Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published widely on sex, gender, sexuality and masculinity/ies, and on Marx, Engels and Marxisms. His latest books are Marx in the ‘Classic Thinkers’ series for Polity Press (2018), and Masculinities, Gender and International Relations for Bristol University Press (2022).

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The following ‘Epilogue’ was written as an English-language postscript to a truly remarkable book in Spanish: ¡Hasta mi mamá! by Monserrat Sepúlveda. The book documents a unique feminist engagement: one man volunteers to listen to, and at the end respond to, ‘the women in his life’ who ‘tell it like it is’ about the harassment, abuse, violence, indignities, subordinations and patronising put-downs they have experienced in their lives. 

Getting a man to listen to testimony from those he knows and loves breaks all the boundaries that hetero-patriarchalist-masculinity engrains in men, however they ‘personally’ feel about it. This man, after such harrowing testimony, has to think what to say in response. 

The publisher decided to modify the structure of the book so as not to include an epilogue at all, so a Spanish-version of the text below was not prepared. The book will be published by Libros del Amanecer in Santiago, Chile, in 2023.

Epilogue

This book begins in just the right place: with a man listening to women. But note that Alejandro has agreed to this, so he had a choice, and opted in. The default option – for men – is not to bother, or rather, why would I? Listening to men is one thing, listening to women is quite another. This whole situation is highly unusual, quite apart from the topic.

This situation is unusual, not simply because ‘the floor’ here belongs to women, but because men – or at least the one – are meant to listen, and to listen in a certain way. They are meant to take what’s said seriously, to empathize, and to think about it, to change their thinking, or at least consider it. They are used to this from other men, and with regard to the kinds of subjects that normally come up in that ‘monosexual’ context. But this situation is quite different.

It’s all through the looking glass in this book, plunging men – or at least one – into the opposite of a wonderland. Suddenly a lot of uncomfortable ideas become weirdly real and so much clearer. On this side of the looking glass, gender isn’t just a binary, and it doesn’t locate us unequally. Gender is already a hierarchy, and it locates us in a relation of domination and subordination. What is unequal here isn’t women with men. It’s an inequality of power within which subordinates cannot be leveled up. In order for that to happen, dominators must be leveled down. So rather than a wonderland, for men this reversal is an inversion, the power-hierarchy turned upside down. What would that be like?

Being a man subordinated to other men isn’t unusual. It’s the way that masculinity works: ‘nested’ hierarchies of winners and losers, engaged in competitive struggles to rise to the top, necessarily pushing others down a rung, down a peg or two … they are losers, so there can be winners. It’s easier to see inequalities of power in that single-gender, masculinised and masculinising, context. It’s far more difficult, and indeed contradictory, to understand gender as a hierarchy of domination (by men) and subordination (for women), yet somehow an equalizable situation. If, indeed, very many men are seriously invested in that idea in the first place.

If we subtracted the gender-binary from the power-structures of society, and considered ‘human’ as the operative category, then equalizing power-relations among humans might start to make sense. Or rather we might start to consider what power-flows among humans construct the human condition, how we feel about that, and indeed what is to be done. There are all different kinds of humans, or rather we understand humanity through differences that are constantly evolving. And through those differences some people construct flows of power at the expense of others. In this push-pull situation a concept of equilibrium probably makes more sense than one of equality. Looking back through time, and still having regard to the present, it is evident – to feminists anyway – that the equilibrium in human power-relations has settled in a very skewed way, and that pushing back on this is very hard work.

The opening scenario for this book – a man listening to women and taking them seriously – is at odds with some of the language through which the interlocutors within the text try to make sense of the power-dynamics that are the issue. That kind of misapprehension is not an accident. The gender-language here comes from the United Nations, international tribunals, academic agencies, commonsense and real life – all of which is dominated by men in their ‘nested hierarchies’. In those hierarchies, organizations merge with structures, and structures merge with masculinity/ies. Or rather those structures constitute the instructive scripts, and the disciplinary practices, through which the binary domination of masculinity over femininity, men over women, is made to ‘make sense’. Or else.

What sense, then, does ‘gender-based violence’ actually make? Violence has commonsense referents, albeit with less well defined ‘grey areas’, such as psychological and structural attributions. Gender is most often, in contemporary discourse, a reference to, or even a synonym for, women and things associated with them, stereotypically. How women actually are, as individuals or even as a group, doesn’t figure against that stereotypical ‘wisdom’. Or rather that ‘wisdom’ tells some humans what to do, how to be, which box to tick … and take the consequences. Gender, gendered and gendering are also flags for feminist thinking about what men have called ‘the woman question’. This book, and a few others, have turned the tables on that.

Can ‘gender-based violence’, then, be women’s violence against women? Obviously not, or rather that isn’t what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about here is men’s violence against women. The narrative memoirs collected in this dialogical book are an important contribution to the documentation that has only recently been allowed. Until recently there was no need to censor or prohibit these accounts – because they weren’t of much interest to readers, academics, publishers, who were mostly men. As a group, men had, and still very much have, far more money, power and influence than women, notable women notwithstanding. And notice how few of them there are, and how variable is the rate of change. We don’t often see these harrowing accounts, because men find it easy to overlook women and what they say, to be uninterested in taking women seriously, to be quite happy with women’s subordination and marginalization. Men are used to the world that way.

Why then does ‘gender-based violence’ (GBV) take center-stage over ‘violence against women’ (VAW)? Note that even with VAW we’re still not naming men. Obviously men don’t want that kind of publicity as a group, and from that perspective, a few ‘bad apples’, ‘bad hats’ and ‘bad guys’ are neither here nor there. Wash out the stain and it’s all squeaky clearn.Even if secretly ‘bad boys’ are admired, sensationalized, fetishized and fantasized. 

‘Gender-based violence’ is such an interesting locution because it is so contradictory. If gender usually references women, how then can the same word also reference men? Could it possibly be applied to men’s violence against men? Discursively, for men, the solution is to expunge the apparent contradiction – what’s a woman can’t be a man – and to locate the violence, not in women, which is barely thinkable, but in something other than men. 

Anyway, if and when there is women’s violence against women, how much of a problem is that – for men? As a matter of empirical and unmistakable fact, men are far more violent personally, and have far more chances to make far more violence, than women. All of these structures are dominated by men, even if – under pressure – they admit women to the masculinizing processes that legitimize the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of the means through which violence takes place. And, by the way, this includes bare-knuckle assault.

In both GBV and VAW men’s violence against women disappears into an abstraction ‘gender’, where evidently it is ‘based’. That paradoxical ‘grounding’ of violence in an airy abstraction really does the trick. The violence against women under consideration here can’t really be about men – it must be about something abstract, something immaterial, something structural, some agency that you can’t really see. The testimony in this book definitely suggests otherwise, however, and one hopes that more than one man is listening to the voices in the text, and taking women more seriously – anywhere everywhere – as a result.

Anyway the abstraction here that is really relevant isn’t actually mentioned. It is an unnamed, unreferenced, sacred and sacrosanct, visible-in-plain sight reality – heterosexuality. Heterosexuality is what makes sense of gender as a binary and as a hierarchy – as much as it does. The dialectic of desire, the political economy of ‘opposite sex’ relationships, the rituals of birth, marriage and kinship – notwithstanding same-sex variations on those themes – provide a matrix of intelligibility through which the important things in life are promulgated, regulated, celebrated, recorded, memorialized and commemorated. Women experience all these power-plays rather more viscerally than men, or if not, they are commonly made to – by men. It’s men who control the choices that they allow women to have. And it’s women who, over the years and rather more recently, have had some successes in pushing back the power-hierarchy, and taking back control, or anyway for some that’s the idea. To do that they have to confront men. And that is not without risks.

What this book does is to give readers experiential detail that men find it easy to be incurious about, thus to ignore, and that seldom comes out in public in the written word as directly as it does here. But readers are going to be confronted with a challenge. Where there is domination there is violence, because violence is the terror through which subordination can be assured. Or rather, since subordination is fragile, a terrorizing program of random and unpredictable violence is constantly required to keep it going. It is that kind of terrorism that is documented in this book.

Suppose that heterosexuality made sense without masculine domination and feminine subordination. What sense, would the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ then make? How would eroticism and desire work without that particular power-differential? Or rather, what would have to be expunged from the current matrices of intelligibility for a non-violent, non-dominating, truly egalitarian sexuality to make sense? The first thing that would have to go would be the ambiguity-creating, and male-exonerating, locutions of ‘gender’ through which the realities of male power – over females and over each other in ‘nested hierarchies’ – are made to disappear. Gender has a proud history as a foundational concept for feminist struggle. But it can also be a useful device for creating the fog of war.

‘Nested hierarchies’ among men and masculinized individuals are important because they are structures of complicity, as well as aggression. And they are structures of a difference that is quite radical and utterly binary, or so it is made to appear. That binary emerges very clearly in the way that this volume has been put together. The women involved are very puzzled in trying to understand why men take so little interest in their thoughts and feelings, not to mention their personal security, and find it so easy to excuse themselves, and of course each other. They are keeping their power-hierarchies in place, in relation to each other and in relation to women. This activity does not require anyone’s intention, necessarily. In fact it hardly requires any thinking at all, hence this volume has – in my experience – a radicalism that is unique.

Men have a lot of listening to do, a conclusion that clearly follows from the disturbing and troubling content of this book. Within the structures of masculinity and masculinization men have zero incentive to do this. All the incentives are to marginalize women and not take them seriously. There are few, if any places in the world that officially categorize men’s violence against women as a particular kind of crime. And even if they do, there isn’t anywhere that registers femicide as something other than yet another homicide. In homicide cases most perpetrators, and most victims are men – by far. Moreover it is those violent activities which are iconic for the super-iconic warrior-masculinity through which the nation-state is celebrated. And if not actually performing as warriors in armies, men are waving flags and celebrating faux-violence as sport. Lately they are allowing, even encouraging women to do the same, in armies, on teams, even in business and commerce. Perhaps at some point tokenism and inclusion will hit a tipping point, and women will be positioned to do the talking, and men the listening. At least in some areas, some of the time. But it is far from clear that that is what’s going on. Conversely it is quite likely that many men suspect the great inversion might be coming, hence there are daily activities of resistance. Those activities are what this volume documents.

Somewhere in the gender-mix warriors were supposed to be protectors – of ‘womenandchildren’, to borrow the feminist parody of any number of instructive stories, international laws and everyday practices. How then, and why then, do men do so much violence to women? Answer: they give themselves permission for all kinds of reasons, and women have a hard time pushing back to get their excuses exposed as inadmissible. This book is an important contribution to that latter activity.

Acknowledgements

Cynthia Enloe, Seriously! Investigating Crashes and Crises as if Women Mattered (University of California Press, 2013).

Terrell Carver and Laura Lyddon, Masculinities, Gender and International Relations (Bristol University Press. 2022).

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK, and Research Associate, SA UK Bilateral Chair in Political Theory, University of the Witwatersrand. His research and teaching bring together discourse and visual analysis; studies in sex, gender, sexualities and masculinities; and decolonising approaches to the political economy of contemporary great-power politics.

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Anglophone political economy has for some time tracked the financial circulations of Chinese investment, particularly in the selection of nation-state ‘partners’ on the African continent. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is thus portrayed as a new player in the great-power imperialisms of exploitative commercial enterprises through which capitalist modernity arrives, whether local people like it or not.

Characteristically this kind of ‘development’ is welcomed by some, who see the national future, and in many cases their own personal gain, aligned – at whatever level of wealth or poverty – with Chinese money and power. And of course there are those who resent and reject these ‘opportunities’, treating them as ‘throffers’ – threats you can’t really refuse.

That pattern of state-driven aggressive and extractive commercialism dates to the fifteenth-century era of voyages and conquests. These ‘exploratory ventures’ have been recorded as such in heroic anglophone histories of industrialised modernity and swash-buckling derring-do. However, in the last few decades the dial has turned from celebration and exculpation to excruciating exposé and mumbled apologies.

The international settlements at the close of World War II (itself a great-power ‘Allied’ historiographical construction) set out a decolonising/nation-building requirement that was enforced on some empires, notably the British and French, but also on the remaining Spanish and Portuguese ‘possessions’. Any number of those political processes are still on-going and disputed at any number of levels, and there are many struggles defying any simple West-East or South-North framing.

Some of these ‘loose ends’ are major geo-political threats, as anglophone and similar perceptions style them, e.g. the Korean peninsula, where the ‘Cold War’ continues. Others are easily marginalised as dots-in-the-ocean, e.g. Falklands/Malvinas. Réunion. There are a number of self-legitimated continuing colonisations, a status where the Falklanders overlap with Bermudans, for example. Because these ‘hangers-on’ stall the postwar decolonising agenda, the politics of these places annoys the UN.

There are also ‘conflict zones’, where the withdrawal of colonial forces allows and encourages other domestic and regional interests, whether bent on irredentism, colonialism or liberation, e.g. Western Sahara, Madagascar. Anglophone historiography characteristically locates colonialism and its consequences well outside Europe and North America, though this geographical binary should be resisted: Ireland and Bosnia-Herzogovina are also in the colonial legacy. Colonialisms are processes, rather than places.

This pattern of power-struggles, which are always internal/external in relation to the nation-state/inter-state political framings, has played out across the African continent. And it is much the same set of stories that eurocentric histories locate in Thucydides as a point of origin: rival colonial powers fought each other via sponsored factionalism within and over their colonial enterprises.

Today’s supposedly non-colonial great powers – in the global politics of the G7/G20, IMF, NATO, Davos and similar hierarchies of wealth, power and military might –  are now stuck on the horns of three dilemmas: crimes against humanity for genocidal conquests; charges of inhumanity in pulling armed forces out ‘prematurely’ and creating power-vacuums; well substantiated allegations that ‘aid’ programs and ‘trade’ agreements enforce economic and political dependency.

Returning briefly to the fifteenth century, when imperial policies in China, Japan and Korea enforced increasingly heavy restrictions on trade with ‘outsiders’, and when the ‘opportunities’ afford by exploratory voyages were wound up by imperial orders, we set the scene for the apparently sudden twenty-first century appearance of ‘China in Africa’.

But what are we actually looking at? The Chinese government, the Communist Party of China (CPC), and their attendant corporate enterprises of course value their commercial secrecy, as does everybody else in the global economies of national competitions.

However, there are economic data-bases and political studies to tell us what there is to know. Generally these are framed to suit specialist audience-interest in economics or/and foreign policy, though with the PRC the two are quite conveniently self-identified with each other.

Many other countries are quite content to have their ‘internal’ disputes on both counts – economic policy and foreign policy – aired in the international anglophone press. And they are also prepared to apologise and ‘reform’ when unauthorised downloads and whistle-blower-leaks reveal their shabby secrets to the world.

However, the PRC/CPC drums up domestic strength by playing the ‘strong China’ and ‘no disrespect’ cards, drawing very easily on local historiographies of national humiliations, foreign occupations and horrendous invasions. From that perspective Japan as an imperialist power falls into the same bracket as Britain, France and Germany, as do the Americans, given their adoption of Formosa/Taiwan as their protectorate.

Moreover the PRC/CPC has no difficulty when it is constructed as a ‘threat’ to current economic/political strengths elsewhere in the ‘global order’. Playing the great-power game suits the PRC entirely, so becoming a threat to the biggest – the USA – is just the job. And China is well versed in divide-and-rule. Since 1978 their unprecedented and meteoric rise up the OECD index has resulted in large part from careful management of trade agreements, e.g. with Germany and Japan.

So far, so conventional. But is this the whole picture? What else is going on here? To get another view we need to get outside the usual boxes – way outside the boxes.

Paul Amar (2021) directs the queer eye very straight at our target. His article ‘Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family in Wolf Warrior 2’ is an essay in ‘eversion’, that is, getting outside the box to look back in and thus see a different and complementary set of dynamics. Nodding to his prize-winning book (2013), Amar focuses on the ‘the archipelago of the PRC’s shipping, mining, and medical projects’, most particularly on the African continent (2021: 419).

However, what Amar fixes on isn’t conventional anglophone or similar ideas of ‘Africa’, which notoriously erase the diverse realities and histories of any number of struggles, projects, cultures, languages and communities that are situated on or near an enormous continent. Rather he fixes on how official Chinese culture constructs an ‘Africa’ in order to support its geo-political ambitions for influence and profit.

Unsurprisingly, but perhaps rather weirdly, China’s ‘Africa’ resembles the long-normalised tropes of ‘western’ colonisers. Those imaginaries and locutions are now highly suspect, at least to some anglophone audiences. In that light they are patronising, racialising, sexualising, infantilising and on down the line to dehumanising. But the Chinese tropes are also interestingly updated.

Understandably this isn’t what one sees in the statistical measures of geo-economics, nor what one views on the news or documentary media channels. In his article Amar shows us how Chinese commercial cinema makes ‘Africa’ visible for the home audience by using an uncritical genre: the blockbuster action-adventure, male-dominated, blow-shit-up, two-hour mainstream/malestream movie.

A straightforward, voice-over propaganda documentary covering Chinese ‘development’ policies and ‘humanitarian’ interventions in ‘Africa’ would have limited appeal, especially to China’s youthful millions. In a rapidly commercialising, high-tech/high-consumption, internationally oriented society the ‘modern’ generation – from the PRC’s perspective – is at risk. What better way to consolidate the national narrative, ethnic identity and moral mission than to present it in blockbuster mode?

Suffice to say the Chinese heroes’ shoot-em-up-bang battles with ‘white mercenaries, corrupt Asian businessmen, and local pirates’, undertaken as their brave warriors are ‘saving Africa from a ravaging pandemic’, is – for me, anyway – pretty much unwatchable (Amar 2021: 419). What Amar’s analysis of the movie shows us is how important ‘gender, race, and sexuality’ are to policy-makers in getting their messages across. To achieve that, they need to play on emotion-driven credulity and fantasy-driven desire.

Against that visual and aural onslaught, viewers would require considerable repression of their love for adventure, exoticism, danger, drama and cliché in order to generate any kind of critique. Academics can do that, but obviously the CPC presumes that semi-captive audiences won’t be so successful.

What is striking here is how successful anglophone and similar academic cultures are at excluding this kind of material, and that kind of approach, in the first place, however ‘critical’ their approach.

Amar’s article doesn’t present everybody’s ‘race, gender, and sexuality’, either. His ‘de-imperial queer analysis’ exposes ‘utopian gender and sexuality plots’ lurking ‘within seemingly conventional heteronormative or patriarchal popular-cultural texts’. Through this lens we see, within the movie, ‘a homoerotic model of rogue or “wolf” governmentality’, a ‘gendered haunting of supremacist humanism’ through which China protects the ‘right kind’ of rebels, and a dramaturgically legitimated queer kinship system of cross-racial adoption and bromance (Amar 2021: 420-421).

All this politically driven ‘Wolf Warrior’ queerness is of course safely displaced onto an ‘Africa’ of dramatic vignettes, and framed throughout as a very foreign adventure. Hence in no way could the movie be a cross-racial, multi-cultural, super-progressive template for anyone to imitate back home.

What, then, is the upshot of Amar’s explication de texte for anglophone readers? His analysis should make them even more suspicious of the ‘humanitarian-medical interventionism’ that passes regularly through parliaments and congresses in the richer nations, or alternatively in the same forums then gets subjected to budget cuts and spend-it-at-home subterfuges. And in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this yo-yo ‘us vs them’ debate resurfaces in very justified allegations of vaccine-hoarding and profit-seeking at the expense of poor nations and thus individuals.

That on-off binary framing, though, fails to speak to the more basic issues of political economy and cultural domination through which global inequalities have arisen – and are worsening – in the first place. Amar’s article exposes this very clearly, by taking anglophone readers abroad to China’s ‘Africa’. The article isn’t a critique of the PRC/CPC – it’s a critique of whiteness, where whiteness happens to look Chinese.

And the upshot for readers in and near the African continent? Most will have lived this great-power politics already, as objects within an imperial gaze, and subjects within an imperial context. No doubt it matters somewhat from which direction this comes, but not as much as each side would have it.

Works Cited

Amar, Paul. 2013. The Security Archipelago: Human Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Amar, Paul. 2021. Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family in Wolf Warrior 2. Feminist Studies 47(2): 419-49.