This book offers a genealogical approach to honor crime discourses, focusing on their dominant articulations and expressions. It does this by attending to past and contemporary historical formations of these discourses, tracing their emergence, circulations, and travels in multiple texts and contexts. Thus, Gen-der Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime moves between histories, places, and spaces, seeking to unsettle what we know about the dominant honor crime discourses and their workings. By mapping these dis-courses and their appearances in specific historical, geographical, and politi-cal conjunctures, the following chapters “explore the geographies of public
and private that shape power relations, that give meaning to difference, and that condition the political” (Staeheli and Kofman, 2004, 10). The chapters are organized around an examination of the ideological, institutional, and geo-political underpinnings of the honor crime and its geo-political uses. This organi-zation moves between and through different contexts to present the distinct and (sometimes) overlapping ways in which honor crime discourses appear to work in each of the sites discussed here. In the chapters that follow, I trace the appearance of these discourses in public and popular works and explore the material, political, and economic conditions that allow for their continued acceptance and circulation. I do this by attending to the larger complex of vio-lence in which gender viovio-lence is enacted and confronted.
In chapter 1, I explore how the story of a gender violence and femicide that occurred in Canada traveled to the US and then to Israel, to show how honor- related violence is depicted in media and the types of activism that it generates and helps mobilize. While much has been written about Aqsa Parvez and the story of her violent murder through its coverage in the Cana-dian press, considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which this murder resonated far beyond the borders of the Canadian state. This chapter thus traces the travels of the narrative of Aqsa Parvez’s murder from Canada to the US and then to Israel to show not only how stories of violence gain meaning but also how they make meaning by reproducing national bound-aries and by reconfiguring relations of dominance, resistance, and power. By charting the transnational routes of gender violence as they are exemplified in the Aqsa Parvez murder and the narratives or stories it generated and the right- wing activism it mobilized, I make connections between the discursive and political configurations of this crime. In mapping these stories’ move-ments and travels, as well as their tensions and contradictions, I show how the murder of (certain) Muslim women in crimes that become known as “honor crimes” is interpreted and deployed transnationally and in a number of inter-connected geopolitical sites and registers. I argue that the production and commemoration of the honor crime as an exceptional violence authorizes posthumous solidarities that serve to buttress right- wing forms of political activism.
In chapter 2, I provide an analysis of the context of gender violence in Pal-estine, mapping the complicated contours of confrontations of gender violence in colonized contexts and their centrality to articulations of national sover-eignty and sites of governmentality. In this chapter, I focus, in part, on the release in 2012 of the song “If I Could Go Back in Time” by the hip- hop group DAM. I analyze DAM’s contestations of gender violence and the honor crime in the form of their popular and UN- funded song, placing this song and the controversies stirred by its release within their national and regional
specifici-ties and a wider discussion of the politics of speaking about gender violence in national and international contexts. That the ensuing debates between the art-ists, academics, and activists shifted to the question of authenticity prompts a careful consideration of positionality and accountability as central to feminist ethics and contestations of gender violence. This analysis charts the fault lines between activist and academic critiques of gender violence.
In chapter 3, I trace recent US government interest in honor- related vio-lence as exemplified in President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13769. I argue that this interest is neither new nor coincidental, placing it in a longer historical context attuned to the imbrications between gender violence and terrorism in American discourses far before the issuance of this order. This chapter examines constructions of the honor crime in public discourses in the US and draws on the story of the murder of Tina Isa, an American teenager of Palestinian and Brazilian origins, who was killed in 1989 by her parents in St. Louis, Missouri. By reading this story and its public framings in rela-tion to recent government interest in documenting honor- related violence and regulating US borders, I explore the messy racial politics underpinning national and public discourses on gender violence. This chapter analyzes the various political national and transnational registers that are often concealed, downplayed, or suppressed in public framings of gender violence in the US and their entanglement in debates around borders, migration, belonging, and citizenship.
In chapter 4, I turn to the Jordanian state and contemporary efforts to end gender violence by confronting the legal codes that are used to prosecute gender violence, including the honor crime and crime of rape. I explore how the law has become a prime site of analysis and critique in women’s efforts to counter gender violence in Jordan. I argue that the state’s investment in coun-tering gender violence, and the legal codes long believed to sanction honor- related violence, enables the Jordanian state to simultaneously position itself as a modern state that upholds the rule of law while bolstering its criminal and carceral systems and frameworks. Here I show how developing nation- states employ efforts to end highly spectacularized forms of gender violence such as the honor crime to reconstitute themselves as modern nation- states committed to women’s equality and empowerment. Rather than focus only on the state’s capacity to utilize such discourse, I examine what is gained and lost when women’s organizational efforts to end gender violence become aligned with the state in the service of justice that is wedded to the legal and juridical domains.
In the afterword, I connect the four geopolitical contexts that this book engages by investigating how honor crime discourses, operating differently across and between these sites, binds such distinct geographies and what the
crime’s contestations reveal about the current contours of the global fight against gender violence. In ending this book, I turn to the activist efforts of the Palestinian Tal3at movement and their contestations of rising incidences of gender violence in Palestine. I center their efforts as an example of transna-tional feminist praxis that attends to the complicated and messy intersections of violence in people’s lives. Ultimately, Gender Violence and the Transnational Politics of the Honor Crime is a work about the power of rhetorics, discourse, and politics to shape antiviolence agendas and practices. It is a study of how this language came to be and of how and why it appears and is used in differ-ent spaces and places. It provides a critique of the mobilization of dominant honor crime discourses for state- building projects that work to cause harm and fortify the status quo. An analysis of this language and its working in mul-tiple sites provides an alternative understanding of gender violence that may help us imagine different, more long- term, and sustainable strategies against its devastating and deadly effects on transnational communities across mul-tiple borders and boundaries.
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