divergent
positions on its scope and gravity. For instance, according to the sociological
school or “family conflict studies”, empirical and comparative research
indicates that violence in households is more often reciprocal and gender
symmetrical. In this perspective, the gender difference stands in the harsher
physical consequences of abuses for women, in a higher perception of
violence by women, and in higher publicity for women victims (Costa et al.
2015). On the other hand, the “violence against women” approach insists on
the unreliability of the surveys and research related to such a complex
phenomenon, claiming that abused women under-report and normalize
intimate violence, and that men assaulted by intimates are more likely to
press charges and less willing to drop them. This approach underlines the
necessity to distinguish between defensive and offensive injuries, as most
women who use violence against their partner employ defensive violence in
response to ongoing, systematic abuse (Kimmel 2002). Furthermore, if we
accept that women and men suffer intimate partner violence in an identical
manner, we must explain the bizarre fact that women who are victims of
abuse have been able to construct, although with a lot of difficulty, spaces
for discussion, refuges and help networks, whereas men show – apparently
only in this area – a surprising incapacity to channel their own interests into
the institutions. Does claiming that the perception of violence and its
physical consequences are less harsh for men mean that men experience
abuse, but do not “suffer” from it? In general, the Conflict Tactics Scale
methodology, most used in family conflict studies, is marked by the biased
assumption that violence is the result of an argument and not the effort to
control and prevail, therefore erasing the circumstances and the consequences,
the nature of the relationship, motivation and intention for violence, the
gender difference in retrospection on estimation of violent acts. The obvious

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22                                                             ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


fact that a woman as well might also be violent, and not naturally a victim,
becomes an argument to maintain the perfect (although potential) symmetry.
These claims of gender symmetry omit a crucial point: the identification and
analysis of the dynamics of gender (Kimmel 2002: 1344).
   Johnson has explained the differences between the two strands of
scholarships, by identifying two distinct phenomena: on the one hand
situational conflict and contestation within the couple, and acts of violence
related to domination on the other end, what Johnson (1995) calls “intimate
terrorism”. The latter implies tactics and strategies of power and control by
one partner over the other, which presents specific dynamics that are not
captured in the surveys. However, this is a particularly problematic
definition, as it defines a relation in which a subject is at the other’s complete
disposal, and thus the object of infinite and unlimited violence. Aren’t
resistances, strategy and overthrow possible in every relation of power?
Contestation and domination are very difficult to tackle separately, much as
gender relations and power relations are.
   It is therefore the question of the perception of violence – the under and
over estimation of violence and of victimization by gender – which is
problematic in the process of data gathering and in the identification of the
social phenomenon: the statistical approach must be objective to the extent
to which it requires “little interpretation by the victim” (Merry, Coutin 2014:
6; Merry 2016). The emotional consequences of violence – included in the
indexes on violence against women – pose particular problems for its
measurement. This raises questions discussed in feminist theorizations and
in reflections on violence in anthropology: what is an abusive act? What is
violence? To what extent is the victim legitimated or moved to talk about the
experience?
   The analysis of the institutions in charge of certifying abuse allows us to
further investigate the potential of the exercise of violence: how can the
threat, the fear of violence be considered within an apparatus of law created
to verify such violence? In his work on asylum courts in the UK, Anthony
Good remarks the rejection of the subjective element – such as fear – in
favor of the objective situation – that one could reasonably be afraid of. The
inclusion of the subjective dimension of witnesses into the picture would
mean rewarding the cowards and penalizing the brave, and, furthermore,
failing to consider the cultural components in the production and expression
of feelings (2007: 53). In order to elicit violence and allow it to be identified
as such, it is necessary to abandon subjective meaning in favor of common
sense. Yet the meaning of violence for the abused subject is crucial. Violence
and gender are implicated in forms of subjectivity: the subject is constructed

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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                             23


through dominant models of discourse and practice that produce and
reproduce the notions of individuality and agency. To address the meaning
given to violence by the victim does not mean to undervalue the acts of
violence; on the contrary, it means understanding the peculiarity of intimate
violence, the issue of dominance and power and the “countercurrents of
subjectivity” (Ortner 2005: 45). Reflections on intimate violence must
investigate the boundary between subject and power and the constitutive
remainder between these two dimensions.

Conclusion
   The anthropological concern on the social use of the term “violence”
produces a paradox: analyzing it doesn’t mean focusing only on the subject
who exercises violence (whether institutional, collective or individual), but
also on the one who suffers it or witnesses it, the one who speaks out. An
anthropology of violence inevitably must address the “political relations
between performer and witness” (Riches 1986: 3).
   The politics of naming violence is decisive for anthropology and feminism.
Indeed, the critique of abstract notions of subjectivity and the complex knot
that links violence to subjection, witnessing, and agency is a crucial point in
both feminist theory and anthropological work addressing gender issues
(Spivak 1988; Butler 1997a; Das 2007). If in “having a voice” and “claiming
one’s voice”, politics and epistemology converge, nonetheless the
transparency of voice as an expression of subjective experience in the
conflation of knowledge and consciousness is constantly put to the test by
ethnography (Keane 2000: 271). The victim’s experience, the possibility for
her to speak in her own voice, and the effectiveness of this speech as a
speech act proves crucial in the testimony of gender violence. It is so
difficult to define the evidence of the “fact” in cases of domestic violence
(and sexual assault) because the fact itself is defined a posteriori, since its
very existence depends on how it is interpreted as experience: was the act
perceived as violence? Was there consent? Was there some kind of
provocation? These questions in turn entail the notion of limit: up to what
point?
   In general, social services and the juridical system, in their claimed
neutrality and thus self-referentiality, are revealed as institutions that do
not recognize the particular nature of intimate partner violence. The
institutional form has been identified, in Italy and elsewhere, as a space that
is hardly capable of taking gender violence into consideration in all its
complexity.


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24                                                          ALESSANDRA GRIBALDO


   In his political and institutional ethnology of truth speaking, Foucault
(2014) addresses the way subjects are actually implicated in forms of
veridiction (truth telling, le dire vrai) and how these generate specific forms
of subjection and subjectivation. Here, between power (normativity) and
knowledge (intelligibility) Foucault focuses on the notion of the subject and
particularly the ways subjects understand and form themselves as subjects of
experiences. The emphasis on who labels a given act as violent, in a context
in which the only witness is the victim, takes us to the center of reflections
on talking about violence, denouncing it and making it evident, expressing
one’s own experience, and at the same time bringing it to the attention of
the public and the institutions. Gender and marginal subjects (Bargu 2017)
question indeed the very act of truth telling.
   To resume the Hau debate, the witnessing of harassment that recurs
marked by the hashtag #MeToo, is a trace of something that cannot easily
find a space and time to be narrated at the “proper” moment. It comes out ex
post and meets a doubtful audience. It is a story that is known and trivial and
at the same time annoyingly complicated. As Gilmore illustrates in a recent
work on women’s witnessing and credibility: “gender animates scandal, in
part, because critical and popular notions of truth telling are gendered”
(Gilmore 2017: 82). More generally gender scandals shift swiftly towards
indifference, in some cases public indignation and the assessment of
irrelevance are woven together (Gribaldo, Zapperi 2012).
   This knot constituted by claims, authenticity of truth telling,
entanglements with the status of victim, and recurrence and triviality of the
experience, makes the witnessing of gender violence something that tells
about – rather than the violent acts themselves – the puzzles faced in
considering violence when it has to do with intimacy, time, relationship, the
everyday. Gender violence is a kind of violence with no witnesses, not only
because women hesitate to testimony, or because there are often no other
witnesses available, but also because witnesses tell something that is
somewhat already known. It may be not by chance that the most convincing
contribution to the Hau debate on #MeToo refers in the end to a popular
Black American radio anchorwoman who reminds that beyond the well-
known ambiguity between the simple gaze and harassment, there is
something that can be recognized and acknowledged (di Leonardo 2018:
424). The supposed undecidability of harassment in common and shared
experience is relative: it is known, maybe it should only be known better.
Anthropology in the field of gender violence might provide a more
articulated picture to elaborate contiguity through the analysis of issues
which are not marked by otherness and the unexpected.


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HASHTAGS, TESTIMONIES, AND MEASUREMENTS                                                25


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Wies, Jennifer R., Hillary J. Haldane, eds, 2011, Anthropology at the Front Lines of
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 Alessandra GRIBALDO obtained her PhD from the University of Siena in 2004 and
 has been teaching cultural anthropology at the University of Modena and Reggio
 Emilia, the University of Bologna, and the University of Roma Tre. Her main
 research interests are kinship, reproduction, visuality, violence, subjectivity, with
 a particular focus on gender. Her work has been published in American Ethnologist,
 Population and Development Review, Studi Culturali. She is author of La natura
 scomposta, 2005, La produzione del genere, 2010 (ed. with V. Ribeiro Corossacz), Lo
 schermo del potere, 2012 (with G. Zapperi), Boundaries within. Nation, Kinship and
 Identity among Migrants and Minorities, 2017 (ed. with F. Decimo). She has been
 fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation in 2016-2017, and was
 recently recruited as Associate Professor in the Department of Studi Umanistici at
 the University of Roma Tre.
 alessandragribaldo@gmail.com




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alessandra Gribaldo
Hashtags, testimonies, and measurements: Gender violence and its interpretation
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 7-30.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3622
