Negotiating violence, navigating neoliberalism: Domestic violence advocacy efforts in South Asian communities in post-9/11 New York City
Item
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Title
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Negotiating violence, navigating neoliberalism: Domestic violence advocacy efforts in South Asian communities in post-9/11 New York City
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b10870aaf782:11741
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identifier
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12351
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Creator
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Munshi, Soniya,
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Contributor
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Barbara Katz Rothman
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociology | Asian American studies | Womens studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation investigates the relationship between legislative acts and community-based efforts to address intimate violence in the lives of South Asian women in the New York City metropolitan area in order to analyze the complexities that community-based organizations, situated in the matrices of neoliberal governance, face in their everyday advocacy practices. The first chapter offers historical context of the role that South Asian women's anti-violence organizing in the U.S. has had in interrupting, forging, and replicating different forms of community politics and argues that the cultural frameworks utilized by South Asian women's organizations, and the construction of populations of South Asian survivors, are constituted by and contribute to the logics of neoliberalism. Chapter 2 examines the epistemological implications of funding and professionalization of anti-violence efforts to argue that the culture of funding has produced discourses of specialization and expertise that impact groups that work on gender-based violence as well as other community-based organizations that see domestic violence appear in their constituencies. Chapter 3 examines the treatment of immigrant survivors in the Violence Against Women Act, to argue that VAWA produces populations of recognizable battered immigrant women that are offered the opportunity to be folded into life, while immigrant survivors of domestic violence whose experience is not legible are neglected, or, in Foucauldian terms, left to die. Policy advocacy discourses reveal that anti-violence efforts not only manage populations but also produce them. Chapter 4 examines how domestic violence advocates working with South Asian survivors of violence negotiate the everyday terrain that has been produced through the U.S. anti-violence movement's alliance with the criminal legal system and argues that advocates take up discursive strategies of "flexible ambivalence" with respect to the criminal legal system that are communicated through frameworks of "choice" that are compatible with the machinations of neoliberal governance. Chapter 5 offers case studies that present imaginative possibilities that community-based organizers forge to address the needs that appear in their communities, and looks at the constraints that they face, internal community exclusions that persist as well as potential openings for further connections.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
