What do we talk about when we talk about violence towards women?
This is a question worth asking at a time when conversation, dialogue, and speech are promoted as our central strategies for changing how women live and die in South African.
For talk, in of itself, is not automatically transformative.
Indeed, it is entirely possible to be both concerned by violence and to speak in ways that reproduce and uphold the norms that make violence possible.
Take the repeated calls on men to stand up, man up, and protect women and children.
Not only do these exhortations collapse women into children, but they also resurrect a particular vocabulary of patriarchal authority.
This is a language whose roots extend deep into the 19th and early 20th centuries when women's delicate constitutions and fragile natures required them to be shielded from the rigours of thought, exercise and work.
Once cast in such defenceless and enfeebling terms, they could only but rely on men's exercise of their paternalistic duties. And where women were without protectors, they were often simply treated as fair game by other men.
Protectionism also functioned as a convenient tool for the domination of other men.
In colonial contexts like South Africa, white men's duty to protect white women's virtue was frequently used to curtail and control black men's movements and work opportunities.
This is the history we invoke when we draw upon the language of protectionism.
But even if we try and update protectionism for the 21st century, it will still rely on conservative gender ideologies that position women as perpetual victims and men as their guardians.
Changing this requires a change in the ways we speak about violence – shifting our language from women's protection to women's freedom, a freedom that includes both freedom from violence, as well as the freedom to live, work and love as one chooses.
Originally published by myself at huffingtonpost