This is a man’s city
Testimonies without testicles
This article has been carefully edited and proofread by Lisa, 33. She overcame the French AZERTY keyboard constraints for us all.
How have I become so blasé? Over the last few weeks, I’ve been wondering why Sarah Everard’s death was picked up so widely. Why was it not treated like another Invisible Women story — like, appallingly, most black women’s and LGBTQIA stories — as a mere ‘fait divers’? It then hit me: I had become completely desensitised to male violence against women. I had taken for granted that we are never safe, because that is how we, women, are raised.
Following Sarah Everard’s death and International Women’s Day, I asked my immediate network — people of different ages and genders — to contribute to a collective article. I wanted to gather their reactions, to help me get past the cynical state I started with. Along with their responses, which were the emotional starting point of it all, I also asked what changes they’d like to see in their urban environment — the crime scene itself.
The replies I got were rich and unique in perspective and ideas. I was initially keen to get an article out as a reaction to the news, but the idea of a deadline seemed absurd. Invisible women and the problems we face aren’t going away. How do we sustain the momentum beyond Sarah Everard’s death, beyond the cyclical media frenzy?
So instead we’re doing something different. Rather than a one-off article, Possible Space will be sharing the contributions over the coming weeks to eventually collect them all in an online exhibition. A necessary process to document and archive the anger, the questions, the sadness, the fear, the ideas, the hope, the anger, the anger, the anger.
Women are often denied anger, criticised for being too emotional.
But emotion belongs in the political realm.
The very word, at least in an earlier form, once referred to a public disturbance in 16th century French. Its etymology is linked to words denoting motion — emotion meant change.
Now we are angry, and it feels good, and it is turning us to action. This is a man’s city full of angry flâneuses in waiting.
This project started from a conversation with my dear friend Mélody Barreau, who lives in London, and is 29 years old. Her reflections form the first entry in the project.
On counting dead bodies — Mélody, 29
Our modern society is obsessed with numbers.
We spend our lives counting, classifying, accumulating and aggregating data to produce the trends and statistics that underpin most of the decisions made in the political sphere and beyond. Yet, as Jess Phillips MP reminded us during the House of Commons International Women’s Day debate, we do not count dead women. Dead women are a societal phenomenon we have simply accepted: “dead women are just one of those things.” Jess Phillips followed this dreadful observation by reading out the list of 118 women killed by men in the UK in the past year.
Four excruciating minutes later, the list comes to an end and I ask myself: is more counting what we really need? There is no denying that this annual roll-call is symbolically poignant; it makes visible the uncounted. Similarly, the flourishing of statistics and trends on killings and sexual assaults on women brought their prevalence into a field of vision. Only by using the rhetorical tools at our disposal can we make a phenomenon visible and give it the attention it deserves.
Yet these discursive tools based on economics are part of the ‘governmentality’ of a hegemonic state which has been historically detrimental to women and minority groups. Foucault coined the concept of governmentality to describe the development of a new art of government during the sixteenth century. Less concerned by enforcing sovereignty over a territory, this emerging political rationality and its corresponding practices and techniques primarily aimed at governing the population in order to achieve particular goals — in the case of the twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality, goals associated with societal stability, population longevity and enterprising productivity. Thinking like a governmental state means considering the health, wealth and death of the population not as intrinsically important, but as instrumentally key to the management of the state. The state engages with them to the extent that they can be managed, acted upon and bring about greater productivity.
A key element in the exercise of governmentality is that of knowledge production. Indeed, only by knowing (wo)men — their wealth, health, resources, customs, ways of thinking etc. — can the state optimise their behaviour in a beneficial way.
The techniques of knowledge production used are not only reductive but potentially harmful. To lay claim to truth is to be able to grasp it and render complex reality intelligible and governable. For this, governmentality relies heavily on scientific and economic techniques: through the classification, categorisation and study of its population, data and statistics are accumulated, trends and forecast produced, deviations identified against a designated norm, and technical solutions designed to bring any deviation back into that norm.
These processes involve a subjective normalisation and homogenisation, whereby categories are created and norms ascribed against which to compare and categorise a vastly heterogeneous population. This brings any deviation into a ‘field of intervention’ upon which the state ought to act and inevitably leads to the exclusion or the coercive inclusion of those who do not fit in. The norms prescribed by the hegemonic state in Britain are historically based on the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class man. Gradually, these are shifting to include the white, heterosexual, able-bodied middle-class woman. This still leaves a large proportion of the population ‘deviating’ from the ‘norm’. This ‘rationality of knowledge accumulation’ and normalisation through intervention fails to acknowledge the multiplicity of realities and the socio-political complexities at stake.
Listing dead women in Parliament firstly homogenises those deaths and conceals the intricate socio-political roots at play in each. Simply listing dead women as yet another number to reduce, and including Sarah’s Everard’s case next to the experiences of women killed at home by their partners, necessarily conceals the variety and complexity of each death. Many reactions to Sarah Everard’s death evoked the ‘stranger danger’ cliché, to which the routinely suggested solution is more police on the street. Another common reaction was shock when her killer was revealed to be a policeman. For some, her death was a shocking deviation from the presumption of police protection. However, this is very much a straight white woman’s privilege: many women of colour or members of the LGBTQIA community who experience regular violence by policemen did not see this as a deviation from their normal. One can understand how bringing together women killed by strangers and women killed by policemen into one statistic to be acted upon could quickly be detrimental to women from minority groups. In this way, the annual roll call of dead women conceals more than it reveals.
Secondly, gathering this information, however reductive, provides the state with the legitimacy to manage and act upon the issue at stake, with the assumption that the state is external to it. This is particularly detrimental when the neoliberal state’s instruments create the very conditions for violence against women, especially those from minority groups. Knowledge production and legitimacy to act rely on an illusion that the hegemonic state’s rationality and techniques are external to the object of its study. The state uses statistical tools to gather knowledge and in doing so creates for itself a status of externality and expertise. When this rationality is at play, the hegemonic state’s connection to the causes of violence against women cannot be examined. It is telling that the police advised women to stay at home following Sarah Everard’s murder. Women exist within the field of intervention of a hegemonic state that has historically served men, meaning that the only solutions available are practices shaped by that very hegemonic state — increased policing, locking women in or shaping their behaviour.
The pre-eminence of governmental rationality over other forms of rationality does not allow us to think about these issues differently. If we are genuinely to address the issue of violence against women, we must rely on different discursive tools and rationalities to the ones of the hegemonic governmental state. We need a new conception of power: one where we do not just present arguments for reducing the number of dead women, but where we ask ourselves how we have come to this. One that challenges not just the number, but what this number reveals about the system from which it arises. At the very least, what we need is twofold: to listen to women’s multiple and multifaceted experiences, and to use and rely on those experiences to shape our societal environment — from urban planning to the political realm.
