Hysterical: A Feminist Killjoy in Bed with Masculinity

The Beginning

This is not about trauma narratives or sob stories. This is not about sexual harassment in the work place, pornography, unwanted advances, or rape. This is about good old fashioned domestic abuse. DV. Intimate partner violence. Remember that, Domestic Violence? “Discovered” in the 1970s by the radical feminists. They coined the phrase, “the personal is political.” Where did that go? It's not sexy or interesting. Displaced by the shining spotlight of male abuse of power in more public forms. Which, is most certainly an advance, but what happens when we think abuse at home is over, no longer an issue? That it's a problem just for poor, uneducated women who don't know any better. That it’s part of the "Other's" domestic culture.

What happens is we, the privileged, stop talking about it. But it never went away. Raising two generations now of young people to be weary of the sexual prowess of boys/men, that no means no, date rape is a thing, consent is sexy, report inappropriate sexual advances at work, school, college, and having the channels to do that---is one thing. But culturally we haven't prepared these same people to look out for the signs of controlling behavior in romantic relationships or even what abuse looks like beyond knives and fists.

So this is about heteropatriarchal white supremacist responses to intimacy that fuel masculinized violence, in the home, the bedroom, on a date. As told by me, a Western, highly educated, middle-class, white, queer, cisgendered woman from the seat of colonial power (America). I say masculinized violence to mean that it emerges out of a misogynistic, hetero-patriarchal capitalist society that hates women and the feminine. Thus, such violence exists in queer relationships and the perpetrators are not all cis-men. Yet, in this post, postmodern moment, where identity is seen as a free-floating signifier, it is important to name the category of difference that most often defines the victim, woman.

This is about identifying domestic violence. Revealing it, naming it, talking about it. We don't even call it violence. "Emotional abuse," emotional, feminine, that will make it disappear. The kind of violence that goes unrecognized for years, decades sometimes, until it has pick, pick, picked you apart and you're left walking around with entire pieces of yourself missing. 

We need to move beyond the limits of feminist theorizing on why men engage in violent behavior, toxic masculinity and the sort. Or why the abused stay in abusive relationships. I agree with Ashwini Tambe’s remarks that the massive appeal of the #MeToo movement is because it is about sexual coercion. And for privileged women, specifically white women, being coerced sexually goes against the middle-class norm of equating sex with self-hood.

This piece is about exposing the forms of coercion that happen in intimate relationships. Exposing the complex labyrinth of the abuser’s control that most often is not physical violence. It is about revealing the ways that the victim is shamed, pathologized, discounted, ignored, and used. She becomes a survivor just by living.