Constructions of Honor-Based Violence: Gender, Context and Orientalism

Abstract

In the 1990s, honor-based violence (HBV), and in particular honor killings, began receiving extensive international media attention. However, HBV includes a broad continuum of mechanisms used to control women and girls with varying levels of severity. Attention directed toward HBV has portrayed communities from South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa in culturally rigid ways, where Orientalist discourses fail to demonstrate diversity. This essay will draw on small group interviews conducted with 27 adolescent girls and young women from diverse Asian backgrounds living in Auckland, New Zealand. Findings will illustrate the varied ways that research participants and their families negotiate gender and gender violence, with some adhering to a range of cultural norms supporting HBV and others diverging from an HBV culture.