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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bunting, Annie, 1964 editor. | Lawrance, Benjamin N. (Benjamin Nicholas), editor. | Roberts, Richard L., 1949 editor.
Title: Marriage by force? : contestation over consent and coercion in Africa / edited by Annie Bunting, Benjamin N. Lawrance, and Richard L. Roberts ; foreword by Doris Buss ; afterword by Emily S. Burrill.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005089| ISBN 9780821421994 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821422007 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821445495 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Forced marriageAfrica. | Child marriageAfrica. | Marriage customs and ritesAfrica. | Womens rightsAfrica.
Classification: LCC HQ691 .M354 2016 | DDC 306.84096dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005089
Foreword
DORIS BUSS
Marriage, perhaps more than any other social institution, highlights the complexity of violence against women. As this volume demonstrates, both marriage and violence are situated in a complex spectrum of practices and classifications. Their intersection at the point of forced marriageand its association with violence in armed conflicts on the African continenthas brought to the fore difficult questions about how sexualized forms of harm, as well as their enmeshment in social practices such as marriage, should be understood as harms and as wrongs. These questions are difficult because they require disentangling the complicated relationships between social structures, particularly those presumed to be essential and foundational, and the continuum of violence against women. At what point is marriage forced? What constitutes coercion? How do physical, cultural, and economic relations structure the ways in which some forms of coercion are visible and others are not?
Feminists have long made the case that violence against women, particularly in the context of war, needs to be seen as part of a continuum where the spectacular forms of violencesuch as rape in war or the targeting of schoolgirls in Nigeria, Uganda, or Pakistanare linked to mundane daily acts of violencesuch as street harassment, employment inequality, or intimate partner violence. But the continuum of violence is surprisingly difficult to see. This volume highlights some reasons why. The chapters assembled here provide close readings of different country contexts and varied historical periods to tease out the ways in which the spectacular hides the mundane. The analyses in these chapters help to reveal the ways in which social structures and norms are positioned as so essential and enduring that we lose sight of just how variable, changing, and historically contingent they actually are.
This collection provides the sort of historically informed and finely grained analysis needed to go beyond the spectacle of contemporary imaginings of forced marriage, to disentangle the very ideas of force and marriage and the conditions needed for the two terms to be brought together in a single sentence. Issues of consent and conjugal union emerge here as long-standing preoccupations of colonial rulers; as social dramas in which changing expectations about labor and control, both within and outside the family, are worked out; and as contexts for the contestation of different discourses about girls, women, and the meaning of justice.
A historical focus provides a rich unpacking of consent and conjugal union, where both emerge as dynamic, multivalent concepts over multiple country-specific case studies. The complex historical approach also insists that we pay attention to the moments of stasis, the legal and social dramas where ideas about marriage and rightness seem to fix and cohere. If we want to understand specifically how the spectacular hides the mundane, then we need to look at these moments that often appear in the form of legal disputes. The frozen in time quality of law, for all its limits, also provides a productive vantage from which to examine some of the currents, tensions, and discourses through which the wrongs of forced marriage materialize at some moments and in particular ways. Attending to social dramas and their legal contexts provides a basis from which to explore the why and why now questions. Why and in what terms are marriage and consent emerging as issues of concern, at this point in time and in this way?
It is significant that international criminal law is a key site where contemporary concerns and framings of forced marriage are unfolding. International criminal law, though it tends to offer a comparatively ahistorical understanding of conflict and its harms, is also an important arena for expressing the hopes of a more (gender-) equal future and one that might be secured through transitional justice. The various legal and bureaucratic institutions built around securing this transition make the task of unraveling the harms of forced marriage particularly urgent.
Naming and officially recognizing gendered forms of harm are essential to any postconflict transition, one where political, social, and economic institutions are reconstituted. Identifying gendered harms is necessarily linked to the ways in which the postconflict future is imagined and the terms of public life and citizenship established. In this context, it is more imperative than ever that we bring a complex, historically informed, close reading to the terms by which concepts of force and marriage are understood.
NOTES
. Doris Buss, Performing Legal Order: Some Feminist Thoughts on International Criminal Law, International Criminal Law Review: Special Issue on Women and International Criminal Law 11 (2011): 40923; Fionnuala N Aolin, Emerging Paradigms of Rationality: Exploring a Feminist Theory of Harm in the Context of Conflicted and Post-conflicted Societies, Queens Law Journal 35, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 21944; Aolin, Advancing Feminist Positioning in the Field of Transitional Justice, International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 2 (2012): 20528.
. Nancy Fraser, Rethinking Recognition,
