‘No Place in Canada’: Triumphant Discourses, Murdered Women and the ‘Honour Crime’

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, public attention to the honour crime in Canada has been directed towards its peculiar nature and transnational origins and linkages. Discussions surrounding Canadian iterations of honour-based violence have emphasised, as in other host nations, the immigrant status and Muslim backgrounds of the perpetrators of such violence. Repeatedly, editorials appearing in Canada s national newspapers have stressed that the honour crime was an atypical ‘act of barbarism’ (Dimanno, 2012) and a form of gendered violence that was ‘anathema to Western culture’ (Kay, 2011). Such narrative settings reified the idea that honour killings are foreign crimes, imported to Canadian shores by immigrants who had failed to assimilate and uphold Canada’s stated commitment to gender equality. On various websites, commentators have debated whether honour killings were acts of violence warranting state-level concern and intervention. While some national coverage encouraged broader and more intersectional understanding of these crimes (Jiwani and Hoodfar, 2012; Kaplan, 2010), the dominant analytic framework used to interpret them has remained focused on their aberrant nature. Globally and locally, honour killings have rendered legible a predetermined ‘civilizational framework (Razack, 2008, p. 5) that casts Muslim women’s bodies as the ‘limit case for tolerance of the Other within the nation (Haque, 2010, p. 80).