Women’s bodies and lives as symbols of patriarchal codes: Honor killings

Abstract

Violence(s) imposed on non-western women during aggressive ritualized occurrences and, in the hereafter, meta-analysis of pain inflicted upon women is discussed particularly in the domain of honor crimes. Representational languages framing trauma in global discourses of naming and human rights are scrutinized, asserting that women’s perspectives must be centric to the discussion. Orientalist frames and control over women as symbols of honor and patriarchal codes maintain tensions of dichotomies between modernity and tradition and cultural relativism. These are thus challenged by emphasizing women’s burdens – as situated individuals – of multi-layered struggles which unfold from purporting to depict women’s realities. The naturalization of women’s suffering is further amplified when constrained within a one-dimensional representation claimed by regional and global injustice. This article contributes to critical feminist interventions in spaces representing women’s realities in a process which deconstructs and diverts the post of modernity and colonialism toward equality and dialogue across socio-political racial and gendered markers.

Introduction

The ‘true effects of traumatic experiences cannot be factually rendered since no one has ever been able to see pain, except in its consequences’ (Depelchin, 2005: 220), in how violence comes to be known and how the aftermath of pain is communicated. Honor crimes are acts of violent murder and are also known as shame killings. These crimes are supposedly held to save the reputation and honor of the family if honor has been perceived as threatened. Honor killings are said to ‘represent the most aggressive and salient form of honor violence, in which the family honor is restored by killing the offending family member’ (Beller et al., 2021: 9772). These acts of murder are largely represented in connection to non-secular states and populations even outside the Arab region. The widely accepted attribution of the crime in direct, linear, and/or absolute linkage to religion and culture in national and regional discourses is arguably unproductive; in that it decidedly cements the violence(s) on women by blindly defining them as fated victims of their society. Additionally, this set of predetermined discourses of knowledge disregards women’s individualities, struggles, and agencies when living within their own societies and legal structures. This alienation occurs in conjunction with abstraction and generalization, which further overlooks the varied sects/beliefs in the Arab region and the variations within each of these. Discourses classifying the act are subjectively named according to their lens, thereby silencing the perspective most crucially at stake. The act is purportedly based on codes in society which uphold honor. Under these contexts

honor involves the female’s assigned sexual and familial roles as indicated by cultural norms and traditions. According to these traditions, adultery, premarital sexual, or nonsexual relationships, suspected pregnancy outside marriage, rape, and falling in love with an ‘inappropriate’ person would all be considered as violations of the collective family’s honor. (Elakkary et al., 2014: 76)

From these understandings, knowledge is fragmented between gaps of invisibility and extremes which are frequently produced in the global sphere and perpetuate dichotomies of other(ing) languages. Such influential canons of information conceivably dismiss the potentials of the realities in which the women exist and their avenues for emancipation from social acceptance of the crimes, ‘not just by their social norms but also by their legal systems which tend, in various ways, to allow such crimes’ (Elakkary et al., 2014: 78). When global discourses which claim to represent accounts of women’s rights violations do not delve into specificities or commit to different naming, the very violence is legitimated and accepted in twofold frames of victimhood, further amplifying pretexts for oppression and blurs contextual legitimacy.

Politicized perspectives and collective thinking meant that ‘social religious practices and religious fundamentalism strongly predicted an increased support for honor violence, whereas individual religious practices were not significantly related to support for honor killings’ (Beller et al., 2021: 9784). The polarization between social, group tradition on one hand and the personal, independent practices linking to notions of modernity on the other hand neglects the social entanglements of each act in its causes, effects, and repetitions. The dissemination of information in contemporary times allows for a critical reflection of the perceived advances that came with modernity, for example, the definition and implementation of modernity as advanced and Western as opposed to dated and otherly. Communication has advanced rapidly while populations particularly of the non-West, the East, and the South have increased exponentially. Consequently, the spaces in between extreme politics, media and other discourses of knowledge, and the humans they frame, and between geographical, cultural, and socio-political polarizations of global and local, women and men, and modern and traditional, are cross-examined for the standpoints from which perspectives stem and for their historical and cultural implications. The critical investigation of positioning, situation, and subjective notions of modernity therefore questions how these may perpetuate binaries of gender and race, developed and developing, and the struggle between violent control and autonomy of the woman’s life as a trajectory of her own territory, which is yet to be decolonized by such discourses.

Through a feminist postcolonial analysis of the patriarchal and racial emphasis of the crimes, these codes and the means by which honor crimes are portrayed as a mere, mysterious side effect of modernity de-centers the role of patriarchal and colonial discourses and deserves therefore to be critically contested. The ‘past glories of Africa were forgotten’ (de la Mothe, 1993: 21) under the weight of slave trade, and the ravages caused by it were seen as ‘the “normal” condition of Africa and its people, not as the disaster it was to the continent’ (de la Mothe, 1993). The underlying historical patriarchal and colonial – or patri-colonial as both are entwined – struggle against all assimilated instances of violence poses the challenging question of ‘how to move away from the embedded practices of policing knowledge, how to prevent the sterilisation of knowledge (history), and instead to allow it to be emancipatory’ (Depelchin, 2005: 1). From this point of departure, this article aims to delineate abstractions to contribute to revisions of recognition of violence and murder on women’s bodies.

The information disseminated is largely abstracted and amplifies the obscurity of the matter. Research assessing whether psychological factors may be associated with the act further connect it to culture over personality effect on attitudes relating to the murder. A study argues that this may be due to the fact that the act ‘constitutes an informed decision, made with discretion, social reasons, and justifications’ (Ne’Eman, 2020: 812) and is based on ‘violence motivated and justified by patriarchal culture and maintenance of the desired social order’ (Ne’Eman, 2020: 812). This further provides generalized statements such as the following: ‘family honor and the perception of women as property are two motifs deeply rooted in the patriarchal-social-cultural basis of Arab and Muslim societies, with both men and women often supporting killing on grounds of dishonor’ (Ne’Eman, 2020: 808). In colonial times, ‘brutal force was rationalised through mental abstractions which reduced Africans to the levels of beasts of burden’ (Depelchin, 2005: 220). This calls for acts of murder and violence which are produced as cultural, regional, traditional happenings in their contextual frames to be reconsidered as decolonized, humanized, and conscious accounts which de-orient patriarchal visions and the languages rationalizing brutality in discussions of non-western women’s rights.

In the article entitled ‘Honor killing as a dark side of modernity: Prevalence, common discourses, and a critical view’ (Heydari et al., 2021), the dark side of modernity is critically deconstructed for its attribution to honor crimes. Bonding these acts of murder as a side effect of modernity dismisses the weight of the crimes and obscures the impact of modernity from different intersectional and multi-layered identities. The centric definition and root of the concept must be questioned; whether there can be a bright side to modernity if honor crimes are perpetuated by it; and whether it can be understood, in fact, as modernity at all. The codes of analysis shift from local to global patriarchal codes of defining women’s existence as symbols of societal control. Feminist theories try to ‘do justice to both complexity and instability as operational concepts in the constitution of social subjects’ (Braidotti, 2005: 178). Defining modernity is therefore nuanced and is worthy of situated investigation in terms of perspective. The concept’s connection to violence and murder inflicted on women due to patriarchal impositions may be overshadowed by claims of the murder as traditional and aged. Attribution to an age of modernity disassociates from its rootedness. Eurocentric, western-centric impositions in this way continue to frame what is deemed by scholars as irrelevant and backward in an orientalist way, which further exacerbates gaps and crimes against women. Moreover, it has been observed that the ‘quantitative growth of feminist philosophies within institutional centres as well as outside raises a qualitative question about the criteria of classification, the use of analytic categories and the canonization processes. These are key methodology and terminology issues’ (Braidotti, 2005: 177). This deconstruction challenges epistemological approaches and canons of knowledge production. Postmodernism can only be understood in relation to modernism, and the ‘dark’ side of modernity as the cause of honor crimes may be problematic in this polarizing discussion which cannot assume an absolute socio-political reality for all actors in the equation. Binaries and distinctive eras claiming to be post modern and/or colonial suggest false margins of spatial and temporal fixations, which repeat discourses of oppression while pretending to be beyond them. Racial difference highlights the Western perspective of an era with Western thought, which cannot simply be applied to another region. In this way, tensions are exacerbated for feminisms as the struggle of gender is burdened by epistemological bias between North and South and in this way the human concern is made irrelevant.

With the understanding of modernity as subjective, the polarizations and increased violence that arose with capitalism have reinforced to a large extent patriarchal discourse. Feminists work calls for an urgent appeal against this faulty association: Anyone ‘concerned with representations of Muslim women, with the lives of actual women in the Muslim world, and with the global enterprise of “saving Muslim women” needs to look hard at this category’ (Abu-Lughod, 2013: 114). The direct coupling of women as subjects of their religion(s), nations, or political stages diffuses implications that, in addition to the global arena at large, regional and non-western societies are essentially against their own women:

Given the importance of familial and societal organization for the reproduction, economic production, and survival of closely-knit groups, honor codes provide a social norm and value system to secure and control group cohesion. The transition to urban contexts has not offered a viable alternative to the micro-economic production of some communities, and it has also created conditions of systematic exclusion and stigmatization. Hence, we suggest that honor killing is ‘a dark side of modernity’. (Heydari et al., 2021: 88)

First, this may be said to be a dangerous connection as religion and modernity are not the direct or sole cause of patriarchal injustice and patriarchal codes of oppression. This injustice may be said to stem from several structurally embedded and intertwined systems between and within the local and global spheres which are neither absolute nor uniform. Cohesion, furthermore, cannot be understood as such if some actors are repressed as a requisite of ‘cohesion’. Reassessments produce a ‘transversal convergence between philosophical anti-foundationalism and feminist science studies [which] results in a post-humanist wave that radicalises the premises of postmodernist feminism’ (Braidotti, 2005: 178). Second, this assumption neglects the considerable role and endurance women assume in the region, constituting a vast segment of the population and thereby the recognition of themselves, as a crucial part of religion and modernity. Instead, this notion arguably subjects women further under these codes. Ignoring this fact reinforces double patriarchies which silence women by overlooking their situated lives, complex diversities, and agencies. Third, the attribution of violence against women to socially constructed concepts which are spatially and temporally limited confines and obscures the complexities and constructions of women’s fates, which are not focused in one location or moment in time but rather across a trajectory of political periods and ideological beliefs. It is important to include that males may also be subject to the act ‘to a lesser extent than females [. . .]. This occurs if the male is the females’ lover in an extramarital relationship, or if he is homosexual’ (Elakkary et al., 2014: 77). Modernity indeed is connected to universalism and decontextualization, arguably the overarching claims of generalizations and gaps which overlook and overshadow cultural complexities and non-western, non-male harm and pain. Attachments of the act to backwardness and exclusion from mental assessment or civilization do little to counter the socio-cultural cognition reinforcing the act or to acknowledge that these acts are not merely connected to uncivilization or barbarism. Finally, these statements remain orientalist in that women’s lives and the larceny of murder against women based on being women must be more critically assessed to understand how these markers and intersections come to be delineated and maintained.

Global frames and the recognition of women’s agency

The value and existence of a life appears only whether it is considered a life (Butler, 2009) and arguably, of the woman’s body whether it was contemplated as a claimed autonomous body in her society and global stage of humanity in the first place. The importance of expanding cognitive capacities which recognize and embrace women as citizens of the societies they inhabit is underlined. This promotes processes unlearning the codes which silence and eradicate women’s choices and lives based on male understandings of purity and honor. The argument that ‘imposing honor codes on individuals is not a matter of personal choice but of community norms and collectively shared values in communities’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 89) may be true, although the emphasis on value reiterates tradition as oppression. This may somewhat abstract the transitional capacity of each individual choice in addition to identifying the community as male, and even more dangerously, referring to males who adhere to and do not second guess such patriarchal codes. It is elaborated that honor codes and values seem to be

rooted in the sense of community of the social groups that bind them together and at the same time blind them to the arbitrariness of the honor codes and values, leading them to ignore the rights of individuals in the group. Such contextual analysis seems to be necessary to situate the violence against women in the familial, social and economic organization of the local communities. Honor codes regarding women’s sexuality and social behaviors function as a form of informal social control that maintains group cohesion, upholds an oppressive normative structure to control women’s body, sustains the reproduction and micro-economics of local communities, and secures group survival by protecting group members against the insecurity of the surrounding environment. (Heydari et al., 2021: 101)

Normative frames of recognition and apprehension are predetermined by the epistemological capacity to acknowledge a life as a life and by the same token, human suffering. Cognitive norms ‘precede and make possible the act of recognition itself’ (Butler, 2009: 5); in that ‘recognizability precedes recognition’ (Butler, 2009), dictated by power mechanisms ‘through which ontological fields are constituted’ (Butler, 2009: 7). This sequence highly shapes the recognizability of violence through the languages that depict it. Honor killings – in the act and the naming of the crime of murder which should have no rationale to be carried out – portray the value of men’s honor based on women’s suffering and unswerving dismissal if not elimination of the recognition of the woman’s value, dignity, and honor.

The specificities and causes of honor killings may be further identified as a defocus to the detrimental and long-lasting histories of the act itself and the aftermath of how it becomes portrayed and consequently, remembered or forgotten. Languages describing patriarchal impositions of violence against women are evidently framed in association with sociocultural discourses in the region and politics of the times. It is thus evident that there is an abstraction and an

[...] intersection between women’s reproductive role and the honor system, such that the honor system aims to ensure that the reproductive role is directed toward the patriarchal structure of the group as well as the group’s survival. In other words, the honor system provides a symbolic contractual framework to enforce a hierarchical relation between men and women. (Heydari et al., 2021: 98)

As such, this burden is disassociated with perspective and cognition and largely perpetuated and dismissed as a cultural happening. The way by which pain and violence are selectively communicated and attributed, as the results of codes of inferiority imposed on women, conveys the occupation of the women’s body from multiple invaders. It can also be argued that modernity, post-modernity, and post-coloniality to some extent replay and reinforce the woman’s body as a relational symbol which ranks and positions men’s power. Knowledge discourses which portray misconduct and violence against women from certain regions/ethnicities as a sociocultural norm simultaneously discount women’s lives and harms against them. Additionally, these occupy the spaces of narratives of women’s agencies in resistance to multi-layered patriarchal impositions by enforcing the idea as custom further. Individual cognition and social group processes are also a paradigm of this debate. Pain is selective of the lens from which it is seen and felt, and the perceived subject of trauma. It is therefore contingent on the sociocultural climate from which the experience occurs. The normalization of pain obscures whether an act has been considered as a crime or cast as pertaining to a certain time or space and hence presented as a happening.

Understandings of community and tradition as constituting exclusively of men and their codes further disinhibit the murder in an orientalist male-domineering fashion. The act of honor killings in this way falsely upholds the dignity and honor of a man’s name (family reputation), stealing and dispossessing the woman from her own essential being, body, choices, and life due to ignorance and claiming misinterpretations through cyclical, structural dominance. The ‘conceptualization of honor implies the men’s, and the group’s, full control over women’s physical bodies and sexuality, particularly their pre-marital virginity’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 90). Furthermore, efforts to emphasize honor crimes as a backlash to the ‘civilising mission’ perpetuate inequalities and polarizations between development and underdevelopment. Under this hypothesis, honor crimes are presented as a ‘response to modernity, such that group members remain attached to their local life as a way to maintain their community in the face of marginalization and discrimination’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 99). When seen as reverberations of development, the act is reiterated as signaling a primitive mode of societal conduct if not cultural backwardness, reiterating again the impact of patriarchal cognition and the community as male.

Commonalities between ‘new master narratives’ have shown the return of new forms of determinism ‘be it the neo-liberal or the genetic brand: the former defends the superiority of capitalism, the latter the despotic authority of the DNA. Their joint impact has caused both inflation and reification of the notion of ‘difference’’ (Braidotti, 2005: 169). There is therefore a continued illusion of choice in the way people come to self-identify and identify others, in addition to the individual’s life choice, needs, and wants. This connects to capitalism and biological essence, in addition to reinforcing more patriarchal modes of operating in the system while socio-economic and political gaps widen. For there to be masters there must therefore be inferiors to be ruled over. This paradigm reinforces binaries of difference, male and Western egos in power affirmations and women and non-Western people conceived with notions of lack, incompetence, and ‘complimentary’ gender politics.

Replacing and shifting blame to large generalizations blurs the perspective of modernity, understood ‘in terms of the Enlightenment project, according to which autonomy and rationality are the ultimate aims of human progress’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 99). This view may be argued to be orientalist in that progress and universalism are deemed as the standard from a western-centric perspective, which fundamentally defines itself against a backward ‘other’ according to its own moral principles and driven by its contrasts. It is important to note that honor crimes were ‘frequent in ancient Rome, the cradle of “Western civilization”’ (Elakkary et al., 2014: 78) and are hence not restricted to the non-western regions. It is inferred that the

reassertion of differences introduces structural patterns of mutual exclusion at the national, regional, provincial or even more local level. These master narratives are not ‘new’ in any historical or theoretical sense, but they have gained a renewal of interest and a new momentum in the present context, under the combined impact of the new technologies and the triumph of the market economy. (Braidotti, 2005: 169)

Conceptual literacy is a ‘recognition that debate and contestation impact on the development of a field of study, on the production of different forms of knowledge and on changing the language of theory and research’ (Hughes, 2009: 10), each shaping what is ‘viewed as the necessary politics of that field’ (Hughes, 2009). The knowledge and information which is disseminated, and how it is shared, is chosen according to epistemological perspective and intention. Countering the hierarchization binary: deconstruction is ‘concerned to illustrate how language is used to frame meaning’ (Hughes, 2009: 19). Misconceptions are widely reproduced; posing an epistemological wrongdoing of double patriarchal representations on the being of the non-western woman, in depicting her suffering which detaches her from her own narrative, story, and body, and additionally, from the act of violence. The way in which human rights atrocities are projected to the Western reading public reinforces ideas of the other as a singular barbaric entity rather than addresses the act as criminal, femicide, aggressive patriarchal violence, and a cruel unfathomable absurdity. Global discourses of media and academia must be a platform for action against such acts as powerful potential spaces for pressure and influence in the reframing of knowledge and the reshaping of blasé attitudes to its happening. This may be evident as a cycle of blame shifting from the local to global governance and societal markers of order:

Systematic exclusion of individuals and groups based on a modern individualistic value system, on the one hand, and the systematic marginalization based on procedural and distributive state justice, on the other, produces a condition which leads groups to rely on honor codes and traditional form of control to find certainty and security. (Heydari et al., 2021: 100)

Feminist scholarship is the political ‘mode of intervention into particular hegemonic discourses’ (Mohanty, 1984: 334), which seeks to deconstruct the production of ‘woman’ as a cultural and ideological composite other, and challenges recognitions of group based on male discourses and actors of codes, honor, tradition, and modernity. Feminist scholarship is constructed through ‘diverse representational discourses [. . .] – and women – real, material subjects of their collective histories’ (Mohanty, 1984). Private and public boundary markers on women’s lives and bodies may be patriarchal structures which reproduce themselves. The ‘definition of household and kin-based controls over women as “private” presupposes the existence of a central state apparatus that subordinates such entities to its own political ends’ (Kandiyoti, 1991: 46), as well as foreign boundary-marker impositions. The frictions brought with modernity emphasized and de-shifted the lens from the locally oppressed to the globally emancipated contrasting images, all the while subjecting women under these patriarchal and colonial symbols and double markers. As Braidotti (2005) observes, ‘human bodies caught in the spinning machine of multiple differences at the end of postmodernity become simultaneously disposable commodities to be vampirized and also decisive agents for political and ethical transformation’ (Braidotti, 2005: 171). Modes of subordination are in this way not linear and are continuously renewed and presented as new political ideologies or eras. Neoliberal post-feminism proposes,

in such a political context, gender politics is dislocated. In institutional settings, feminist activism is replaced by the less confrontational policy of gender mainstreaming. In society at large, the ‘post-feminist’ wave gives way to neo-conservatism in gender relations. The new generations of corporate-minded businesswomen and show-business icons disavow any debt or allegiance to the collective struggles of the rest of their gender while the differences in status, access and entitlement among women are increasing proportionally. Even in the so-called advanced world, women are the losers of the current technological revolutions. (Braidotti, 2005: 171)

Women are the symbol of capitalist and patriarchal honor codes at multi-layered contexts and are thus victimized several times as women, through the moment of the act, the terror preceding it, and again beyond their assassination, in the narrative of murder and bodily invasion which does not refer to the crime using this wording. In a ‘context of racism and xenophobia, this type of gender politics results in mutual and respective claims about authentic and unitary female identity on the part of the ‘liberated’ West and of its allegedly traditionalist opponents. They are mirror images of each other (Braidotti, 2005: 173). Frames of victimization of all the women represented in the region are portrayed in every crime of (dis)honor and genital mutilation, killing, and cutting by close family members and by their own society, what should be the closest unit of protection. Women are further victimized when generalized as African, Arab, or ‘third worldly’, of a culture that would not only not protect her life but endanger it and thereby delude and take hostage of the concept of honor. To ignore the crime in such an instance of vulnerability and injustice or seek to justify it based on societal patriarchal codes dismisses it as non-modern. This does not allow a closer look at the individualistic narrative of each situation or to develop dialogue between women from different racial and economic entitlements; women’s lives rather remain confined to a statistic or marginalized as a side story to the main body of political agency, similar to the focus on restoration of honor, and the understanding of honor as belonging to men. The languages which seek to justify or explain acts of violence dispossess justice for the woman in these manipulations of honor, women’s claims to their bodies, and continuous orientalist discourses in frames of international human rights rhetoric.

Global solidarity must commit to efforts which recognize the complexities of such acts and their naming to support the Arab women’s right to claim ownership over their own realities and bodies, to be perceived as complete beings despite – and perhaps in view – of the fact they are living within patriarchal regions and are subjected by patriarchies outside of it, which also claim to define and divide them. Many women from the South are active agents in rejecting the mechanisms which objectify them, empowering themselves as whole. Women endure and resist the forces of patri-colonial discourse and barriers within it. Education is crucial in the support of consciousness and legal protection of their women’s rights. It is argued that

highly educated families might not feel the need to restore their honor as strongly, simply because their social status in the community might depend more strongly on their educational and economic achievements rather than the norm-conforming behavior of individual family members. (Beller et al., 2021: 9782)

This reiterates education and the process of othering based on socioeconomic means and implies disempowerment to those from lesser socioeconomic backgrounds.

Honor, within these interwoven webs, is perceived as property of men while the woman’s body and purity are mere symbols of upkeeping it. Male honor, which is ‘upheld due to aib (shame) of the women’s lack of purity’ (Odeh, 2010: 917), is reclaimed as of their own, to de-stigmatize constant productions of shame on the woman’s body and being and honor as for the male to preserve. This is not a new or a single act but a process in which women are actively partaking for decades in the human rights discussion, declaring that women cannot continue to be regarded as culturally distant and abstracted, even from their own sites of existence, their societies and crucially, their bodies, and must be recognized as physical and conscious beings autonomous from societal wrongs. Supposed claims on women’s bodily purity are associated with men’s honor in aged tradition. A woman from a very traditional and conservative family was expected to prove her virginity in blood on the night of marriage and display it to the family, who is sometimes present during the act, or nearby with other village spectators, awaiting celebration of the male-headed and named family’s honor (or dishonor and shame should there not be blood). The patriarchal narrative ‘demands, under the sanction of social penalty, that the performance of femaleness styles the body that is called female as virginal’ (Odeh, 2010: 917). The woman’s emotions during this moment are disregarded and the intrusive pressure is also an instance of claiming ownership of the woman’s body and purity and shame used as a signifier of honor or dishonor to the man.

Honor is a thing of the woman, as is her body, her virginity and sexuality, and her notions of purity. While it does not result in her death, it is a vivid example of her blood in theatrical dispossession of her. The absence of blood results in her being taken back to her family to kill her due to shame, inflicting psychological images of violence which underline the need to question the very languages used in these instances and particularize their variances, causes, and resistances. The hymen ‘acquires the double function of being both a mark of virginity and of delineating the boundaries of the body that is called female’ (Odeh, 2010: 917). It is preserved for the male’s pride and claim, and ‘distinguishes it from the male body, since the latter can bear no such mark of virginity’ (Odeh, 2010) and yet cements it at the objectified expense of women.

The act of killing a woman, no matter the reason, is a murderous crime. This act is one that has existed across cultures, outside the region as well, but perhaps across most conservative, traditional societies, in different geographical scales and under different names. Connotations to dominant ideologies, religion, and new eras may therefore further stigmatize the way the term is used, understood as connected to certain peoples and societies and documented. Sociological, political, and legal action must be taken to deconstruct the words honor killings for their lack of sanity, inexcusable justification, and social inaction, if not perpetuation of the act. Patriarchal connotations are further reinforced: the man ‘who kills his sister to defend his honor epitomizes in a dramatic way, through his act, the performance of his gender’ (Odeh, 2010: 919). This must be deconstructed by epitomizing women as the highest authority and voice for their claimed autonomy on their own bodies. The juxtaposed name (there is no honor in killing or assuming possession over any human life) reflects the contradictions by which it is communicated, as a ritual of barbaric practices. This naturalizes the killings as merely sparking enigma, then distress, to end in utter dismissal of a separate world. The acts are labeled as honor killings but should rather be resisted for their dishonor, their horror and as crimes against humanity to recognize languages of activists, intellectuals, and feminists which strongly condemn connections to religion.

The double violence is produced in such representations and depictions of human rights violations – linking to Said (1978: 1), that ‘perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something in stake in the process’. The irrelevance of the Arab concern and African and Arab women’s resistance undermines these struggles and their agencies by neglecting atrocities and defining them as pertinent to that region and those people. To relate such violence to culture or religion limits its conversation, as if forgetting that women’s suffering, and violence and death at the hands of men occurs beyond the Arab culture and under different naming and systems. Depending on geopolitical location, select stories, situations, and descriptions individualizing the murder as personal, emotional, or of the attacker being under the influence; when reported, languages and depictions are selectively given great care in details and specificities. The differential way by which crimes are archived, handled, and accounted evokes disparate feelings of recognition, value, compassion toward the victim’s death, and her justice beyond her death: ‘cultures cannot simply displace or undermine each other’ (Abu-Lughod, 1998: 263). Atrocities toward women in the Arab region are largely defined using a different grammar, describing invasive methods of condemning women’s sexuality and bodily integrity and re-blurring hypocrisies between private and public issues. Detachments of the woman’s body even in the way the violations are reported arguably additionally impose acts of domination on her being and after the taking of her life.

The very name, honor killings apropos the exoticized other, appears to be anthropological, paradoxical, and detached from the ritual of sacrifice, which is of no self-will, nor depicted as a sacrifice nevertheless in affiliation to the woman but rather as a glorified act of protection of male honor. The loss is magnified when it is neither contested nor empathized with from its situation and arbitrarily receives instances of global attention only to reproduce the frames in which it is falsely justified. The framing alienation feeds polarized dichotomies between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and dismisses the act as peripheral to and distant from the civilized global sphere.

Obscurities in frames do no justice to the woman’s story and the rest of the women when depicting what stands for her life and the violent taking of her life against her will. It explains the act as if definitive; and detached from the woman, further exacerbating non-recognition of the woman’s perspective by turning the conversation to the shock value of male honor and barbarism through double patriarchal, blatant moral superiority, and systems of other-ing which continue to refer to the murderous act as one of honor. The projection of this act of murder as honor killings – honor in single form due to the perception of wholeness of man’s honor and singular focus exclusively on the male’s concern in the act, and killings in plural as if never-ending, fragmented yet prevalent – sentences the subject and dismisses the killing. This further objectifies women to violence and international acceptance of a false pretext they are fighting within and against.

Discourses are shaped through representations of the violent tradition and the implications these may have on the languages used in sequential frames when claiming to portray the Arab, African other, women and human rights in the region. The Guardian’s article on female genital mutilation (FGM) entitled ‘FGM: number of victims found to be 70 million higher than thought’ was analyzed for the languages it used to represent non-western women victims of FGM and narratives of violence. The wording of barbaric and ritual is followed by a large photo portraying the hands of a woman in Kenya showing the ‘razorblade she uses to cut girls’ genitals’ (Elgot, 2016) – followed by the name of the photographer rather than the name of the woman or her face.

The space between the viewer, the global community, and the losable life is what reinforces the tragedy or rather the indifference of its lose-ability. To know a name, a history, to see the faces and names of people, their families, their reactions, and their aborted ambitions, is to relate to them, value, and empathize with their situated reality and lives. By refraining from using names and personal stories, not only does the global community treat lives and grieving of life differently, but through its distancing framework has, in fact, given its own names to the subject in the frame, if not reduced them to mere discrepant and vast statistics. Such reportage seems to disqualify the symbols of tradition and ‘entire cultures or communities’ (Abu-Lughod, 2013: 114) as what is severely stigmatized, rather than articulated, located ‘particular acts of violence’ (Abu-Lughod, 2013). FGM studies in numerous international and Western criteria of surveying and statistical data depict the act as barbaric and as prevalent in African and Arab societies. Her disembodiment, only seeing her open palms and the violence of the razor, disconnects us from a face, or a full human body and the repetition of the word ‘cut’ expresses vivid violence in a mechanical and detached way. The vast numbers impersonalize and generalize the region – stating that Indonesia, Egypt, and Ethiopia ‘account for half of all FGM victims worldwide’ (Elgot, 2016).

Cultural relativism is somewhat evident in selective media attention which creates shock or perpetuates apathy toward violence against particular groups of women. It may be debated that when a woman is killed or mutilated in the countries of the global North by Europeans, the act is highly individualized, labeled as psychosis on the male part, as a case of domestic violence, and a disturbed person committing murder or assault.

Due to its occurrence in the field of the non-European other, it is produced and thus understood as a cultural act, a ritual, and banished as such. Discourses provoking horror at the region, hate, and violent connotations to religion are reproduced in addition to silencing the resistance and internal general disagreement condemning violence against women and femicide. Nawal El-Saadawi describes the traumatic memories of her experience of FGM as a child in vivid description and is one voice of many silenced records which unlike hers remain unknown and reported as mere statistics with external authorities on them if and when documented at all. She portrays the brutal sense of loss of a woman from her own body after the extreme pain and no explanation; she saw a ‘red pool of blood’ around her hips, and writes decades later from her point of authorship and personal experience:

I did not know what they had cut off from my body, and I did not try to find out. I just wept, and called out to my mother for help. But the worst shock of all was when I looked around and found her standing by my side. Yes, it was her, I could not be mistaken, in flesh and blood, right in the midst of these strangers, talking to them and smiling at them, as though they had not participated in slaughtering her daughter just a few minutes ago. (Saadawi, 2007: 13)

She goes on to describe how afterwards the same atrocity happened to her sister, and unlike many how she has been able to write about her experience and mobilize others in the international arena to condemn FGM. Saadawi condemns the way FGM is depicted as normal, by personalizing the assault as closely as possible while self-distancing from the act in that as a young girl she did not comprehend exactly what is happening, rather focusing on illustrating the vividness of the pain and shock which persists in her memory. She situates herself by describing the raw cruelty of the fact that her own mother who was relatively educated, and more surprisingly, a woman too, let alone her own mother, symbolically the utmost bearer of care and protection, believed it to be a regular procedure. This conveys the lack of awareness of the custom on a very personal level, after graphic depiction of the violence and bloodshed, the female figure of safety she was seeking was right there knowingly subscribing to her own torture. Such accounts show the controversy of the act and the need for spaces condemning it through eloquent firsthand accounts of it as torture, rather than legitimizing it further, in its regional and international representations and as mere statistics which are detached from the women’s pain, essence, and body. FGM in this vivid description reiterates the voids of honor killing; as no woman can speak of her experience of her own murder. FGM is an honor crime and while it cannot be directly compared to honor killings, it is also regarded as a violent crime and essentially a painful theft from the woman’s life, sexuality and body, which unlike the latter can produce firsthand accounts of women’s narratives even when continuing to live; a part is ripped away from her. The misconceptions recounting the crime and cutting of sexuality numb out the voice of the woman herself, which feeds further patriarchies in describing its reoccurrences and burdens women to explain the unexplainable act, whether they have undergone it, and incomparably further burdens the women who have. The naming even of honor-based abuse and violence obscures the woman’s perspective. Women’s agency across socio-political and cultural terrains must be therefore recognized as fluid rather than confined. Fear, graphic violence, and the recounting of these narratives curtails to some extent the strong emergence of a transnational feminist resistance condemning and rejecting patriarchies which reproduce violence and fracture feminisms particularly visible in media and political landscapes.

In falling outside of the frame which the norm is reproduced from, the subject is not recognized, for what is framed becomes the ‘viewer’s inevitable conclusion’ (Butler, 2009: 8), which may evidently endorse further disregard to women’s humanity when she is framed and also when she is not. This ignorance, to be contested, cannot be dismissed as religion or culture. Namings such as ‘honor crimes’ and ‘FGM’ reinforce their dissonance, the disempowerment of women’s agency and choice – by focusing on men’s honor and classifying it as a ‘female’ procedure as if honor-based abuse and violence against women were a medical norm of the land. Grouping such horrific acts into happenings seems more conventional than shocking – and does not focus enough attention on internal struggles, complexities, and socio-political factors affecting the crime, its prevalence, and resistances. While these acts objectify women as a product of ownership to her family and society, and ambiguously claim fixed reason and difference, similarly to modernity and post-coloniality, the communication and narration of these acts further amplify injustices as to her feelings and her story before, during, and after brutal acts of violence against her if she can live to tell the story.

Any act of murder or bodily occupation over another human life must never in any way be understood as negligible or dismissible to culture in a racial pretext by global discourse in media reports, international assemblies, courts of justice, and other spaces of influence and global solidarity. In this mere connection and difference in language, the victims of such crimes are denied the sense of a shared solidarity in grief and tragedy across borders. This denial in the recounting of crimes charges currents of further objectification under similar dominant apparatus to the ones which took their lives. A woman’s existence, body, and narrative were not considered her own to begin with, and the global arena instead perceives massacre and bloodshed of women in the name of culture in the projected abstract, distant Orient thus perpetuating collective apathy. The victim’s tragedy is not recognized or claimed in collective human or feminist solidarity, but instead stolen from her to build a political and social fear of particular religions and to consolidate patri-colonial discourses through rejection of Arab women’s rights to their own bodies and lives. Abstracted stories of estrangement recounting that women’s own families and society chose to mutilate or kill them due to purity and honor feed the image of the Arab as a monster. Impersonalization through graphic public exposures of the private portray the image of the Arab woman as victim while living abstractedly, being murdered and after death, subject to the Arab man, who is conveyed as the underdeveloped aggressor in discourses which may be argued to be maintaining the echoes of injustice in language and knowledge apparatus.

Discussion: Orientalist (mis)representations and feminist resistance

Facing several barriers to access knowledge and its production, women activists and scholars from the South to a large extent undergo further critique not just as women, from the South, but more so when they actively engage in, articulate, and claim their emancipation. Critique and the burden faced is not dichotomous but a minefield of complicated, intricate frameworks and languages to use, to avoid, to justify, and to defend themselves for their actions before they have begun to first have the space to articulate themselves and, second, to be heard. It may be questioned

why European thinkers have been credited for being self-critical in their attempts to overcome arbitrary and theological regimes, while Egyptians are easily discredited by notions of ‘aping the West’ – not only by European and North American scholars, but also by Egyptian intellectuals. (Al-Ali, 2000: 27)

Rather than displacement, some women seek to position themselves not between the dichotomies or within them, but rather in ‘value systems and political struggles that are not necessarily framed by the “West” as “the other”’ (Al-Ali, 2000: 33) to escape apparatuses of oppression.

From being excessively framed and coming to see ourselves beyond various frames, women from the South when defending women’s rights become very conscious of framing and not committing the same destructive generalizations from several sides when discussing foreign feminisms and Western discourses. Women are non-homogeneous and whole in their individuality. Fragmentation mutes nuances and inhibits dialogue and solidarity across differences. This recognition enhances efforts toward authenticity without abandoning non-secular beliefs. It rather dissects and re-fragments what divides Black, Arab, Middle Eastern, African, Latinx, and Asian women and the systematic orientation of their lives on more than one front. Accordingly, misrepresentations are not confined as produced solely from Eurocentric productions. Saadawi (1999: 6) states, ‘I was proud of my country despite the almost constant alienation I felt towards the society in which I lived’, revealing the dichotomous conflict between nationalism, roots, and a misplaced affiliation in a woman’s own nation. Patriarchy is prevalently felt and yet concealed within languages used to frame women’s rights, as not of the woman but rather concerning humanizing argumentations,

they conceal the gender oppression of women behind brave words about human rights or the human being, distinguish between the liberation of our country and the liberation of women who are half of society, apply the norms and values created by the class patriarchal system and their signifiers in both spoken and written language. (Saadawi, 1999: 10)

This dissonance reproduces and internalizes feelings of contradiction and shame rooted in presenting the feminine being as autonomous. Women’s public action is concerned with not existing solely for man, for children, or for the home, but as sovereign of her life choices and relationships. Dissonances hinder some women to concealment even of their own identity, body, and presence in the public sphere and in her immediate surroundings. International understandings of choice are said to be ‘entwined with the individualism, rights and freedoms of liberalism’ (Hughes, 2009: 83), dangerously associating human agency as a liberal concept. Choice is often structured by its languages which limit the scope of horizon, therefore underlining the significance of reassessments of definitions of women’s agency and their situational set of choices. Challenging the concept of choice and its patriarchal structures examines alternative re-articulations of the self within and outside the schemas which produce and influence it. The self-determination of selection considering contexts outside liberalist schemas explores the apparatus of choice.

Choice may also be prevalent between a fine line of resistance: on one hand, bravery despite the threat of danger, speak, or self-censor; on the other hand, choice may indicate the safe spaces of speaking for another society and therefore not self-risking as correspondingly as the ones speaking for their own claimed realities. In this case and some other illusions of choice, liberal concepts may to a high extent style ambiguous states of fear and dim the underlying reasons for them. Self-censorship is a choice restrained by its political and social context. At the same time, it may be construed to empower women as a protective blanket for their lives and thriving careers and activism, rather than seen as an oppressed unassertiveness or lack of power to select, when it is a choice from its contextual standpoint.

De-orienting the constructed ‘third world’ woman is hence driven by diversified, non-monolithic production in women’s scholarship, recognizing and resisting all patriarchies misrepresenting and limiting shared exchange within spaces of knowledge production. The crossing of ‘historical boundaries that have separated the academy from the world’ (Amadiume and Na’im, 2000: 1) concerning non-western people and women in academic and non-academic realms is considered ‘crucial to the success of a transformative cross-cultural discourse on the politics of memory’ (Amadiume and Na’im, 2000) and women’s epistemologies in human rights. The journey of making connections between my own sociocultural origin, the diversities within it, my comparative identities outside of the region, and how to comprehend these formed my understanding of my own delineations to compliance and resistance. Different perspectives emphasize the discernment that being home and being away are two spaces which are not so rigidly set apart, and across these borders, women are not either. To feel that would impose more minorities of living on identity, in socio-political bureaucracy and barriers, than to traverse terrains across these vast identifications based on numbers and perceptions rather than intrinsic belief in common humanity. More differences can be said to be found within misinterpretations and segregations of societies, and between women and men in discourses of representation than across international spheres and boundaries of distinction.

Rather than further silencing, blame-shifting, and censoring, women and men condemning the act should be highly regarded in the discourses and in their critique. It has been clearly elaborated that ‘when the state and its authorities fail to provide security and welfare for society members, different communities rely on their own methods of survival and social informal control’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 102). These vital concepts inform women’s networks and the recognition of women’s rights by the state and civil society, instead of merely shifting blame between tradition and sexism which may ‘backfire since it might stigmatize groups further and hence increase reliance on social informal control through traditional codes of honor’ (Heydari et al., 2021: 102). Furthermore, transferring blame and the conflicting tensions that arise from this perpetuate harm toward women rather than deconstructing the crime as essentially unjustified, criminal, and flawed. The occupation of bodies is repeatedly epistemologically suffocated through patri-colonial reiterations of the acts. These must be scrutinized for the multi-layered structures of domination and oppression they employ between regions, genders, and state and society. Patri-colonial discourses also do not address the double if not triple claims made on the woman’s body and rights in her own individual social reality but may impose more claims of ownership on her by focusing on the phenomenon rather than stopping it. Preoccupations with identity should be more in depth than reduced to physical attributes or to oppression and pain, such as that one does not look like a certain ethnicity or if and to what extent of violence or victimization a woman has undergone. This orientalist gaze reduces articulations to materialistic molds, as to what the woman is wearing, and not wearing, and why, and bodily anatomy as to what this woman endured, did not endure, and why not. Simplicity and apathy to violence is reduction at the expense of the women who do not have a chance to explain themselves, to be heard, and are not here to tell the story of their murders. Deflection of blame, patterns of fixed categorization, and selective recognition are forms of apathy to violence which cannot be justified.

Both colonial and nationalist structures continue to impose an other-ing lens in their fixed frames of identity and power to define from a perceived superior lens of exclusion: ‘demarcation of the “self” and “other” that had been at the heart of the colonial encounter needed to be carried on for the nation to be secure in its borders’ (Rai, 2008: 23). These discourses bypass if not somehow internalize their own affairs on women’s rights, its own vast complexities, and social and ethnic differences. Exclusions and forced identities continuously define postcolonial societies. Historical and contemporary definitions form discourses of political memory and identity:

The nation – imagined as well as imaged, remembered as well as forgotten, traditional as well as modern – was to be built through the efforts of mobilized ‘masses’ led by nationalist elites imbued with a vision of the reclaiming of a glorious, if vanished, past. (Rai, 2008: 23)

This impels interrogations of women’s access to legitimacy and deconstructions of both patri-colonial and nationalist schemas of recognition in contemporary women’s rights discourse. Ahmed (1992: 166) delineates, the ‘resistance narrative contested the colonial thesis by inverting it – thereby also, ironically, grounding itself in the premises of the colonial thesis’. The subordination of women’s rights under the dynamics of misrepresentation and the burdens of the colonial past persist in contemporary times and are somewhat confined through the dichotomies and boundaries of speech and access to knowledge which are present in the discussion. Post implies an absolute end to the preceding period and a new era following it, which is problematic on many levels. First, this vainly erases the colonial past which persists in socio-cultural domains. Second, it repeats the colonial and the modern. This, therefore, finally reinforces a dissonance and binary which do not deconstruct the realities but perpetuate injustices as these terms are created and used by Western sources and thus cannot define the non-west or be used as a tool for labeling racial or gendered injustices while reinforcing these.

Critical efforts in knowledge production require close analysis and representation for the

need to stand outside these struggles, writing the history of feminism [. . .] with an awareness of its multifaceted nature, historical stages, and complex intertwinement with the West while regarding the claims of the Islamists to cultural authenticity or counter-modernity with healthy suspicion. (Abu-Lughod, 1998: 264)

The intersections and markers of polarization propose border crossing – Du Bois’ ‘double vision’ – which opens the ‘field of vision without being expansionist; it includes without consuming; it appreciates without appropriating; and it seeks to temper politics with ethics’ (Henderson, 1995: 27) to counter extreme dichotomies, tensions, and doctrines of exclusion, silencing, control, and invisibility. Efforts to create a space free from binaries reveal what is in between, the complexities and details which are otherwise highly ignored, whether intentionally or due to histories of neutralizing abuse, and male control of legal, political, and social knowledge canons. It may be inquired whether the ‘body in race [is] subject or object, or is it more dangerously an objectification of a methodology that aims for radical subjectivity?’ (Suleri, 1992: 760). This outlines the dilemmas of epistemology and identity in researching and defending women’s rights in the region and for women from the South in European countries and the West. The claim to authenticity, political and social consciousness, and responsibility of scientific critical research deliberates my intentional commitment to address and circumvent the same crimes which subject women within a frame. Frames of speaking for, measuring, misunderstanding, and disregarding, emphasize alternatively the significance and necessity of sites of listening to. In her language and without the epistemological injustice of confining frames and alleged regulations on veiling and unveiling, each active woman eloquently speaks against human rights violations and advances against them.