Beyond Destruction: Violence as Productive and Gendered Labor

• In Event: Feminism and Politics

Abstract

Policymakers agree that skyrocketing levels of criminal violence in the Global South threaten to destroy liberal systems of governance that ensure human security, free markets, and the rule of law. These policy visions of organized violence as fundamentally destructive echo widespread assumptions in political science that reify violence as a force of disruption (Wilcox 2015; Winter 2018). This paper contests the conventional picture that equates illicit lethal force merely with the destruction of socio-political life. Without disputing the horrors experienced by those victimized, it argues that organized violence should be studied as labor—as violence work—to better grasp how it not only destroys but brings new political subjects and economic relations into being. It shows how, like licit work, which produces economic goods and a sense of identification, illicit lethal force also generates income and identities that are bound up with gendered and racialized forms of exploitation. This argument is grounded in a 13-month ethnography of transnational gang violence in Central America that— through the perspectives of MS-13 and Barrio 18 women gang members and affiliates—examines how gang violence produces alternative orders of belonging and welfare for socio-economically excluded groups in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

The paper develops the conceptualization of organized violence as a type of work by building on a Marxist feminist tradition that has argued in favor of seeing invisibilized care work, sex work, and housework as work (Federici 1976; Weeks 2011). Like feminist political economists, my intention is to move us towards a structural analysis that analyzes the politico-economic entanglements and productive capacities of violence. Instead of focusing on the “violence” part—the injuries that invoke our moral repugnance—the paper suggests that we focus on “work” and the social worlds it brings into view. In doing so, we can make visible neglected sites of value production as locations where violence can and must be refused. Moreover, in exposing the productivity of violence we can summon the counterpowers of those who do and sustain the work of violence—a potential source of power that can be harnessed for the construction of less injurious futures.

Author

• María Méndez Gutiérrez, University of Toronto