“There’s Girls Who Can Fight, and There’s Girls Who Are Innocent”: Gendered Safekeeping as Virtue Maintenance Work

Women routinely practise taxing safety strategies in public, such as avoiding unlit spaces after dark. To date, scholars have understood these behaviors as means by which women bolster their physical safety in public. My in-depth interviews with women in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia suggest t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lennox, Rebecca A. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2022
In: Violence against women
Year: 2022, Volume: 28, Issue: 2, Pages: 641-663
Online Access: Volltext (kostenfrei)
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Summary:Women routinely practise taxing safety strategies in public, such as avoiding unlit spaces after dark. To date, scholars have understood these behaviors as means by which women bolster their physical safety in public. My in-depth interviews with women in Greater Vancouver, British Columbia suggest that, much less than reliably enhancing women’s safety, safety work often exacerbates women’s fear of violent crime and unreliably mitigates their exposure to violence. I thus interrogate the protective function of gendered safekeeping and reconceptualize women’s safety work as virtue maintenance work, theorizing that women practice risk-management in public places to attain the ontological security associated with evading subjectivities of gendered imprudence.
ISSN:1552-8448
DOI:10.1177/1077801221998786