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Violence, Vulnerability, Precariousness, and Their Contemporary Modifications

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Abstract

This paper is a survey of a number of women scholars who, during the last 20 years, have made extremely valuable contributions to the meanings and interpretations of the terms ‘violence,’ ‘vulnerability,’ and ‘precariousness.’ Each scholar (Sally Engle Merry, Grace Marion Jantzen, Ann V. Murphy, and Pamela Sue Anderson) has proposed in-depth insights that demonstrate that the terms they have examined can be reconfigured in more constructive and less definitive ways. In their respective pertinent observations, they have challenged the existing negative theories that associate violence with weakness and vulnerability with anger. Even though there are critics who have found fault with these authors’ proposals, the impact of their studies has had revolutionary repercussions.

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Notes

  1. Sally Engle Merry, Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective, 1.

  2. Jeremy Carrette and I edited two posthumous publications of Jantzen’s writings: Violence to Eternity (2009) and A Place of Springs (2010). Both books were collections of essays along the lines that Jantzen had intended.

  3. Merry, Gender Violence, 1.

  4. Merry, Gender Violence, 3.

  5. Merry, Gender Violence, 15.

  6. Merry, Gender Violence, 2.

  7. Merry, Gender Violence, 1.

  8. Merry, Gender Violence, 2.

  9. Merry, Gender Violence, 19.

  10. Merry, Gender Violence, 20.

  11. Grace Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, 56.

  12. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, 81.

  13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 10–11.

  14. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 146.

  15. Jantzen, A Place of Springs, 185–86.

  16. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, 4.

  17. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, 4.

  18. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, viii.

  19. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, viii.

  20. Jantzen, The Foundations of Violence, viii.

  21. Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 7.

  22. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 8.

  23. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 25.

  24. Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics Derrida (1990), 97–192.

  25. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 1.

  26. Butler quoted in Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 80.

  27. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 80.

  28. Butler quoted in Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 82.

  29. Butler quoted in Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 72.

  30. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, xiii; Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 71.

  31. Ann V. Murphy, ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism,’ 580.

  32. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 80.

  33. Butler quoted in Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 80.

  34. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 81.

  35. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, 120.

  36. This article of Pamela Sue Anderson’s will be published as ‘Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,’ ed. Nick Bunnin, in Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson, ed. Pelagia Goulimari, in this special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (2020), forthcoming.

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Correspondence to Morny Joy.

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Joy, M. Violence, Vulnerability, Precariousness, and Their Contemporary Modifications. SOPHIA 59, 19–30 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00767-8

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