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Conceptus interruptus: Forestalling sureties about violence and feminism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2020

Anne Sisson Runyan Open the ORCID record for Anne Sisson Runyan [Opens in a new window]
Anne Sisson Runyan*
Affiliation:
Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Cincinnati
*
*Corresponding author. Email: anne.runyan@uc.edu
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Abstract

Forestalling sureties about what constitutes violence and feminism and the relationships between violence and feminism have been significant themes in the work of feminist International Relations theorist Marysia Zalewski. I follow how Zalewski, through her work and work with others including myself, interrupts well-trodden ‘trails’ of violence and feminism to open up thinking about both. I consider how her provocative work on violence and particularly feminist violence prefigures and advances cutting-edge critical thought on violence as represented in the ‘Histories of Violence’ project. What I call her ‘palimpsestic’ or multilayered and intertextual approach to violence reveals it as not only destructive, but also productive in terms of breaking with deadening conventions. I also consider her conceptualisation of feminist violence as both epistemic and militant over time in relation to some contemporary feminist insurgencies, the kinds of insurgencies that serve as her muses for breaking out of forms of ‘secured’ feminism and opening space for unbounded feminist thought. Consistent with her insistence that theory (and writing) should provide uncomfortable openings, not comforting foreclosures, I end not with a conclusion about her work, but rather echo her call to resist the kind of ‘knowing’ that suffocates critical thinking and (re)generative feminist thought.

Keywords

ViolenceFeminismFeminist ViolenceSecured FeminismInsecured KnowledgePalimpsest
Type
Forum Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 325 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2020

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References

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2 This is part of her large corpus of work, which includes such earlier books as Feminism After Postmodernism?: Theorizing Through Practice (London: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar and many other co-authored and co-edited volumes and articles on postpositivism, visual politics, masculinities, sexual violence, and feminist IR thought and methods, several of which are cited in this piece and which are reflective of her abiding commitments to feminist poststructural theorising that unmoors feminist thought from corporeal and temporal attachments so as to see it as a mobile and inexhaustible source of and force for critical thought.

3 Zalewski, Feminist International Relations, p. 1.

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7 Ibid., p. 25.

8 Ibid., p. 78.

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24 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘Taking feminist violence seriously’, p. 297.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

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28 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘Taking feminist violence seriously’, p. 308.

29 Ibid., p. 297.

30 Ibid., p. 295.

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40 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, pp. 446–7.

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43 Ibid., p. 451.

44 Evans and Ettinger, ‘To feel the world's pain and its beauty’.

45 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘“Unthinking” sexual violence’, p. 453.

46 Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, ‘The violence of forgetting’, New York Times (20 January 2016), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/the-violence-of-forgetting.html} accessed 8 February 2019.

47 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘Feminist violence’, p. 107.

48 Ibid.

49 Brad Evans and Todd May, ‘Histories of violence: Nonviolence and the ghost of fascism’, Los Angeles Review of Books (21 May 2018), available at: {https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/histories-of-violence-nonviolence-and-the-ghost-of-fascism} accessed 8 February 2019.

50 Zalewski and Runyan, ‘Feminist violence’, p. 108.

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57 Ibid., pp. 309, 310.

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