Affective violence: re/negotiating gendered-feminism within new materialism

Abstract

This conceptual paper describes, interrupts and diffractively explores named patriarchal practices as performatively and situationally (re)produced via gender norms. We are attentive to ways in which heteronormative familial conventions maintain and reinscribe gendered binaries reductively as natural. We suggest that heteronormative familial relations re/produce gendered difference as intrinsically disadvantageous to female bodies and that this requires a response; a mobilization of creative feminist affirmative counteraction. In this paper, we respond to the failure of feminism (for us personally and at large) to re-signify gendered norms associated with parental care work that tie the female body naturally to reproduction. By making this move, we aim to (re)deploy theoretical analysis of so named patriarchal power. Through employing a diffractive analysis, we attempt to move on from a simple binary debate that we suspect only reiterates female oppression and disadvantage supported through compulsory heteronormative investment. We discuss a reframing of patriarchal power that necessarily releases it from the male/female, feminine/masculine dichotomy. We frame this relation of power as heteronormative affective violence.