Against Silence as Violence: De- and Re- centering Gender-based Violence through Intersectionality as Interconnectedness

Abstract

The aim of this contribution is reconstructing the complex path of intersectionality as an approach enriching and enlarging the conceptual framing of Gender-Based Violence (GBV from now onwards) through a concurrent analysis of multiple forms of inequalities, oppression and discrimination, usually silenced and (made) invisible. Such a reconstruction will consist of three steps.

First, the reconstruction of the peculiar path of intersectionality, from practice and activism to theory and back, until the official entry in the OED in 2015 (Perlman, 2018), more than two decades after its appearance in literature (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991).

Secondly, intersectionality allows to go beyond the sole GBV, at once de-centering and re-centering the role of gender by a series of affiliated motives/origins of violence and oppression. It is not a matter of listing multiple sources of inequality, rather the way multiplicity is framed through accumulation, intersection and interlocking, as well as “asking the other question” as critical method (Lutz, 2024).

Third, intersectionality as a concept will be re-framed looking at the weight and violence of classification systems and their consequences: inclu-exclusion, orphanage and infrastructural violence based on “layers of silence”, torquing of individual and collective lives, and marginalization of borderlands and multiple vulnerabilities (Star and Strauss, 1999; Bowker and Star, 1999). If silencing the margins can worsen GBV, mapping and giving them a voice (Hooks, 1984) can trace a path to enhance strategies of prevention and care.

Silence is a form of communication (Watzlawick Beavin and Jackson, 1967), largely unavoidable and unintentional. However, it can be a powerful and opaque form of violence, especially in complex information infrastructures (Bowker and Star, 1999). As silence constructs otherness and invisibility, its violence can take multiple forms as well, as in the enforced cancellation of DEI policies at the beginning of Trump’s second term (Ng et al., 2025).