RECOGNITION AND GENDER VIOLENCE: MAKING VISIBLE INJUSTICE

The article tries to develop a non-conventional narration of gender violence through the description of the career that category of recognition has had both in social sciences and transnational feminist debate. In the first recognition made visible and therefore politically prosecuted asymmetries inherent models of socio-cultural representation of gender relations, in the second it redefined the relationship between equality and difference in the broad debate of social justice. The combination of these results shows that violence against women can be otherwise told provided reading misrecognition as severe form of social injustice.


Introduction
The purpose of this article is the lin k between female subjectivity and the definition (then emerging) of the phenomenon of violen ce.The existence of this nexus has its origins in feminist epistemological paradigms and shows how violence is a construction of a soci al fact whose rec ognition -and then existence -in public s pace is due to the change in social perception by women themselves.My attempt is to enter in to the mechanisms of production of a discourse on violenc e against women th at has been able to de termine social and anthropological changes from which we can obser ve now the consequences.The s urvey I propose, therefore, has a reflectiv e and critical thinking based on feminist dec onstruction.I propose a critical r eading of t he phenomenon of violence against women in three steps, to show semantic shifts and changes in s ocial perception that determines its evolution and representation in public space.First I reconstruct genealogy of feminist thoug ht on Law.Feminist perspectives are dedicated from the beginning to a critique of positivism as science that neut ralizes and objectified subjectivity.The different aspects of feminist thought on Law winding around conc epts of equality and difference, and translate, as proposed by Carol Smart1 , three trends: sexist Law in liberal approach, Male Law in radical approach, Sexed Law in postmodern.This survey of feminist theories on Law shows how debate from the seventies, especially in Italy, has been anchored di rectly to struggles practiced by movements for abortion rights and against sexual violence.In that context, the violence was denounced as a phenomenon rooted above all in the fami ly, opening the first phase of development of feminist strategies for combating domestic violence, which will t hen be followed by a s econd phase, characterized by the development of women's refuges.
The definition of gender vi olence will fo llow the po litical and cultural change, reaching to introduction of the term "femici de"2 that characterizes the current debate.Secondly, I enter in the ac tuality of phenom enon, analyzing gender violence as a social fact: media represent ation, perception of safet y and public order, the real numbers of vict ims.In particular, I try to reconstruct the drift of security-representation of gender violenc e in recent years investigating the processes of criminalizati on and victimiz ation, which is the main objectiv e critique of the practices of deconstruction in new-femin ist movements.Finally, I focus on the formulation of codes and cultural grammars by new-feminis m, which I consider fundamental to co llective action of the contemporary movements.My reflection ends with the po ssibility to see into the formulation of a new neo-feminist lexic on the deconstruction of gender violence not only as device for control of bodies and subjecti vities, but also as an expression of social injustice.

Genealogy of feminist Critic of Law
The feminist reflection on Law is derived naturally from general critical to systems of knowledge, production and assi gnment of meaning, constituted by positivist social sciences.First, what general guide feminist critique of Law in its various forms is the deconstruction of the Subject of law, assumed as neutral, independent and universal, but drawn around in fact as white western owne r man.He is an actor detached from rea lity, without relations or dependencies, asexual: a fictio juris, of which feminisms criticize the distance from the concrete embodied experience.Second, and c onsequently, conceptualizations of equality and differenc e are in question, both as horiz ons of feminist politic al action.Some feminis t theories identify equ ality as goal or practical means to achieve an improvement in the status of women, while other perspectives argues the irreducibility of difference, firs t of all the sexual, to paradigm of law and human rights.This ambivalence has to do with question of whether to use law in an instrumental way, and has marked historically div ision between feminist movements with respect to the claim of protections, rights and recognition.In addition, the general object of feminist critique of Law is its classificatory function, which ranks subj ectivity in predefined roles instead in dynamic relationship between them, in constant change, char acterized by influences and experiences unique and unrepeatable, so don't reducible to abstract types provided by legal standards .This dimension of r igidity of Law produces the paradox of in dividual atomic, without bo dy and history.Several authors have tried to systematize the di fferent phases of feminist thought on Law in large areas, starting from the different basic c oncepts.One of these is Carol Smart, with its famous historic tr ipartite summarized in slogan: right is sexist, right is male, right is sexed.This division may be useful to understand how analytical elements described above are present in every declination of feminist thought, although in c ontradictory forms, and why new-feminism continue to produce a political discour se and a public debat e that insists, instead, on categories of subject, differ ences and bodies.From point of view of analysis of discrimination against wom en, the bas ic problem of the liberal approach is that the cr iterion of assessment -the st andard to which to refer tois the man, while Law is regarded as an object of study in neutral liberal regime, thus circumventing the whole problem of construction of power relations that characterizes law and society in general "Law does not stand out side gender relations and adjudicate upon them.Law is Part of These relations and is always gendered Already in Its principles and practic es.We cannot separate out one practice -called discrimination -and ask for it to cease to be gendered as it would be meaningless to request " 3 This approach is overcome by the so-c alled second wave of feminism, that identifies male Law as crux of the problem.This is the radical feminism, which interprets Law as an institution forged in image of a subject notionally neutral but actually male.This approach opens a space in whic h women can take voice and tell their own experiences, thus foundi ng the field of studies on the "vict im".Once again, however, this approach rema ins anchored to a static view of reality, in which the me mbership of a gender -be women -brings with it a potential consequences: to be victims.Are known, in this sense, MacKinnon battles for recognition of sexual harassm ent as crim e, and for prohibition of pornography.Rights for MacKinnon can be used, then, as tool to change the symbolic and material condition of wo men, affecting representations and behaviors detrimental to the dignity of all women (according to MacKinnon) but: is the s ame public representation of the f emale image that has normaliz ing function, and therefore legislation, to indicate to woman her status and her r ole.The core around whic h develops the radica l feminist perspective, born in the 60s, is sexuality, seen as device to control and oppression of women, especially in the family.Stanko says: "Women's lovers are more dangerous t han the stranger on the street.And because many of women's social, educational and economic situations take place primarily within a framewor k of heterosexuality, they are at risk of violence merely because they are in some form of a relationship with a Man"4 The slogan of radic al feminism is "all men are rapists", but, as says Tamar Pitch5 , not all men are rapists.On this ridge is played in par t the risk of essentialist radical feminism, which descr ibes all men as oppr essors of female gender, as if they had total power over their own liv es.Essentialism underlies this position tends to flatten realit y of gender relations in a static and unchangeable, which is only the size of sexuality (divided in a bin ary) to hac k into crime-detection: are not taken into account, as in socialis t feminism for example, variables of class or "race".The third approac h described by Smart is the postmodern argument that Law is sexed: it exc eeds strict gender dichotomy of radical feminism and proposes a more fluid concept of positioned sexed.Law is both product and c reator of the gender, subjectivity , identity, it becomes a technology of construction of gender that is no longer, according to this approach, unitary and monolit hic, but is fragmented and mixed with the various social aspects class, ethnicity and sexu ality.One of the main aspects of postmodern feminist analysis is the cent rality of symbolic representation of social phenomena in contemporary society: through which meaning is produced and political significance helpful to nominate and then classify social phenomena underlying the soci al reality, thus pr oducing systems knowledge, discursive orders and regimes of truth that justify po licy choices of government.It is, according to Braidotti , a new materialism: in philosophy, postmodernism is marked by the crisis of the modern subject6 .The Man, the dominant subject is constituted in what it exc ludes, as that through which it authorizes and values.In this per verse logic other are m ade and produc ed.One of the central questions posed by postmodern feminism in fact, according to Flax, is to understand and (re)constitute the self, gend er, knowledge, social relations and culture without returning to a paradi gm of thought and practice linear, teleological, hierarchical, holistic, or binary.Flax says it: " We live in a world in wh ich gender is a constituting social relation and in which gender is also a relation of domination.Therefore, both men's and women's understanding of anatomy, biology, embo diedness, sexuality, and reproduction is partially rooted in, reflects and must justify (or challenge) preexisting gender relations"7 The aim of postmodern feminism then, according to Flax, must be to denaturalize gender and at the same time deconstructing the concept of nature.Concept in which some feminists , so to speak, are taking refuge essentialysing stereotypes naturalized as maternity and care attitude.

Gender Violence as a social fact
Women's bodies continue to be a crucial po int for definition of the social or der and its social and legal norms.Around the sexuality of women, are constructed discursive orders, several articulated, but all ultimately aimed on the one hand to affirmation of heterosexual norm, and on the other to expr opriation of ability to self-determination.In the last decade we have produced two different discursive waves: social sec urity that saw violence and prostitution both devices to stir social alarms, justify repressive measures, reproduce securitarian rhetorical and at the same time reaffi rming the social roles of essentialized gender; the next in which we are still imme rsed, where violence against women "back home" (where in fact it has al ways been), while raging sex scandals related to politic al leaders, like Berl usconi, and spread of a new-moralistic discursive order that once ag ain distorts meaning of terms such as prostitution, violence, self-determination and freedom with the objective of restoring order of gender relations and weaken grip of t he word -and articulat ed policy -of women.In this debate, feminism and polit ics as a cognitive perspective, though with different variations and ambivale nces, calls into question order of discourse, showing figure and test of anthr opological and social transformations that took place in recent years is in th is dimension, where spilling continuously discursive orders and regimes of trut h, which plays game of redefining relationship between gender and generati ons, between politic s and morality, between bodies and their representations.Following a number of cases of sexual violence attributed to foreigners, it often happens in Italy that the answer is a new decree Law on sexual violence and stalking.This trend correlates the alarm on immigration and gender violence, using as an adhes ive securityspeech: often used the expulsion of i llegal a, as if t he two phenomena were linked by any relationship.The r ole played by media in these ev ents is crucial.Suffice it to observe how relationship between actual performance of offenses, their media representation (in terms of quantity and quality), and perception of insecurity mainly due to immigration is significant and shows a clear trend: while the trend of crime is in dec line , their media repre sentation grows.Thus it happens that in public debate on violenc e against women disappear violence and abuse against women inside and outside t he family, that is just the picture more 'truthful of violence agains t women.In Italy, almost 70% of violence is committed by former partners, family members and close friends 8 .However, the stereotype of migrant rapi st again makes evident the intrinsic link between sexuality and ethnic ization of public enemy , through t he media c onstruction of moral panic.It is clear, moreover, as the deep mobilizing power of rape is crucial to f ocus public attention on soc ial alarms induced, useful to build the contours of a folk devil against which to project their anxieties and social concerns.Of course this is nothing new : the scapegoat has always been used to build the public dis course around the looming threat of a public enemy t hat passes through our city, making them dangerous, d egraded, insecure.The enemy is stranger, the Other, who end angers identity with his presenc e (presumed single monolithic) of a supposed community (ethnic, national, moral or religious).And this is pr ecisely the point.In the case of rape, what matters is that they are others w ho rape, scoring an insurm ountable boundary between "us" and " them": a border cultu re, civilization, religion, and so on.In othe r words, violence against women is a social identity that defines, before defining the difference for themselves who ra pes.Instrumentally so emotional mobilization, that comes from violence or the murder of a woman, sets out what our this woman represents: an ethnic co mmunity, national, religious, whic h is opposed to the stranger, the enem y, the rapist.This process of victimization of women also has another substantial perfo rmative function: to crush the pla yers involved in predetermined roles (offender / victim), neutralized and divorc ed from the materiality of human and social relations.Roles that do not realiz e ambivalences and contradictions of the relat ionships and conflicts, which bring to light the cultural and social as pects of gender violence and that, especially in the case of violence against women, exprop riate the latter of the possibility of taking word from the self-determinati on But not only .The distinction bet ween good and bad victim (or defendant), useful to identify a community, it also serves to define what our women, to say what qualities must have a victim to be legitimate defended.The victim is us eful to outline good conduct to which woman must adhere equally well for it to be recogni zed victim and not guilty (or imputed).In this sense, therefore, gender violenc e is a powerful bio politics: through which you c an define ethnic id entities and public enemies, alarms, moral, normal and deviant sexual behavio r, gender roles essentializ ed and s o on.This is the story of the status of victim-defendant assigned to women from violence legislation.Processes of vict imization and criminalization pass through the construction of stereotypes, essentiali zed roles, culturalized bodies.In the case of violence, as we hav e seen, on the one hand, female body is used to justify repressive intervention ra cist, scoring once again the deep interconnection between sexual ity, identity, processes of criminalization and ethnicization.On the other hand, the repres entation of culturalized bodies used to say in general an order between the sexes, in which female is finally deprived of subjectivity and to speak out.Victim or others will talk about her.Becaus e through censorship of its subjectivity hi de the processes of emancipation, selfdetermination and freedom that are the source of fun damental conflict in our society.

New codes of contemporary feminisms: the communication campaigns against gender violence
The contemporary movement s are prophets of the present.They do not hav e the strength of power , but the power of "word".In complex soc ieties, in fact, social conflicts develop from the definit ion of identity, needs and r elationships.
The contemporary movements, according to Melucci 9 , have developed to reformulate systems of meaning reclai ming power of naming in public discourse.The world's symbolic of self-representation, cultural meanings needs and relationships, therefore, has become the central space of the politic, wit hin dimension of reflexivit y become typical of postmodern societies .It is in this dimension that the movements star t processes of deconstruction and reconstruction of new codes chall enge the domin ant one to interpret and transform reality.Feminist mov ements in fact always use symbolic tools to assert their speech in public s pace.The reticular form of activism, typical of contemporary movements, also characte rizes efforts of feminist groups, especially around mobilizations in project, identifying po licy issues, recognizing reflective practice of everyday life.And this confirms again as the inductive approach and immanent criti que of feminism is based on practical experience, and critically rev ised policy to make it the subjec t of political action and research.It is thus that in recent years have developed the most signific ant mobilization of feminist movements.
The communication campaigns produced within new-feminism using these techniques, which have become baggage shared of social movements, they are mainly intended to deconstruct gender st ereotypes, to unveil the asymmetry underlying the relationships, to denounc e violence latent in many behav iors considered normal in the ever yday life.But not only.Fa ithful to the practice of critical self-reflexive, new-feminist ca mpaigns not even save themselves and areas of motion within which they devel op and are diffused.T hey put a theme, so much provocative as it is effective, the fact that the same self-organiz ed social spaces, meaning this term in t he broadest s ense (events, festivals, meetings), are never to be consider ed once and for all spac es freed from gender violence, prejudices, from machismo.In the paths of sharing, processing and production of campaigns and mobilizations are put in motion process es instead of (self-) critical an alysis of practices and ways of relating within groups themselves.The issue of gender violenc e so immediately immerses us in this dimension of self-reflexivity, because it imposes a ve ry high level of awareness and ability to recognize themselves as part of the problem in q uestion.The movement itself becomes the field of political intervention, showing the problem of asymmetry in gender relations and (ther efore) of power within it, and thus questioning its nature and fo rm.Another central aspec t of the communicative work of movements, in particular ne w-feminist, is to networking, tool unavoidable diffusion of materials and connec tion between different experiences.Almost all policy documents in fact today traveling on network and are available to all realities for their reproduction; appeals to as semblies, for communication campaigns, and the same flow of informati on circulating via blogs, mailing lists and websites .On the issue of violence aga inst women, in the sense of discursive and performa tive device of gender relations, newfeminist collective hav e produced different types of public campaigns involv ing the production and dissemination of mate rials including computer awarenes s and denunciation of it s causes and social c onsequences.In particular I want to mention three campaigns, signif icant for the dimension of t he involvement of groups that have participated in their fo rmulation and implementation of soci al reality.
1.The first originated at the national demonstration against gender violence 2007 in Rome, bearing the title "N ot in my name" and focused on aspects of violence and exploitation of women's bodies in order to justify repressive measures against foreigner s, while at the same time it confirms the structural dimension of violence within family relationships 2. The second, entitled "Macho-free z one -Sure that's enough?"It spreads via computer at national level.The campaign had two forms: on the one hand was the photographic representation of some paradoxical situations in which you would find women who wa nt to follow the precepts of good conduct to prevent violence in public places.On the other insists on the stigmatization of macho behavior, th rough the distribution of leaflets and brochures ironic during events and parties in public spaces.
3. The third "Rigeneriamoci" of 2010 is particularly interesting for two reasons: the first is that it is part of a march against insecurity, until that time the sexuality of bodies was never considered, but deemed granted if not irrelevant.Secondly, the c ampaign involved the majority of neofeminist collective, summoned to ma ke up for absence of a politic al reflection of gender, and was therefore the occasion to meet and discus s various manifestations of viol ence: the symbolic, the homophobic , securitarian considered parts of the same organic problem.

Conclusions
I conducted this reflection on violence aga inst women like a trav el in which you can imagine a lot but you can not predict everything.You know where you start, you can choose the ways useful to address the first part of the road, but then, you know, the paths often come to m eet us before we choose them.Worn metaphor, perhaps, but for me this trav el has meant to open a path to selfreflexive very fruitful.This approach has allowed me to get rid of a number of prejudices that had informed my plan, and to understand the limits, above all the fundamentals.The goal that I was given was to demonstrate that gender violence is a social construction, which is stirred for food hatred and fear.I am aware that power certainly exists and it is widespread, produces bodies and sexuality, as Foucault teach us 10 , but gender seems to me now an outdated concept, overcome, both in a descriptive and prescriptive sense.My Prejudices were related to the fact that I had not considered another option, that I have learned through research, and that is methodological and epistemological approach together: in addition t o the de scription and prescription there is positioning, and this perspective is relat ed to strategy, or mode of analysis and approaches proposed by neo-f eminist movements.From this perspec tive, everything changes.Violence is indeed a social construc tion, at the same time we know t hat kills thousands of women.So, in what sense it is a soc ial construction?It is in two senses: one objective and one subjective, the second of which is the one that involves our leve l of discourse.From the first point of view, it is now c lear that in public space what it represents serves to mobilize public opinion against someth ing or someone, or to di vert attention from other social problems, or in any ca se to fix and build identity , roles, victims, criminals, enemies, friends, prot ectors and relationshi ps.In this sense, the violence is a device used as a weapon to annihilate any form of dissent, of conflicts around policies and rules that otherwise would have been democratically unacceptable.The bodies of women are violated by t he very objects symbolic potential, and are used to mute any objections to the r epressive policies adopted to combat it: and if she was y our mother?Your sist er?Your daughter?The point is, in addition the mystification of objective facts as they are represented, in this order of discourse women remains mothers, si sters or daughters of someone.Their subjectivity is not o nly represented, but is den ied as a possib ility, is misrecognized.For this reason violence aga inst women is a social construction even in the subjective sense.Becaus e, censoring the vo ice of women is denying their subjectivity.The domain pa radigmatic of man -citizen, white, wealthy, usefully is represented as r epresentative of all.These elements hav e emerged during my analysis, in an impressi ve manner: the constructions of the public enemy, defense of respectable wom en, protection of our society have become the main dis courses around violence.The exasperation of the speech security has begun to show its limits in terms of credibility and politica l sustainability.The alarm security has e ffectively saturated the public discourse.In all this is missing the subjective dimension, placement, recognition of otherness: taking the word of the women's movement.In other words, we can not talk about violence against women without talking about the movements that fight.Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the same tensions are created by the processes of subjectivation that strengthen the social research to push need for such investigation: a dut y which springs from perception of anthropological change in pr ogress that i nvolves the whole society, and that shows its first symptoms in the debate on "de fac to couples", on artificial insemination, monitoring se xual orientations since beginning of the 2000s.It feels more and more clearly a decisive brea k in social, political and legal culture of our time: a gap between rhetoric of moral increasingly paternalistic, patriarchal, authoritarian, religious and familistic continually reaffirmed at the institutional level by the flowing of the real life, desires, and cultural contamination of cognitive precarious generation.Specifically, the new-feminist perspective on violence shows that violence itself is inserted and recognized as part of a general paradigm that sees bo dies and the production of subjectivity as objects of Government of life.
In the development of communication campaigns and mobilizations on violence a gainst women, in fac t, this is never the only object of reflection, but is i dentified as part of t he construction of a structural discourse t hat involves the whole society, its cognitiv e order and social development.The link between r acism and sexism is conclus ively verified, as confirms the objectiv e of new-feminism movements to reveal and imposing a new discursive level, epistemol ogical and cognitive, a different code that challenge violence against women as social injustice.