On Violence and On Violence Against Women [Paperback]

A blazingly insightful, provocative study of violence against women from the peerless feminist critic.

Why has violence, and especially violence against women, become so much more prominent and visible across the world? To explore this question, Jacqueline Rose tracks the multiple forms of todays violence  historic and intimate, public and private  as they spread throughout our social fabric, offering a new, provocative account of violence in our time.

From trans rights and #MeToo to the sexual harassment of migrant women, from the trial of Oscar Pistorius to domestic violence in lockdown, from the writing of Roxanne Gay to Hisham Mitar and Han Kang, she casts her net wide. What obscene pleasure in violence do so many male leaders of the Western world unleash in their supporters? Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence?

On Violence and On Violence Against Womenis a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.

Jacqueline Roseis one of the worlds leading feminist literary and cultural critics. She is codirector of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, cofounder of Independent Jewish Voices, and a fellow of the Britsh Academy. Rose is a frequent contributor to theLondon Review of BooksandThe Guardian, among many other publications. She is the celebrated author ofSexuality in the Field ofVision,The Haunting of SylviaPlath,Women in Dark Times, andMothers.

For all that Rose reveals, her book might be most intriguing in its strictures and refusals . . . She shies away from cheap pathos and struggles to avoid turning victims into figures of timeless suffering . . . For all her attraction to unruliness, Roses own sentences are cool, almost enameled in their polish and control.
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