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Birgit Sauer: The State as an Intersectional and Gendered Relation of Violence

Friday, November 25, 2022, 09:00 - 10:00

Feminist scholars have been pointing out since the 1970s that the state is not neutral, that it is not an expression of the common good, but that it is patriarchal. State power, then, not only organizes gender binary, but the modern state emerges from gender relations. Its institutions are characterized by hierarchical gender binary. With the emergence of modern state administrations, institutions, and norms, other relations of inequality were inscribed into state power – production and class relations, heterosexual structures of privilege, ethnicized and racialized structures of inequality. 
The lecture will first develop an understanding of modern statehood that goes beyond the state apparatus and also understands the state as a contested strategic field. It is in contestations in this field that intersectionally gendered state institutions, administrations, and norms emerge. The state can be conceptualized as the condensation of intersectional gendered relations of domination. 
Moreover, and this will be explained in the next step of the talk, the modern state is a gendered relation of violence. After all, in these struggles over statehood, notions of separation of public and private and of non-intervention of the state in the supposed private sphere, i.e., the delegation of the power of disposition of the head of the household over the privatized household members, have become inscribed in the architecture of the state. 
In the final step, I will reflect on perspectives for change: This expanded understanding of the state not only allows us to understand the violent nature of the state with respect to intersectional gender relations, but also opens up perspectives of agency, that is, of change in and against the state. However, this potential for change is limited – the integration of women, e.g., into state institutions does not guarantee a gender-equal transformation of the state, but it does provide a position in the state field of contestation and struggles.