Reviewed in this essay:

Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan by Allison Alexy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Unexpected Subjects: Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the Law by Alessandra Gribaldo (HAU Books: Society for Ethnographic Theory, 2021)

Feminism, Violence, and Representation in Modern Italy by Giovanna Parmigiani (Indian University Press, 2019)

Reviewed by Pooja Satyogi, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi

In a recent article, “Intimacy and the Politics of Love”(2022), Perveez Mody, discusses the emerging scholarship on romantic love and companionate marriage, with its focus on what she has poignantly called “the uneven distribution of the intimacy grid” (Mody 2022, 273). In this grid are also scholars studying the form and impact of the dissolution of relationships; domestic violence and spousal struggles; caring for children and older parents amid familial breakdowns; brokenheartedness, despair and longing; seeking intimacies later in life, to name a few. The set of books I discuss below are related thematically on intimacies; my own interest is to draw out the non-settling expanse of linguistic struggles that frame the intimate grid. I argue that linguistic struggles do not just bounce off laterally as a form of political overcoming—now victims, now survivors; now object, now subjects/agents—but crucial to these movements are “state effects” that inflect why we are drawn into modes of representation. I do not need to rehearse Timothy Mitchell’s (1998) very well-known discussion on the economy, state, and the household; the three books under discussion poignantly delineate the simultaneous struggles that inhere in the interiorization/ exteriorization of the intimacies of representation (Parmigiano) and representation of intimacies (Alexy and Gribaldo).

In Intimate Disconnections: Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan (2020), Allison Alexy introduces us to contemporary Japan, where a consideration of divorce among men and women has become the context through which the normativity, appeal and the prospects of intimate relationships are being thought through (2020, 3-4). The earlier stability in the marriage form was enabled through the post-war Japanese politics of reconstruction that secured salaried work for men and restricted women’s entry into it. Alexy traces a longer history of Japan’s modernization program with the 1868 Meiji Restoration, which created the “stem family or ie” and “concurrent household registration or koseki,” enabling the tracking of all citizens through familial membership that records any or all changes in the family composition and identity, including divorce (ibid, 90-91). With the gradual disappearance of the ie system and post war modifications in the koseki system that required records only up to two generations connecting a family, there was a cementing of the idea of a normal Japanese family: a male headed family. Favorable intimate spaces and domesticity was enabled for the salaried men by bolstering a gendered division of labor through informalization of women’s employment, incentivizing marriages through ‘family allowance’ only for men and a supportive tax structure in which a dependent spouse, in a low paying job, enabled the husband to get better tax benefits (ibid, 42-44). Emotionally disconnected and dependent intimacies, then, were the model of a “normal, unremarkable, and evidence of a healthy marriage” in Japan till the 1990s (ibid, 47-48).

Marriage remains a desirable option for Japanese men and women, such is the powerful symbolism of the koseki system even today, but it is possible to read significant changes in the form of marriage aspirations. Alexy quite beautifully delineates how a neoliberal Japan has disabled work stability and other guarantees to make up for decades of recession. An important change in political articulation of the citizen that accompanies neoliberalism everywhere in the world is privatization of the responsibility for the self, and Japan did not remain untouched by this rhetoric. From changes in labor hiring towards greater informalization, to privatizing the Japanese Post Bank, to a push towards cultures of audit, Alexy tracks how these structural adjustments have, perhaps inadvertently, fostered newer conversations about intimacies themselves (ibid, 52-53). A 2007 legal enactment enabled divorced women to claim up to half of their former husband’s national pension. This law, Alexy argues, has provided marginal financial support to older women who want to leave their husbands, leading to a new phenomenon in Japan known as “later-life divorce” (ibid, 5). Although accounting for less than 3% of all the divorces in the year 2015, they have nonetheless opened conversations about the expectation in marriages of connected intimacies. 

It is also quite remarkable that in contemporary Japan, legal processes of divorce do not enable negotiations and arbitration; rather, these must be exhausted before moving the application for mutually consented divorce. Unlike protracted negotiations that have become the hallmark of alternative dispute resolution in divorce and custody battles in many parts of the world, Alexy shows how the family court system in Japan enforces the belief that divorces ought to be settled within the families, even as the family’s production is intimately tied to that of the modern nation. Close to 90% of the divorces in Japan around 2015, Alexy shows, were uncontested divorces (ibid, 85). Despite the persistence of stigma and the possibility of impoverishment, it is women who are likely to both initiate divorces and bargain with husbands. Husbands, Alexy contends, often take a lot of time in getting persuaded, their resistance stemming largely from domestic privileges they have enjoyed from a sexual division of labour. These recent trends notwithstanding, Alexy finds that divorces do not make people express “political frustration with heterosexual marriage” and that marriage as an ideal continues to find resonance in Japan. Set adjacent to popular and media discourses on the many representations of Japan’s society without bonds, this ethnography enables thinking separation itself as being generative of different forms of ‘potential interactions, coping tactics, and affinities’ (ibid: 176).

Here, then, is an account of how states foster styles of intimacies that may become part of national planning and, also, a history of feelings and personal choices that are intimately connected to and reflective of broader transformations, which are, nonetheless, not teleological transitions. Intimate disconnections is a fascinating study of not just how marriages end through divorce, but the place of discourses about divorce on intimate practices. The strength of Alexy’s work lies in her stories, particularly of older men and women, working out the anxieties and fall outs of what later life-divorces foreclose and/or open. 

In Unexpected Subjects: Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the Law (2021), Alessandra Gribaldo interrogates the intersections between intimacy, dependency, and ambivalence with legal regimes of proof and evidence in domestic violence cases. Her context is contemporary Italy, where she contends campaigns concerning violence against women are still in their nascent stage. For instance, it was only in 1996 that rape became a crime against a person from being a crime against morality (2021, 47). Gribaldo contends that it is important to understand that domestic violence has a distinctive history with law in Italy when compared to that of sexual violence, with the focus being on creating shelters for women rather than changing the law. The law itself, article 572 of the Italian Criminal Code, which deals with partner violence (abuse of family members and live-in partners) stipulates mandatory prosecution so that the ‘trial goes ahead even if the woman retracts her statement’ (ibid, 38). The Code also calls for clear evidence of the violent acts in question to be repeated over time, failing which they are referred to other articles of the code, which may attract a less serious charge and penalties (ibid, 39). The family member abuse trials privilege the victim’s testimony, which is enough in incriminating the defendant and can constitute the basis for a conviction. In other words, in domestic violence cases, there is a reason to believe that the victim’s testimony occupies a central place, argues Gribaldo (ibid, 38). It appears, therefore, that Italian law has overcome the problems that exists in many places, the inadequacy of testimony and/or political unwillingness to prosecute spousal aggressors being important among them. So, a different combination—mandatory prosecution, even if the woman retracts her statement; central place given to the woman’s testimony; shelters for women—point towards all things good for the procedural purists. Take pause, is what Gribaldo asks of us.

Gribaldo draws attention to the twin aspects of the burden of proof, which are evidence and persuasion. In the first instance, evidence is to be read via reconstruction of facts based on what any victim has to say about her experience and the second is how judges’ need for persuasion of the testimony relies on how authentic its performance is by the victim. Since evidence itself needs to be ‘free of human intention’ (ibid, 100), Gribaldo argues that in cases of intimate violence, the twin components of proof are in a ‘relationship of intractable contradiction’ (ibid, 71). Persuasion, when read with the elevation of victim testimony means not only that victim’s experience of violence is transparently available to her but, also, that a clear and linear accounting can be made intelligible to law (ibid, 72). In the Italian context Gribaldo wants us to note that the place of the shelter is to be understood as being thoroughly enmeshed within the folding out of the legal field. Although Italian women may retract charges, continue to live in shelters and take assistance from the lawyers working there to evaluate their choices, social service managers work with the givenness of legal proceedings for the continued use of services (ibid, 42-43). The implications for victims then are that they not only have to prove themselves to be credible and ‘conscious’ victims (ibid, 44), but also it also means having to take publicly recognizable stands with evidentiary requirements of proof and persuasion. Gribaldo poignantly leads us into asking whether bringing all the ambivalences of intimacy to bear upon the charges of violence, when men’s motivations in using violence are inconsequential for the court, means that intimacy itself is on trial, which then makes possible a juridical order judging the authenticity of a lived life itself (ibid, 99). Speaking violence, then, is both caught in the context of being something already well known as say, gender violence, and yet being able to say anything gets trapped in the regimes of truth-telling that weigh upon moral interiority (ibid, 89, italics in the original). Is the Japanese model of coming to the state only after private battles have been fought privately, then, better or is this a poor comparative question? The Italian legal system assumes that since women may retract their charges, their silence or ambivalence counts less and, therefore, the state needs to come in to ensure mandatory trial. And yet, as Gribaldo argues, the lack of recognition is not procedural alone, but that the juridical cannot be without its production in the sense that the interpretation of what gets counted as violence will continue to run up against linguistic accommodation in all legal fora.

I place Giovanna Parmigiani’s Feminism, Violence and Representation in Modern Italy: “We are Witnesses, not Victims” (2019), sideways to the discussion thus far. Parmigiani’s work follows the formation of a new political subject, which we are told began to appear in Italy in 2008, with the formation of the Union of Women in Italy (UDI) and its national campaign against ‘sexed violence’ (Parmigiani 2019, 49; Parmigiani 2020). At the heart of the subject of ‘sexed violence’ is the newness of the ‘women’s question in Italy’ itself, which Parmigiani argues is different from the feminist politics of ‘sexual liberation and self-determination’ of the 1970s and 1980s (Parmigiani 2019, 15). The formative moment of ‘sexed violence’ is tied to the recognition of ‘femicides’ or femminicidio (killing of women) of which there had been 774 cases between 2012 and 2017 alone. In 2017, Law 119/2013 also known as the Law on Femminicidio was passed, which continues to be contested among Italian feminists (ibid, 15).

Interpreting killing of women as ‘sexed violence,’ the new political consciousness, Parmigiani contends, is about a “‘community of sense’ that gathered not around shared ideas on who a woman is or should be but on shared feelings and affects linked to being actual or potential objects of violence” (ibid, 15, italics in the original). Parmigiani’s fieldwork, conducted between 2011-16, was in the Salento region (southeastern part of the Italian peninsula), which has a vibrant history of unionization by women tobacco workers and of also macare (being witches). The Salento UDI took on macare in their own title (UDI Macare Salento) as also signifying an understanding of women’s marginality. It is through inscribing the past to the present— appropriating and resignifying macare-ness—that a broad feminist sensorium, Parmigiani contends, is being built and developed in Salento. This notwithstanding the limits that inform Italian feminism more generally today.

Parmigiani informs us that Italian feminism is less than ‘intersectional,’ with exclusions around ‘migrants to transexuals, from transgendered to persons with disabilities’ (ibid, 62). Inclusion could include ‘economic,’ she argues, since there was some workers’ unrest in the feminist movements in Italy today. Further, Parmigiani notes that the public engagement with the violence against women that femminicidio has enabled is also caught in an inward struggle over representations of violence against women. The struggle for representation that Parmigiani follows with Salentine activists is a movement contesting “common-sensical representations of women-as-victims” to women-as-witnesses (ibid, 62).

The struggle over representation manifested, for instance, in how a public awareness campaign was organised in 2013 on the International Day against Violence against Women at Campidoglio, the headquarters of the municipality of Rome, in partnership with a private company ENEL Sole, which provided projectors and generators to illuminate the slogan “Stop Violence against Women.” This projection used a hand as a symbolic marker of putting an end to violence. The conversation among Salentine activists, Parmigiani informs us, was about whether a feeble, feminine, angular representation of an open hand used in the projection, conveys an assertive position and whether the awareness programme needed to be called out for leading an advertising campaign for ENEL Sole, all the while undermining the struggle that feminist organisations faced in putting violence against women on the Italian landscape.

Femminicidio as a “battleground for their representational struggle” (ibid, 107), is also an internal movement which, following Foucault, Parmigiani calls ascesis or even autopoiesis. To illustrate this argument, she draws out links between art and political activism. We are introduced to Rina, an activist in her fifties, who maintains a “feminist persona” on Facebook by organising events, sharing political positions, publishing reflections, and, also, judging other women’s senses of the political (ibid, 205). We are told that online and offline persona do not add up neatly necessarily, but it might be possible to infer that social medium, “which engages with the (construction and performances of the) personal in a public way, translated into an ideal locale for these political activities” (ibid, 208, italics in the original). In this part of the text, the descriptions become lighter and lighter, and the conceptual scaffolding begins to come apart. I am willing to be persuaded that online activism or any activism might be riddled with contradictions, but the work that Parmigiani leaves out is precisely what about this political activism may be best understood as ascesis or autopoiesis. For instance, how might we read the work of self on self through digital activism, especially since Parmigiani calls Rina an activist who maintains a feminist persona?

Elsewhere, Parmigiani charts the fantastic growth and struggles of a counselling center for women who suffer violence, called DNA Donna, to being recognised by the municipal authorities in Soleto, with an assigned public space. Parmigiani describes a conflict between DNA Donna and the local officers of a national workers’ union that was seeking help from DNA Donna to set up a help desk for the “tutelage” of women (ibid, 131). The difficulty here was precisely about representation of women, with DNA Donna insisting that women did not need tutelage at all. We are amid a context, which Parmigiani explains very well, where mobbing or workplace harassment, with considerable overlap with sexual harassment spread through the Italian public sphere in the 1990s. Although recognised by Italy’s state health institution as a possible cause of work-related illnesses, the dominant trope through which it circulated was ungendered and moral violence. Parmigiani’s argument here is that mobbing as an ‘ethically superior’ form of violence became the dominant explanatory model of workplace conflict and ended up shadowing the often-sexual nature of harassment at workplace (ibid, 131-32). In so far as mobbing created an undisputed category of ‘worthy victims,’ there continues to be in Italy, she argues, some traction in retaining women’s representation as “victims…powerless, passive, and pushed around by the malevolent agency of others to the point of being physically and emotionally damaged” (ibid: 134). To assert back against this subjectivation of women as victims continues to involve considerable work by the DNA Donna.

The struggle in the realm of the politics of representation and against violence continues in the Italian context and these dimensions of political activism, Parmigiani argues, are unfolding in the realm of becoming to imagine and affirm poetic ways of being women. Whether we necessarily want to call these practices forms of ascesis, I remain less convinced of, but I am persuaded about the need for more inclusive political configurations that are cautious of their own potential of/for ossifications. Thinking with Baxi (2014) and Das (2019), I will end with a provocation on witnessing—dissolution, violence, representations— to ask how and with what interpretive labour are internal and external resistances to be confronted. Das explicates diathesis alternations of the verb, here witnessing, in two ways. One, as action that is performed for the self , for instance, how, following Gribaldo, a worthy victim of domestic violence needs to be a credible witness of her own story or how, following Alexy, persuasion is itself a form of witnessing, in the long waiting time that the husband could take to agree to a separation.  Second, as action that is performed for others, Parmigiani gives an account of witnessing through the politics of representation/s and feminist futures. In the semantic class of feminist politics, it is seldom the case that internal and external resistances are in sync and perhaps the texts under discussion, read together, are a reminder of why Juliet Mitchell calls women, the longest revolution.

References Cited

Baxi, Pratiksha. 2014. Public Secrets of Law: Rape Trials in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press

Das, Veena. 2019. “A Child Disappears: Law in the Courts, Law in the Interstices of Everyday Life.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 53 (1): 97–132.

Mitchell, Juliet. “The longest revolution.” New Left Review 40 (1966): 11-37.

Mitchell, Timothy. 1998. “Fixing the Economy.” Cultural Studies 12 (1): 82–101.

Mody, Perveez. 2022. “Intimacy and the Politics of Love.” Annual Review of Anthropology 51: 271–88.