Australian Feminist Studies EVERY TIME YOU SAID

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Australian Feminist Studies

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EVERY TIME YOU SAID 'PENIS' Adrian Howe

Online publication date: 20 May 2010

To cite this Article Howe, Adrian(2010) 'EVERY TIME YOU SAID 'PENIS'', Australian Feminist Studies, 25: 64, 209 — 222 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08164641003762511 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164641003762511

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EVERY TIME YOU SAID ‘PENIS’ (Men’s) Violence, Victim Advocacy and Impermissible Speech

Downloaded By: [Howe, Adrian] At: 01:33 25 May 2010

Adrian Howe

Will there ever be a time when one can speak openly about men’s violence against women in non-feminist forums? Will it ever be permissible to speak for women victims of that violence, be they dead or alive, to audiences that are not exclusively feminist without being accused of some dastardly form of ‘gender bias’ or, heaven forbid, man-hating? Will male students ever reach a point where they can engage in a productive conversation about the overwhelming evidence of the pervasiveness of men’s violence*the national surveys, daily media reports, homicide statistics, the case law*without retreating into one of the many tedious defensive modes of operation which work to close discussion down? More to the point of this paper, will there ever come a time when women, feministidentified women included, feel able to continue discussing such ‘sensitive’ matters in the presence of men who start to evince signs of discomfort, if not resentment or outright hostility? The problem of naming men’s violence as men’s violence has been identified as a significant social problem for some time now. Not only is there a vast literature documenting the campaigns of victim advocacy groups to get that violence recognised as a pervasive social harm; feminist scholars in a host of different fields of inquiry have made important contributions, far too many to record here, to the project of theorising that persistently resistant analytical object: men’s violence against women and children. Rather than revisit that huge body of work, this paper tells a story about what happened when the problem of men’s homicidal violence against women was raised in a university classroom. It is the story of a feminist academic well-apprised of the obstacles facing anyone addressing any form of men’s violence, she having taught university courses on that subject for 20 years. The story I want to tell is my own. While I have written at length about my experience of teaching an undergraduate course on sexed violence (Howe 2008a), here I interpret ‘classroom’ broadly so as to encompass my pedagogical experience in three different kinds of university settings: a law school staff seminar, a postgraduate class and a parallel session at an international conference. My topic at all three settings was the deployment of provocation defences in so-called femicide cases; cases involving men who kill departing or allegedly adulterous wives. It was theses cases that had led to the establishment of inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom at the beginning of the twenty-first century into the operation of partial defences to murder, defences that, if successful, reduce a murder to a manslaughter conviction a murder. These inquiries were to spend a great deal of time focusing on the question of whether provocation should be retained as a partial excuse for homicidal fury. Femicide cases and the provocation defence in particular have preoccupied me for some time (see, for example, Howe 1994, 2002, 2004). My extensive research and teaching Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 25, No. 64, June 2010 ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/10/020209-14 – 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/08164641003762511

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experience in this fraught field notwithstanding, what happened when I ventured to share with postgraduate students and academics my righteous anger at the continuing cultural currency of this deeply ingrained cultural excuse for men’s violence against women was unprecedented. Pointing out the ‘gender bias’ of provocation cases turned out to be one thing; drawing attention to the sexed identities of the perpetrators and the pathetic nature of their excuses for homicidal fury*paradigmatically, she wanted to leave me, she said he was better in bed, she taunted me about my sexual inadequacy*quite another with audiences unused to thinking critically about the discursive construction of sexed homicide, let alone thinking about sexed violence within a postmodern frame (Howe 2008b). Experience had taught me that scathing challenges to male privilege, which fairly describes most of my published work, are destined to raise hackles inasmuch as they hold men responsible for their own violence. I was just not prepared for the tale I am about to tell.


Telling Stories, Managing Risks My story is informed in part by my reading of Adriana Cavarero’s wonderful Arendtian study of ethical storytelling. According to Cavarero, it is crucial, if one is to create ethical narratives, to tell the story of the ‘who’ rather than the ‘what’ of human existence. All actors leave behind a story, but ‘nothing guarantees that this story will later get told’, thereby enabling the actor to become a ‘narratable self’ (Cavarero 2000, 28). Previously, I have drawn on her work to expose the ethical bankruptcy of a provocation tale that allows a man to become a certain kind of narratable subject, a much-put-upon man, while his victims*traditionally, a nagging, unfaithful or departing wife and, more recently, a man making an unwanted sexual advance to another man*are transformed into an annihilated ‘what’ (Howe 2002). While Cavarero’s analysis helps us to distinguish ethical from unethical forms of narration, recent work on the cultural politics of emotion helps inform an understanding of what might be registered as a failure of ethical listening or, less emotively, as a breakdown in communication. Zembylas’s (2008) work on the telling and receiving of trauma narratives in the classroom is especially helpful here. While his analysis relates to telling narratives of war, genocide and terrorism, I believe that femicide cases, especially those containing men’s accounts of being provoked beyond endurance by a woman, meet his definition of a trauma narrative. They too are stories of suffering, pain and trauma, stories that have an immense emotional impact, not only on the families and friends of murdered women but also on feminist teachers and students who hear them. More crucially, had I known of his work on negative student responses to educators’ attempts to ‘register the inhumanity of violence through the use of trauma testimonials’ (Zemblyas 2008, 12), I may have been more alert to the prospect of negative responses from my audiences. I hasten to say that the following account of my pedagogical experiences of deploying trauma narratives in the classroom is by no means the worst story that can be told about what happens when feminist academics venture into non-feminist forums to speak on the topic of men’s violence. I have yet to experience being publicly humiliated, having my credentials trashed or my motives impugned; my encounters with hostile nonfeminists have never been that unpleasant (cf. Byrne-Armstrong et al. 1999). Nevertheless, I venture to suggest that mine is a salutary story, one that supports the central claim of my research and teaching in the field of sexed violence; namely, that it is still not culturally


EVERY TIME YOU SAID ‘PENIS’

permissible to name men’s violence as just that in any non-feminist forum, university ones included. For all the work done over the past four decades to expose the pervasiveness of men’s violence against women, this is still a topic that needs to be carefully managed, much as it has been suggested homophobia needs to be managed by those who bear the brunt of it. Minority sexual subjects, as Gail Mason argues, face an imperative to ‘map’ their own safety by continually monitoring and balancing the potential risks of self-disclosure. This process involves regulating and managing representations of homophobia, including managing or ‘looking after’ their own self-representations in order to avoid violence or discrimination, or defiantly refusing to manage them. Safety for sexual minorities is ‘a context-dependent form of negotiation’ (Mason 2000, 8283). So too, I suggest, one needs to proceed warily, carefully managing one’s disclosures and self-representations, and remaining alert to the dangers that lurk when addressing the ‘Man’ question. Asking this question entails paying close attention to the discursive place occupied, or more usually vacated, by men in any account or explanation of individual or generic acts of men’s violence against women (Howe 2008a). This is an exceedingly risky business. Not that that is a deterrent to a feminist scholar determined to name sexed violence as precisely that. As Abigail Bray argues in her superlative study of the emergence of tolerance as the ruling neo-liberal and most definitely post-feminist virtue governing responses to the production of sexualised images of girls, challenging the corporate sexualisation of girls ‘is a critically risky experience’ (Bray 2008, 331). That did not stop her from problematising those images, querying the arguments of corporate liberalism’s apologists and demonstrating how the virtue of tolerance is deployed to silence feminist dissent. I too have found doing feminist work to be a critically risky experience in related fields of inquiry. In particular, calling men’s violence men’s violence can provoke outrage and I await the fallout from my most recent published papers on the thorny question of whether non-Indigenous feminists can speak about men’s violence against women and children within Australian Aboriginal communities (Howe 2009a, 2009b). For it is indisputable that for all the impressive work done in so many fields of inquiry and in so many campaigns and policy-making initiatives, feminist discourse about any aspect of men’s violence, but perhaps especially the ‘private’ ones, still finds itself classified as impermissible speech today. Despite all the effort that has been put into dismantling the public/private distinction over the last four decades, taking a stand on behalf of the usual victims of domestic violence and against the usual suspects, insisting on naming the vast majority of those suspects as men is guaranteed to meet resistance and invite censure.

*

That Paper Telling Stories about Law Reform Inquiries The subject of this paper is the audience reactions to what I had to say about femicide cases and the provocation defences that feature in so many of them, not the paper itself (Howe 2008b). It follows that my long-standing objections to these defences, which notoriously blame victims for their own deaths and that were canvassed in the paper, need not detain us. We do need an outline of what I said by way of background briefing. I began by stating that while recent Australian and English law reform inquiries into partial defences to murder had been driven by feminist and public outcry over lenient sentences given to men who kill women partners, these triggering events soon got lost in the course of the inquiries, thereby leading to ill-founded recommendations for reform.

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This was very clearly the case in the United Kingdom where, in the summer of 2002, lenient sentences of two to seven years were handed down in three femicide cases, including one where a lawyer knifed his wife to death in front of their children. Public or at least feminist outrage and extensive media coverage propelled senior law officers into action. The Solicitor-General sparked a campaign against the defence, the AttorneyGeneral launched an appeal against the sentences, ranging between two and seven years, on the grounds of leniency and, the following year, the Home Secretary requested that the Law Commission instigate an inquiry into the law and practice of partial defences to murder. In Australia too, the problem driving the recent Victorian Law Reform Commission inquiry into defences to homicide was that of ‘sexual intimacy’ homicides (32 per cent of all homicides), where a person kills his or her partner or former partner, or a sexual rival. The vast majority of the killers in these cases were men (85 per cent), most of whom were ‘motivated by jealousy or a desire to control their partner’. At their subsequent trials, provocation became their defence of choice to avoid a murder conviction (Victorian Law Reform Commission 2004, 15). In my view, all the recommendations for reform fell short. While the Victorian reformers left provocation as a sentencing discretion, the UK commissioners came up with an even more deeply flawed recommendation that still allowed male possessiveness and jealousy to found a provocation defence. Should stories of unfaithful or departing wives prove insufficient, defence lawyers could resort instead to the tale of the taunting woman. Take, for example, a case where a man discovers his wife is having an affair, he confronts her and she responds by taunting him about his sexual inadequacy, as so many women seem to do when confronted with men’s homicidal violence. In the commissioners’ view, the wife’s taunts may ‘constitute some provocation’ and the husband may well be said, at law, to have lost his self-control if he kills her in such circumstances (Law Commission 2004, 19193). With such a patently misogynist idea of ‘passion’ retained as mitigation to murder, the whole point of reviewing the operation of the defence*that of concern over the lenient sentencing of men who kill women*was lost. Moreover, provocation also managed to survive an even more far-reaching inquiry into the law of murder in England and Wales in 2006. It was conceded in the new inquiry that the current law appeared ‘especially user friendly to men . . . because they are more likely to lose their temper or respond violently to such matters’, and that it could also lead to lenient sentencing in cases where the provoked murder ‘may have been little more than a reflection of the continuing cultural acceptability of men’s use of violence in anger’ (Law Commission 2006, 91). The commissioners remained convinced that their restriction on the use of the defence to cases where there is a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged would put a stop to the more controversial types of cases where men had got away with murdering women in the past. Crucially, their final argument for retaining the defence was that the door must be left ‘ajar for cases where a real injustice would be done’ if the defence was not available. Tellingly, they provided by way of example a hypothetical case of an Asian woman who chases and kills a white man who has taunted her with racial abuse after she found him attempting to rape her daughter (2006, 93). What was overlooked is that putting the spotlight on the exceedingly rare case of a woman killing in such sympathetic circumstances left the door ajar for the legion of male defendants whose feeble excuses for killing women prompted the review of homicide trials in the first place. They scarcely get a mention in the hundreds of pages of consultation papers and reports on defences to murder and the law of murder published by the Law Commission; clear


testimony, I argued, that it is still not culturally permissible to keep the focus steadfastly on men’s violence in any non-feminist forum.


Episode One: Setting the Scene My story begins in April 2007 in Auckland, New Zealand. I had been invited there to take part in a documentary about so-called ‘homosexual advance defence’ cases (Potter 2008). These are cases in which a man kills another man and then pleads provocation, claiming that he lost his self-control when faced with an unwanted sexual advance by the dead man. There had been a spate of such cases in New Zealand. The filmmaker, who was familiar with my work on homosexual advance defences cases (Howe 2000a), arranged for me to give a seminar paper at a law school while I was there. My chosen topic was a criminal law issue that had been attracting a great deal of interest in Australia and the United Kingdom: the pressing need for the reform of partial defences to murder. I thought this topic might be of interest to New Zealand law academics inasmuch as the New Zealand Law Commission was at that time undertaking a review of defences to homicide. As the abstract setting out my proposal made clear, the paper would reiterate my longstanding abolitionist argument against the retention of the defence of provocation. It would also suggest that recent reformist policies were doomed to fail if the defence was abolished but provocation was left as a sentencing discretion as it was in my home State of Victoria. Such a ‘solution’ allows male defendants and their lawyers to continue telling their execrable tales about much-put-upon men and their dreadful dead wives, albeit during sentencing rather than as a defence submission to a jury. Thanks to the Victorian law reformers’ limited abolitionist stand, the classic provocation script of the taunting woman who drives a man to perfectly understandable homicidal rage had lived to fight another day on behalf of anxious male killers keen to avoid long prison sentences. By appalling coincidence, newspapers around the world ran with front-page stories about the most recent campus shooting rampage in the United States on the very same day that was arranged for my talk at the law school. The reports about the killing of 32 students and staff at a university campus in Virginia did not waste any time in imputing a motive of the student gunman. His killings were attributed to jealousy over the involvement, or so he believed, of an alleged girlfriend*‘The girl who may have sparked the massacre’*with another male student (‘‘‘Blood on their Hands’’’ 2007). This report, it seemed to me, provided a perfect, if ghastly, way to begin the staff seminar. And so, reading from one of the front-page stories, I began with what was intended to be a wholly ironic aside about the killer, initially identified as an Asian man who had recently arrived from Shanghai on a student visa. He might, I suggested, have had access to a cultural defence if only he had stuck to the usual jealous-male homicide script and confined his killing to the allegedly provocative young woman and her alleged new boyfriend. While not a formal defence, cultural defences in the form of expert testimony about supposedly ‘backward’ or less enlightened ‘foreign’ cultures are raised by defence lawyers to explain, and thus partially excuse, their clients’ homicidal fury. As the victims in such cases are invariably women and children, such defences have attracted a great deal of criticism from feminist scholars (e.g. Volpp 1996). By killing another 30 people*and I said this with very deliberate irony*the Virginia campus killer had placed that kind of defence out of reach. In any event, as he had committed suicide, there was no criminal case to answer. That is how I began the seminar. I then proceeded to present my paper.

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What Happened? The first respondent to my paper asked two questions. First, he questioned my (ironic) suggestion that had the campus killer confined himself to killing the young woman and her boyfriend and not shot 30 other people and himself, his defence lawyer might have mounted a cultural defence on his behalf. Referring to a different report that the killer was a second-generation Asian-American who had lived with his family in the United States for 14 years, the respondent felt it was pertinent to point out that secondgeneration migrants have difficulty relying on a cultural defence, having become acculturated into the customs and way of life of their new country. My point that from a feminist or even a humanist perspective any so-called cultural excuse for killing women*including, of course, that of the provocation defence itself*is unacceptable was completely lost on him. Second, he wanted to know about sentences handed down to battered women defendants in the United States. He thereby ignored one of my key points: namely, that given the asymmetry in the matter of who kills whom*I had informed them about the study that found that 85 per cent of ‘sexual intimacy’ homicides were committed by men*the focus in any homicide inquiry should remain steadfastly on men, not women. On the contrary, my respondent displayed no interest whatsoever in addressing either that statistical reality or the urgent need to prevent men from relying on antediluvian misogynist cultural scripts that partially excuse their homicidal violence directed at women. The women staff at the seminar also confined their questions to cases involving women who killed men. One asked what I would do about the hypothetical Asian woman who killed racist men who tried to rape her daughter. What charge and sentence did I think was appropriate for her? Recall that this was a hypothetical case, one that I had taken pains to point out served to detract attention away from the far more common case in which men kill women who want to leave them or who annoy them in some trivial way. That is exactly what happened here. Not once did anyone refer to any of the documented cases in which men killed women, or even to the recent homosexual advance cases that had taken place in New Zealand. Nor did any one express any concern whatsoever about the pathetic victim-blaming excuses men gave for killing women or the lenient sentences handed down to them. Not one was interested in dime-a-dozen femicide cases. Very familiar though I am with states of denial about men’s violence against women, and with the wide range of tactics of equivocation and erasure that can be deployed to derail any attempt to name that violence, I was flummoxed by this relentless collective effort to sideline concerns about the failure of law reformers to come to grips with the criminal law’s most notorious concession to men’s homicidal ‘passion’. Perhaps I should have known not to assume a sympathetic audience. After all, the right to be convicted of manslaughter, not murder, for killing a wayward wife had been enshrined in law for centuries. Moreover, I well knew that the she-askedfor-it cultural script still has massive currency in non-feminist circles, higher education ones included. Nevertheless, the fact that no law staff, more particularly no woman staff member, was prepared to address the critical issues that have troubled feminists law scholars and activist for so long about homicide cases, was deeply disconcerting.



Episode Two: Penile Sensitivities As it turned out, that week in April 2007 was a momentous one for media reports of men’s violence that featured female provocateurs. The day after giving the seminar paper in Auckland I returned to Australia and to front-page reports*and not just in the sports section*about two Australian Rules footballers called to appear before the AFL tribunal. One faced a striking charge; the other was charged with provocation. It seemed that a tattoo of a female form on the arm of one player had prompted the other to make disparaging remarks which, naturally, led the first to respond with a punch. I was struck by the sheer coincidence of this story and the topic for my postgraduate class in Australian social policy that evening, the controversial move to abolish the defence of provocation in Victoria. I began by telling the students about what had happened at the seminar in New Zealand. I invited them to reflect on what I had come to call ‘the conundrum’: how, given all the media exposure of lenient sentences handed down in femicide cases that had led to recent law reform inquiries, one could account for that persistent drive*afflicting women as well as men*to re-focus attention instead on the far less common case of the battered woman killer. I thought the students might find this an interesting way to conduct the class. I even dared to hope that they might embrace it as an empowering pedagogical exercise that gave them the chance to reflect on why an audience that could be presumed to be familiar with the pressing need for law reform could react so negatively to a critique of provocation cases involving male defendants. This, I also hoped, might lead to a discussion of the trials and tribulations of victim advocacy for murdered women. I was wrong. In next to no time, the classroom turned into a highly fraught space. About 18 students attended that night. Most worked full-time in the community sector. Three were men. Some of the women were feminist-identified, some not. Discussion began promisingly enough. Several women students set about the task of sifting through the key issues, one proffering the interesting hypothesis that it was easier for women to identify with women who killed men rather than with the women men murdered. Battered women killers might be tragic figures driven to extreme action after experiencing horrific violence for many years, and they might have been given long prison sentences, but at least they had survived; far better to concentrate on them rather than on the mounting pile of murdered wives. Some women engaged with the topic, others remained silent throughout, as did the male students. My contribution, based on extensive research on provocation cases, consisted of informing the students about the most common excuses men made for killing women partners. Invariably, it was alleged that the dead woman had cast aspersions on the man’s sexual prowess, comparing him unfavourably to the new man in her life. The case law was full of references to the risible provocations of women who, according to the testimony of their killers, had contributed to their own deaths by mocking their husbands’ penises, deriding their inefficiency, incompetence, small size or odd shape. One woman, it was said in court, had even laughed at her husband’s bent penis, knowing full well that this affliction had been caused by a medical condition (Howe 2004). Reading the case law, it quickly becomes apparent that, if you can believe the killers’ tales, the penis had taken quite a battering, metaphorically speaking, from cruel and disrespectful women. The case law was not the only weapon I had that night to clinch the abolitionist case against provocation. We also had to hand the newspaper reports about the footballer who had punched another one for making a derogatory comment about a tattoo on his arm.

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What actually had been said in the heat of the moment was disputed. The aggrieved player, believing he had heard something to the effect of ‘who’s that*I’d like to fuck her’, had retorted that the tattoo image was that of his young daughter as he went to punch the offender. In his evidence at the tribunal, the provocateur claimed that he had no idea that that was the case: ‘All I knew is that it was a female’ (Blake 2007). What a perfect illustration, or so I thought, straight from that day’s front-page newspaper story, that the female form is fair game, self-evidently ripe for abuse and ipso facto provocative. ‘Female’ equals fuckable object in the mind of a real man. It could not be clearer: women are ‘sex objects, with no role outside their sexuality. Sluts’ (Waterhouse-Watson 2007, 161). The students would see that at once. I had miscalculated. A male student objected to the tone I adopted when quoting the footballer provocateur, accusing me of implying that footballers were stupid. This was his sole contribution to the discussion. I explained to him that that was not my intention at all. My point was rather that the statement ‘All I knew is that it was female’ exemplified how women are held accountable for provoking men to violence. Moreover, I continued, it was this antediluvian script that was stupid, not footballers who repeated it. It was also discriminatory in an age where it is legal for women to leave unhappy relationships. The student was not only unmoved by my explanation; he later complained to the programme coordinator that my conduct of the class had been tantamount to bullying. We moved on. I mentioned the case, from the 1990s, of the first footballer to be suspended for racist abuse. Calling an Aboriginal player on an opposing team ‘a black cunt’ was enough to incur a relatively stiff penalty, four weeks’ suspension, at the tribunal. But crucially, it was the racism, not the misogyny, of the insult that drew censure. No football player has ever been hauled before a tribunal anywhere in the world for calling another player a ‘cunt’ per se. It is only a specifically ‘black cunt’ that crosses the line as a term of abuse between men. How did the other students respond to this perhaps unconventional learning experience in my postgraduate class? It is difficult to know as several remained silent throughout. Some clearly enjoyed it, one student announcing drolly that she could not recall players referring to each other as any kind of ‘cunt’ at her netball games. Others joined in with rambunctious jokes. One asked whether anyone had registered the use of the c-word in The Sound of Music. Bemused by our perplexed faces, she went straight to the punch line: ‘It’s when the nun says to Maria, ‘‘what is it you cunt face?’’’ That seemed like a good time to finish. I concluded the evening’s discussion with another football story. At the final siren of the famous 1993 CollingwoodSt. Kilda match, Aboriginal St. Kilda player Nicky Winmar lifted his jumper to point proudly and defiantly at his black body, the racism of Collingwood players and supporters having gone too far on that historic day. While that moment is now installed in anti-racist iconography, my story about being a spectator at the match had never been told before. It related to my experience of standing in the outer listening to the insults hurled at the players by notoriously abusive Collingwood fans. An endless stream of the usual suspects*‘you play like a girl’, ‘you faggot’, ‘handbag’*all met with gales of laughter until one loud male voice stopped everyone dead with this address to a player who had invoked his displeasure: ‘your mother fucked a dog with AIDS’. The crowd fell silent. Clearly, he had gone too far into the realm of impermissible speech. The episode did serve usefully to show that there are limits to sexualised speech even at football games. That, anyway, was how I told the story to my postgraduate class that night.



The course finished three weeks later. In the final class, I asked the students to reflect on what had taken place at the seminar on partial defences to homicide. What had been the unintended effect of asking them to consider why the New Zealand law academics had scrupulously avoided the question of men’s homicidal violence against women, retreating to the relatively safe haven of battered women killer cases? Why had that ‘conundrum’ taken us to such uncharted pedagogical waters? Afterwards, we went to the local pub for end-of-semester drinks. This provided an opportunity for students to voice previously unstated opinions about what had happened that night. Some described their discomfort at speaking about men’s violence in the presence of male students. To much merriment, the sole male student who joined us for drinks referred to it as the ‘cunt’ class in homage to those women students who had somehow felt liberated enough to deploy the c-word at will in the classroom. As for the male student who had been upset that, in his view, I had implied that footballers were stupid, he had absented himself from the next two classes. Over drinks, one woman student confessed that she had privately congratulated him on his bravery when he returned for the final class. Most revealingly, it then emerged that some of the women students had felt for all three male students there on that fateful night. One disclosed that she had fretted every time I said ‘penis’, such was her concern that my frequent references to much-derided penises in male defendants’ self-justifying accounts of their wives’ provocative conduct would make male students feel uncomfortable.

Episode Three: Sex, Sangria and Race Three months later, in July 2007, I gave a paper at an interdisciplinary social science conference in Granada, Spain. My topic was ‘Sex Violence Policy*Recent Law Reform Initiatives in ‘‘Domestic Homicide’’ Cases’. As my paper was assigned to one of the last parallel sessions at a conference at which it was de rigueur to present your paper and promptly disappear*sangria on balconies overlooking the Alhambra beckoned*there was just a small gathering at my session. So rather than make a formal presentation, I opted for a casual conversational format in which I told the story of what had happened on the two previous occasions on which I had addressed this topic that year. Before I had gone very far, a man interrupted me, demanding to know when I was going to start talking about the causes of homicide. I replied*politely, I was assured later by one stunned observer*that that was not my ambit and referred him to my abstract in the conference papers. He immediately jumped up and went to storm out of the room, pausing briefly to indicate to two women seated next to him that he expected them to exit with him. It is always important to ask when ethnicity is relevant not only to accounts of sexed violence but also to stories like this one about pedagogical experiences. Race is very relevant here inasmuch as the raced identity of the angry departing man and that of the two women was to impact on the discussion. He was black and dressed in a long white gown and the women he wanted to follow him also wore clothes and headscarves that were indicatively Muslim attire. When the women*who remained silent throughout the session*declined to follow him, he stormed out alone. I continued with my account of the UK Law Commission inquiry, and concluded by asking the participants to reflect on what was fast becoming, before their very eyes, a cumulative tale about strongly negative, bordering on hostile, reactions to my critique of law reform inquiries into the partial defence of provocation.

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Now it was question time. Once again, no one bothered to address any of the critical issues, although one participant tried unsuccessfully to get the group to stick to the point, that all-too-challenging point about the ease with which men get away with murder and the difficulty most people seem to have with confronting that problem. One contribution, that of a white American woman who expressed discomfort that the man had become angry and left the room, was memorable. She felt I should have done more to make him feel included, that I had failed to display cultural sensitivity. She also assumed, wrongly, that I knew nothing about the deployment of cultural defences in homicide cases. Worse, she implied that my reference to a case involving an Asian defendant was potentially racist. What, she wanted to know, justified a white woman referring to the case of the Chinese swimmer? Here my storytelling ends. Only by speaking with the American woman after the session did I gather that her ‘Chinese swimmer’ was in fact the UK Law Commission’s hypothetical Asian woman. Translating that hypothetical case into her American context, she had heard ‘Chinese’ when I said ‘Asian’. Perhaps my talk had sparked her memory of the 1988 New York case People v. Dong Lu Chen, one of the most controversial cultural defence cases. In Chen, a Chinese immigrant who bludgeoned his Asian-American wife to death avoided a murder conviction with the help of a white anthropologist who testified that traditional Chinese custom allowed men to kill adulterous wives. He received five years’ probation on the lesser charge of manslaughter. The case attracted considerable feminist commentary, none more scathing than that of Asian-American feminists who condemned Chen’s lenient sentence as sending out a message to Asian women that they had no recourse against domestic violence. Crucially, they also criticised the racialised anthropological construction of Chinese tradition as ‘backward’, pointing out that the very same excuse for men’s lethal violence against women is enshrined in the provocation defence in Anglo-American criminal law. Provocation provides white American men with their cultural excuse for killing women, but courts do not require the service of anthropologists to explain their sexed violence, it is so culturally ingrained that their women, privileged white women included, ask for it (see Volpp 1994). Such arguments against the deployment of cultural defences by minority or majority men who kill or sexually assault women and children are compelling. So are the challenges of black and Third World feminists to imperial white feminism, challenges that have informed my teaching for years (Howe 1995). As for why the disapproving American woman thought she heard me discuss a case involving an ‘Asian swimmer’, I never did get to the bottom of that. Let us just put it down to my Australian accent and leave it at that.

Reflections on Pedagogy that Went Awry I have recounted my story of a distressing pedagogical experience many times in a bid to process what happened. Turning to the critical literature for assistance, I have trawled education journals for theoretically informed insights. Certainly, I would agree with those who have been plotting the occlusion of second-wave feminism in higher education that the broader context for stories like mine is the deleterious impact of neo-liberal policies (Thornton 2006). It would be entirely plausible to read my story as a case study of the ‘sidelining of feminist thinking’ that occurs when pedagogies become ‘disarticulated from their radical impulse in the context of a neo-liberal politics of the personal’, a politics that is centred on the employable, not the reflexive ethical subject (David and Clegg 2008,



490). I would be the first to concur that the corrosive influence of neo-liberal policies can be seen at all levels of university education, and most dramatically in undergraduate courses where opposition to the teaching of feminist perspectives became more marked and strident through the 1990s (Howe 2000b). The ‘politics of resentment’ that inhibits the progressive agendas of earlier eras and fans a regressive anti-feminism is certainly in full swing in my field. So too are neo-liberal educational discourses that valorise the market and frame students as ‘forms of human capital in a competitive global market’ (Dillabough, McLeod, and Mills 2008, 306; original emphasis). And it has all occurred so quickly. Teaching my Foucauldian feminist undergraduate course on sex, violence and crime was still, in the mid-1990s, an exhilarating and enriching experience. Teaching it today to market-driven students who believe that, in a ‘post-feminist’ world, the time of any kind of feminist engagement with social issues is well and truly past is, well, another story. What about the postgraduate students and academic staff who reacted so unexpectedly to my critique of law reformers’ failure to deal with femicide cases, remaining silent, hesitatingly venturing an opinion, focusing doggedly on cases of women killers? Most were women in the 3055 age range who had graduated in an earlier ‘progressive’ era. Even if we were to grant that they too have been infected by the relentless pressure of the market to re-constitute themselves as employment-centred neo-liberal subjects, can that really account for their reluctance to engage critically with law’s complicity with men’s homicidal violence against women? And what, more particularly, are we to make of their expressed concern for the feelings of male students who might have been discomforted that I said ‘penis’ too often when discussing the case law? Surely the hegemony of neo-liberalism in the post-feminist higher education sector cannot fully account for that. After all, these women did not need my postgraduate course to help them find a critical voice. Life experiences had already provided them with ways of ‘achieving voice’ (McArdle and Mansfield 2007, 487) and they certainly did not hold back in criticising other pressing policy questions in my Australian social policy course, genderinflected ones included. Something else was at stake in their reticence and reluctance to engage femicide cases. It is here that Zembylas’s identification of negative student responses to the telling of trauma narratives in the classroom proves useful. These responses to educators’ attempts to register the inhumanity of violence through the use of trauma testimonials are, he suggests, ‘equally dangerous’. The first is ‘a sentimental reaction by students who identify with privilege and respond defensively’. This does not seem likely in the case of my women postgraduate students. The trauma narratives I told were hardly sentimentalised; no space there for sentimental reactions and none at all for a felt sense of privilege. After all, the she-asked-for-it script is universal and some students may well have been written into it in their own lives. By contrast, Zembylas’s second student response*‘an intense resentment by those who feel subordinated and may eventually get stuck in victim politics’*is a possibility. My students may well have felt overwhelmed at hearing so many provocation tales that confirmed not only the dead women’s but their own subordinated status as ‘female’. And what about the third, ‘the desensitization of the student-spectators of suffering who get irritated by the scenes of suffering in some way, refuse engagement with it or minimize its effects, mis-read it conveniently’ (Zembylas 2008, 12; original emphasis)? Does this apply? Perhaps, but this begs the question: if students were irritated by my insistent focus on the scenes of suffering in femicide cases, why, exactly, were they?

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Why the disavowals, the heavy silence around women’s violent deaths and all that fussing over the feelings of the men in my audiences? I have no definitive answer. Once I have digested all the devastating insights into the undoing of feminism in our post-feminist neo-liberal world that are made in Angela McRobbie’s stunning new book The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (2009), I might better understand disavowal as a subject position of choice for women in the face of the sexed asymmetry in the matter of who is killing whom. Abigail Bray’s brilliant recent work analysing how normative technologies of neo-liberal governmentality regulate subjectivities by producing tolerance as a ‘proper rational affect’ (2009, 174) also provides vital clues to comprehending contemporary audience receptions of scathing feminist critiques of the gender order in which we live. In her incisive analysis of the furore over the Henson photographs of young girls, Bray shows how current formations of neo-liberal tolerance of such sexualised images operate to ‘depolicise and dehistoricise heterosexual paedophilia’ and ‘the abject materiality’ of sexual relations between girls and men. Such neo-liberal tolerance, she argues, ‘depend on the exclusion of a feminist gaze from the public sphere’ (Bray 2009, 17475). The disavowal of the abject bodies of women murdered by male partners surely operates in a similar way to the disavowal of the bodies of sexually abused children, a disavowal that Bray argues convincingly is caught up in the displacement of feminist critiques of contemporary sexual politics (2009, 177). Expect disavowal. That might be the key. Also, learn to become a more restrained pedagogical self, managing representations of traumatic topics more carefully so that speaking about sexed violence feels less like edgework. Staying more alert to audience sensibilities, anticipating defended reactions to my critique of sexed homicides might help. Next time, surely, my discursive production of problematic homicides will be guided by ‘anticipated discourse reception’ (Magnusson 2004, 219; emphasis added). In short, I will try harder. But I remain committed to a pedagogical practice that ‘engages with the world through affective interventions’ and to a ‘critical emotional practice’ that starts by acknowledging that ‘enacting social justice presupposes an understanding of the role of emotion’ in unjust practices (Zembylas 2008, 5, 12), such as excusing men who kill women. The law of provocation is our most emotional law. It panders to men’s homicidal rage and jealousy, transforming vengeful and extremely brutal attacks on women into ‘crimes of passion’ and then, adding insult to injury, dresses itself up as a compassionate concession to ‘human frailty’. No wonder hearing provocation scripts in femicide cases produces complex emotional responses in women students. The trauma scene, mounting piles of dead women compounded by the relentless banality of killers’ exculpatory tales, can be simply too much to bear. Diversionary strategies such as a single-minded focus on battered women killers are sometimes all that can be managed when a teacher, wellversed in the case law, offloads onto an audience her own traumatised response to men’s homicidal violence against women. In the final analysis, such disavowals should have come as no surprise. Under conditions of masculinist hegemony, it was entirely predictable that some women would choose the path of least emotional resistance*that old familiar, well-travelled path that valorises men and men’s feelings*opting to focus attention not on murdered women but rather on the sensitivities of male students every time I said ‘penis’.


REFERENCES 2007. Selwood cleared, Headland free. The Age, 19 April. Available from www.realfooty. com.au ‘Blood on their hands’*Angry students attack university’s delay. 2007. New Zealand Herald, 18 April. Available from www.nzherald.co.nz BRAY, A. 2008. The question of intolerance: ‘Corporate paedophilia’ and child sexual abuse moral panics. Australian Feminist Review 23 (57): 32341. ****. 2009. Governing the gaze: Child sexual abuse moral panics and the post-feminist blindspot. Feminist Media Studies 9 (2): 17391. BYRNE-ARMSTRONG, H., M. CARMODY, R. HODGE, R. HOGG, and M. LEE. 1999. The risk of naming violence: An unpleasant encounter between legal culture and feminist criminology. Australian Feminist Law Journal 13: 1337. CAVARERO, A. 2000. Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood. London: Routledge. DAVID, M., and S. CLEGG. 2008. Power, pedagogy and personalisation in global higher education: The occlusion of second-wave feminism? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29 (4): 48398. DILLABOUGH, J., J. MCLEOD, and M. MILLS. 2008. Introduction: In search of allies and others: ‘Troubling’ gender and education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29 (3): 30110. HOWE, A. 1994. Provoking comment: The question of gender bias in the provocation defence*A Victorian case study. In Australian women: New feminist perspectives, edited by N. Grieve and A. Burns. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ****. 1995. White Western feminism meets international law*Challenges/complicity, erasures/encounters. Australian Feminist Law Journal 4: 6392. ****. 2000a. Homosexual advances in law: Murderous excuse, pluralised ignorance and the privilege of unknowing. In Sexuality in the legal arena, edited by D. Herman and C. Stychin. London: Athlone. ****. 2000b. Law out of context (or who’s afraid of sex and violence in legal education?). Alternative Law Journal 25 (6): 27478. ****. 2002. Provoking polemic: Provoked killings and the ethical paradoxes of the postmodern feminist condition. Feminist Legal Studies 10: 3964. ****. 2004. Provocation in crisis*Law’s passion at the crossroads? New directions for feminist strategists. Australian Feminist Law Journal 21: 5577. ****. 2008a. Sex, violence and crime: Foucault and the ‘man’ question. Abingdon: RoutledgeCavendish. ****. 2008b. ‘Yes, minister, sex violence has failed’*It’s time for sex, violence and crime in a postmodern frame. In Sex as crime, edited by G. Letherby, P. Birch, K. Williams, and M. Cain. Collumpton: Willan. ****. 2009a. Addressing child sexual assault in Australian Aboriginal communities*The politics of white voice. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 4161. ****. 2009b. R. v. Wunungmurra: ‘Culture’ as usual in the courts. Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 16369. LAW COMMISSION (UK). 2004. Partial defences to murder. Report on a reference under section 3(1)(e) of the Law Commissions Act 1965. Report no. 290. London: Law Commission. ****. 2006. Murder, manslaughter and infanticide. Project 6 of the Ninth Programme of Law Reform. London: Law Commission.


BLAKE, M.

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ADRIAN HOWE 2004. ‘Voice potential’: Language and symbolic capital in Othello. In Shakespeare and language, edited by C.M.S. Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MASON, G. 2000. Managing homophobia. In Anatomies of violence: An interdisciplinary investigation, edited by R. Walker, K. Brass, and J. Byron. Sydney: Post Graduate Arts Research Centre and the Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney. MCARDLE, K., and S. MANSFIELD. 2007. Voice, discourse and transformation: Enabling learning for the achieving of social change. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28 (4): 48598. MCROBBIE, A. 2009. The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social change. London: Sage. PEOPLE V. DONG LU CHEN No 87-7774 (NY Sup Ct Dec 2 1988). POTTER, S. (dir./prod.). 2008. An Ordinary Man. Auckland, New Zealand. Funded by the Screen Innovation Production Fund, New Zealand. Website available: http://www.anordinary person.com THORNTON, M. 2006. The dissolution of the social in the legal academy. Australian Feminist Law Journal 25: 3. VICTORIAN LAW REFORM COMMISSION. 2004. Defences to homicide: Final report. Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer. VOLPP, L. 1994. (Mis)identifying culture: Asian women and the ‘cultural defence’. Harvard Women’s Law Journal 17: 57100. ****. 1996. Talking ‘culture’: Gender, race, nation and the politics of multiculturalism. Criminal Law Journal 20: 1573617. WATERHOUSE-WATSON, D. 2007. All women are sluts: Australian Rules football and representations of the feminine. Australian Feminist Law Journal 27: 15562. ZEMBYLAS, M. 2008. Trauma, justice and the politics of emotion: The violence of sentimentality in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 29 (1): 117.


MAGNUSSON, L.

Adrian Howe teaches Australian Social Policy and Sex, Violence and Crime at RMIT University. Her books include Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge, 1994), Sexed Crime in the News (Sydney: Federation Press, 1998), Lindy Chamberlain Revisited: A 25th Anniversary Retrospective (Sydney: LHR Press, 2005) and (with Maureen Cain) Women, Crime and Social Harm: Towards a Criminology for the Global Age (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008).