Outsourcing Patriarchy

Abstract

While much has been written on the violence of honour killings and the women who are their victims, little has been written on the production of the concept of ‘honour killing’, or the ways that concept produces meanings, cultures and identities. This article takes on that question, looking at when, where and how violence against women gets named as a specific crime called ‘honour killing’, in which honour comes to be a stable and unchanging term, particularly as the term comes to have hegemonic meanings which submerge other possibilities, struggles and violence. In this article, I argue that the concept of patriarchy has been outsourced from the USA and Europe to do its messy work elsewhere. I do so by examining the circulations of ‘honour killings’ as a concept in the media coverage in India and in the ‘West’. This article finds this method particularly useful in analysing the concept of ‘honour killings’, particularly in terms of feminist struggles to give violence a voice and bring it to the public. The article concludes that attention to the production of the idea of ‘honour killing’ along these racialized lines is all the more important given the fact that the identification of violence as ‘honour killing’ may even foreclose an analytic that might be more historicized, multifaceted or conflictual.