Violence in Everyday Life: Power, Gender and Sexuality

Violence in Everyday Life explores how identity markers such as gender and sexuality intersect with violence, synthesizing the themes of gender, sexuality and violence to offering a crucial and coherent framework for understanding the interrelationship between these concepts. Aliraza Javaid explores how violence is experienced at a local, regional and global level, and considers the ways in which hegemonic masculinities are reproduced through violence. Attention is given to the particular ways in which these constructions of masculinity are reflected in areas such as homophobic violence, transphobic violence, and violence against intimate partners. Drawing on new empirical data and his own personal experiences of violence, as well as identifying new areas for further research, Javaid’s work represents a unique study of the interconnectedness of violence, gender and sexuality, and of how violence is fuelled by society’s attitudes towards masculinity.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Contextualizing and Understanding Masculinities and Sexualities 2. Unspeakable Acts: Sexual Violence Against Men and Women 3. Murder and Evil 4. Homophobic Violence 5. Love as Violence: Intimate Partner Violence 6. Transphobic Violence: The Fear of the ‘Other’ 7. Global Violence 8. Secrets Untold: Tales of Violence Conclusion References

About the Author :
Aliraza Javaid is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of East London, UK. His research interests are gender, sexualities, masculinities, police and policing, sexual violence, the sociology of ‘evil’, and the sociology of love. He is the author of Male Rape, Masculinities, and Sexualities: Understanding, Policing, and Overcoming Male Sexual Victimisation (2018) and Masculinities, Sexualities, and Love (2018).

Review :
It is a truism in criminology that violence and its consequences cannot be understood outside the prisms of gender and sexuality. By making these fundamental starting points, Javaid provides an analysis that is perceptive, empathic and reflexive. A thought-provoking introduction for students and teachers. At last, the book that brings to light how both hegemonic masculinities and heteronormativity impacts all facets of everyday violence—from rape and sexual assault, to murder, to homophobic and transphobic violence, to violence in the global South. The book is clearly written, intellectually meticulous, and wide-ranging. Should be required reading for all scholars of violence! The intersecting worlds of sexuality and gender offer potent sites for the generation of conflicting emotions: pleasure and danger, love and hate, dominance and submission, desire and fear. It is not surprising that violence can tear across these feelings and shape and disfigure so many lives. This book delves deeply into this complex web of experience and affect and offers invaluable and clarifying insights into the violence of everyday life. In its coda it goes beyond this to offer a raw and deeply moving account of the author’s own experience of violence. Dispassionate analysis and passionate lived experience combine to make this book an invaluable guide to the endemic nature of violence, and the possibilities of resistance, survival and redemption. This fascinating work offers new and insightful perspectives on the study of hegemonic masculinity and violence. By adopting a framework that views violence as being collective and institutional as well as individual, Aliraza Javaid has crafted a book which is genuinely groundbreaking in its scope and vision. Drawing on global perspectives, this work offers carefully crafted and nuanced arguments on the interrelationships between masculinity, power, sexualities and violence, making it a must-read for academics, students and practitioners working in these areas. Comprehensive, thought-provoking and beautifully written, this book offers new ways of thinking about themes of power, gender, sexuality and violence. In doing so, it raises a series of important questions which feel utterly relevant to the times that we are in. Aliraza Javaid assembles data about rape, murder and assault, in situations ranging from intra-family violence to homophobic violence, anti-trans violence, serial killings, and more. The importance of the power dynamics of masculinities emerges clearly; a distinctive feature is a chapter about the personal experience of being targeted. This work is a valuable introduction to the complex and difficult issues around gender-based and sexual violence. A truly original and illuminating discussion of theory and evidence about violence. Javaid adopts insights from contemporary masculinities theory and skillfully applies these to the analysis and explanation of a series of topical issues in violence to reject limited, totalizing, and conventional divisions often made between the experiences of violence. The question of men and masculinity is at the centre of public debate and politics across the globe. Passions run high as gender power is at stake. Javaid’s highly original Violences in Everyday Life: Power, Gender and Sexuality should prove an indispensable guide to navigate this confusing gender and sexual terrain.