Banal Violence: Re-conceptualizing the Gendered Nature of Defensive Violence Based on Women’s Narratives of Gun Ownership and Self-Defense Training.

• In Event: Guns, Fear, and Risk

Abstract

Borrowing from Michael Billig’s concept of banal nationalism which identifies the many ways nationalism is continually flagged, both consciously and unconsciously and is dichotomized into “good” and “bad” variants, I develop the concept of banal violence, identifying the ubiquitous nature of violence in the US media. Sexual violence provokes a distinctive type of fear in women and is seen as “male” while victimization is “female” (Lamb, 1999). Similarly, US laws define the legal use of lethal force against an assailant through Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws as being limited to cases where the assailant is an unknown intruder in the act of committing another crime. This limitation means the laws do not apply in domestic cases – those where women are most likely to use lethal force (Richie, 2000). Using interviews with women who own guns or have taken self-defense training, I examine the ways women think about the possibility of using violence in self-protective contexts and explore how their conceptualizations of defensive violence alter the way we typically think about violence, creating an alternative understanding of defensive violence that is based on women’s experiences.

Author

• Alexis Halkovic, The Graduate Center, CUNY