Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial

10. The Logics of Controversy Gender Violence as a Site of Frictions in Ghanaian Advocacy

220 10 w฀The Logics of Controversy Gender Violence as a Site of Frictions in Ghanaian Advocacy saida hodžić if one aim of anthropology and history is to particularize knowledge claims and write against globalist ideologies, a conceptual method we rely on is analyzing controversies in places where many see only flat surfaces. The cracks, fissures, and fault lines that disrupt the presumed global order reveal themselves in specific contexts, speaking against the universalizing tendencies of globalization itself and its theorists. Controversies erupt in surprising locations and remain buried in others. For many activists, institutions, and scholars, violence against women, or gender violence—as well as advocacy against it—is flat and universal. “Violence against women” is spoken of in the singular, and female genital cutting, female infanticide, dowry murders, and so on are named in one breath as “types” that belong to this larger, unifying category.1 According to Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, the universality of violence against women had such a hold on imagination of activists and government representatives from both the global North and South at the 1985 United Nations conference in Nairobi that it allowed them to agree that this was a key human rights violation.2 While the taxonomy that subsumes different phenomena to the larger category of “violence against women” may make the gendered and universal aspects of violence visible, it also obscures crucial differences. I argue against the globalist portrayal of “violence against women” as a singular and consensusleading human rights violation. Cultural difference, postcolonial legacies, and the politics of location all bring “a creative friction to global connections.”3 Ghanaian campaigns to criminalize female genital cutting and domestic violence reveal what Tsing calls “zones of awkward engagement”—“where words mean something different across a divide even as people agree to speak.”4 Gender Violence as a Site of Frictions in Ghanaian Advocacy w 221 Whereas the category “violence against women” may have been easy to agree on at UN conferences, it did not lend itself to a unified consensus in much of Africa. The trajectories of efforts to criminalize cutting and domestic violence reveal that frictions emerge in surprising places. In Ghana, and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the attempts to criminalize domestic violence and marital rape have provoked moral panics and unprecedented struggles between activists and governments since the 1990s. Governments campaigned against the proposed laws; media propagated masculinist discourses; and women parliamentarians walked out of parliament sessions in protest against the discriminatory remarks of their colleagues. In contrast, criminalization of female genital cutting was rather tame, and cutting was outlawed in most countries that introduced such laws. This chapter examines the logics that determine when controversies erupt and when advocacy is tamed and laws are embraced. My ethnography offers a situated account of debates in the Ghanaian public sphere, revealing a complex web of conditions that structured the faiths of the two laws. I seek to uncover the cultural logics and politics that shape both taming and controversy. I ask: Why do governments fiercely resist some forms of activism but embrace others? What makes laws controversial in particular places? How does female genital cutting become tame while domestic violence engenders disagreement? The logics of taming and controversy, I argue, are shaped by both global and local forces and by the shifting dynamics of culture and power—the configurations of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, the discourses of rights and modernity, as well relations between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. taming cutting, passing law s Although in particular historical moments, legislation against female genital cutting inspired anticolonial revolts, in much of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa, it receives salutatory headlines. Countries that have criminalized female genital cutting since the mid-1990s include both those in which the practice is prevalent (Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo) and those in which it is not (Madagascar, South Africa).5 Given that legislation is largely considered a government’s domain, these laws are often interpreted as governments’ deeds. However, governments have not been the main force behind these laws, but rather side actors. African women’s NGOs have been the primary advocates for criminalization of cutting. Their legal advocacy was not met with strong government or popular resistance, except, notably, in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Egypt, and Guinea-Bissau.6 Criminalizing female genital cutting did not cause a public controversy in Ghana. I emphasize the “public” to draw attention to the specific...