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11. Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the State
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191 1 1 Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the State Belinda Leach Memorials to women murdered by men have materialized on the Canadian landscape over the past several years, brought into being by groups that usually include relatives, friends, and antiviolence activists.1 Some of these memorials blend gently into the landscape. Others startle when one stumbles upon them unexpectedly (Cultural Memory Group 2006). A few of these were dedicated before fourteen women were murdered at l’École Polytechnique in Montreal on December 6, 1989, because they were women, in the killer’s own words. Many invoke that act even as they commemorate a friend, sister, mother, daughter, coworker, or simply a member of the same community, whose death at the hands of a man has shaken those around them. These memorials have often become rallying points where the local feminist community holds noisyTake Back the Night gatherings and reflective December 6 vigils (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2002). In this chapter I consider the relationship between the Canadian state and violence against women,and the intervention into that relationship of memorials to murdered women constructed through the efforts of frontline antiviolence workers.2 As in many other countries, in Canada memorials are most commonly erected to celebrate the heroic acts of men who died serving the country. Murdered women—the underside of state- sanctioned violence—are usually mourned quietly and markers noting their deaths disappear in vast cemeteries or do not exist at all. Unlike the former kinds of memorials that appear to function largely as “scriptural tombs,” intended to keep the dead dead (de Certeau 1988), memorials to femicide have an activist and forward-looking intent, seeking to keep memory alive and change the future (Bold, Knowles, and Leach 2003).3 I argue that through creating memorials and memorializing practices, frontline workers provide an alternative to culturally sanctioned ways of remembering 192 Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence murdered women. In the process, they communicate the nature and extent of gender-based violence against women to a larger public, and back to the state itself. Yet, they do this in a highly contested context in which frontline workers must step cautiously around hegemonic constructions of family grief and state responsibility. The chapter conceptualizes the everyday violence that women frequently experience as a manifestation of the embeddedness of gendered violence in state and social institutions. It traces the relationship between the Canadian feminist antiviolence movement and the state through events and state responses over the past three decades, paying particular attention to the paradox that, for the feminist antiviolence community, the state is both part of the problem and part of the longed-for solution. Drawing on local ethnographic fieldwork with a Canadian women’s shelter organization , I examine how frontline antiviolence workers relentlessly contest how “the rendering of physical hurt” (Riches 1991, 295) is represented. In so doing, these workers—paid staff and unpaid volunteers working for a local feminist shelter organization—confront hegemonic constructions of violence against women that undermine a shared acceptance of its moral repugnance, while simultaneously diminishing access to the resources of the state to assist them in their work. The chapter shows how, through the construction of a local memorial to a woman murdered by her male partner , as well as other ongoing memorializing practices, frontline workers and their organizations offer an alternative construction of violence against women to the hegemonic version the state presents through its policies and legislation. I conclude by considering the risks involved in these actions as funding programs increasingly insist on gender-neutral “victim” services and programming and penalize organizations for what is deemed “political” advocacy. Anthropologies of Violence While anthropology has made a significant contribution to the study of political and state violence and its experience and resistance in everyday life, much of this attention has focused on repressive states (Asad 1992; Nagengast 1994). There is little concern for these issues in the context of states governed by what are taken to be nonviolent regimes. In contrast to obviously violent environments, the study of violence within a state like Canada requires a conceptualization that encourages analytical attention to some of the hidden sites of violence. These sites include what [44.201.24.171] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:13 GMT) Memorializing Murder, Speaking Back to the State 193 Scheper-Hughes (1992) identifies as specific configurations of policy, rhetoric, institutions, and politics. These configurations provide a useful framework for examining how violence against women is...