Feeling ontologically (in)secure: States,traumas and the governing of gendered space

Globalisation, modernity and ontological (in)security

As noted in the introduction to this special issue (Kinnvall and Mitzen, forthcoming), scholarly interest in ontological (in)security has followed a more general ‘emotional’ or ‘affective turn’ in the social sciences (Clough and Halley, 2007; Turner and Stets, 2005). However, as Hutchison and Bleiker (2008) have argued, there are surprisingly few studies that systematically study how emotions matter in concrete political settings..] Work on ontological (in)security constitutes an important exception in this regard, whether from a more state-centred (Mitzen, 2006; Roe, 2008; Steele, 2008) or society-centred (Croft, 2012; Kinnvall, 2004, 2006; Rumelili, 2015) perspective. Ontological (in)security is intimately connected to emotions – not because people are by nature security seekers, although fear and anxiety reduction are often related to a search for stability as will be discussed later – but because ontological (in)security is grounded in temporal and spatial emotional structures through which individuals, societies and states make sense of themselves and the world around them. As such it is difficult to separate ontological (in)security from forces of modernity and globalisation.

The strong reactions to the Delhi rape-case cannot be viewed apart from gender, modernity and globalisation, as protests have challenged aspects of tradition, religion and notions of masculinity. However, as indicated in some of the responses to the rape there is also a valorisation of the traditional among large subsets of the society in which the West and Westernisation are discursively constructed as evil forces that corrupt Indian women (and some men). At heart is the myth of a common, essential and ahistorical origin where women and girls are constructed as the preservers of a ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ tradition, religion or ethnic culture (Yuval-Davis, 2008). A stark example of this phenomenon in India is the many recent attacks on young women in the information technology-capital of Bangalore as their economic and political independence is being resented by far right BJP-activists. The mere presence of these single women in the midst of the city is challenging traditional notions of womanhood and has created anxieties among many conservative males in the Bangalorean society.

So how are these events related to notions of ontological (in)security? Considering the history of the concept in psychology, a discussion of ontological (in)security cannot be divorced from ideas about globalisation and modernity. Critical of the inhumanity of late-modern societies, Laing (1960) writes of the range of threats to ontological security that arise from the often engulfing and impinging character of conventional social structures, and of the coldness of alienated social relations that commodify and depersonalise individuals. Giddens (1991) proceeds from Laing’s work but is careful to introduce an aspect of ontological security that has to do with basic trust and the mutuality of experience (Zarakol, 2010), thus making more explicit the relational aspects of the term. To Giddens, modernity is ‘inherently globalising’ (1990: 63, 77), marked by the world-capitalist economy, the nation-state system, the world military order and the global information network. Modernity contains globalising institutions that allow for separation of time and space, and the ‘disembedding’ of social relations, defined as ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across definitive spans of time–space’ (Giddens, 1990: 21).

There are a number of problems with Giddens’ approach to globalisation and modernity, not least the first being reduced to the latter but also his distinction between modernity and tradition, which leaves little space for their co-existence in time and space. Giddens also leaves entirely unexamined what exactly ‘non-Western’ might mean in a modernised world (Barker, 1999). In addition, there is in Giddens’ account of globalisation (similar to many other globalisation scholars, e.g. Bauman, 2001; Beck, 2008), a tendency to view the local as being predominantly the victim of the global – whether in economic, political or cultural terms. This is problematic in a number of respects, not least because of its emphasis on temporal and spatial linearity in which homogenisation and universalisation are privileged over fragmentation and hybridity (Kinnvall, 2006). The focus on modernity as a linear process is thus invariably linked to a politics of risk (Beck, 2008), and to the existential effects of economic liberalisation (Giddens, 1991; Scholte, 2000). The aim has been to understand risk as a social and psychological construction in which global neo-liberal policies affect individuals in their everyday lives.

Despite providing some excellent analyses of contemporary global conditions, many of these studies lack a specific gender focus and one can ask, as has Carla Freeman, why so many of the major accounts of globalisation in the social sciences have been ‘systematically bereft of gender analysis when we have by now so many excellent accounts of the central role played by gender in the configuration of global production and global consumption when addressed at the “local” level?’ (Freeman, 2001: 1008). Freeman argues that macrostructural models in general, or ‘grand theory’, have been implicitly rendered masculine while the local has been gendered female. Freeman’s observations point to a need to take seriously globalisation as a particular kind of gendered space in which new forms of global femininities spawn suspicion and wariness towards women’s increasing physical independence. The difference between more traditional accounts of globalisation and a focus on globalisation as gendered space lies in the very questioning of the empirical circumstances at the local level in which the relationships between space, movement and gender are interrogated. As such, gendered space is a process through which social systems maintain the organisation of powerful hierarchies based on assumptions about masculinity, femininity, and privileges (Hearn, 1998; Horton and Rydstrom, 2011).

Proceeding from the Delhi rape-case it is clear that such assumptions provided a powerful rationale for the rape itself in which the attackers and their lawyers justified the rape on the basis of decency in terms of women’s movement. The girl should not have been out in the evening without proper guardianship, one of the attackers claimed, and ‘had she not resisted, she would not have been killed’ (India’s Daughter, 2015). However, the Delhi rape did not occur in a vacuum. The victory of the Hindu right in the 2014 Indian election under the BJP-leadership of Narendra Modi, has spurred a number of inquiries into how this gendered space has worked to institutionalise gendered insecurities in BJP-dominated states. A number of reports and scholars have noted how attacks on minority women are not a side effect, but central to the project of the Hindu Right which in BJP-ruled states is also a project of the State. In Gujarat, human rights organisations have clearly established that the massacres of Muslims in 2002 in which some 2000 people were killed, countless women were raped and 200,000 displaced, were sponsored by the state (Human Rights Watch, 2002). This is likely to continue under the leadership of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. The image of Modi as a man of progress and development, an anti-corruption market-oriented figure, who envisages the future of a glorious India that is no longer pushed around on the global stage, represents both the male Hindu warrior and the saviour of mother India (Wilson, 2014). Promising to protect India from the ‘pseudo-secularism’ of the Congress Party, Modi provides an ontological narrative to a masculine state that is able to assert itself both internally and externally. His open rejection of the English-speaking elite in India becomes a way to improve Hindu pride in the light of Western dominance and resentment toward the upper classes.

In this sense, resentment constitutes a fundamental aspect of globalisation as gendered space. From an ontological security perspective focused on state narratives and actions, resentment is intimately connected to anxiety and fear – anxiety in terms of losing national control in the face of the state, but also fear of ‘the feminine’ – of weakness and repressed emotions. ‘Fearing the repressed’ questions common assumptions in the literature to automatically link fear to an immediate threat (a source of danger). Rather, fear may arise from situations that do not threaten those who fear them in any meaningful way. Hence, global, international and national political structures (governments, organisations, parties, legal systems, and so on) are interwoven with ‘structures of feeling’ (Barbalet and Demertzis, 2013). Such political emotions are inherently (but not exclusively) relational and social: they are produced on the basis of asymmetrical figurations of power, and are triggered by considerations that make a reference to other people, institutions or states. As noted by Demertzis (2014: 228): ‘fear, hope, gratitude, anger, vengeance, disgust, awe, trust, distrust are only some of the extant affective reactions within a polity’. These structures of feelings constitute ways of ordering the local in relation to the global, often by positioning those at the margins into an area of gendered space that serves to maintain existing hierarchies and hegemonic narratives. The search for ontological security is thus not only a reaction to modernity, as Giddens and others would have us believe, but is also signifying the emotional dimension of power as being co-constituted in the narrative and institutional relationship between individuals and the state. The core of the problem is how to conceive of these structures of emotion at the collective and state level as something more than the sum of the individuals, without committing psychological reductionism. This will be discussed in the next section, which deals with the ontological, and especially emotional, aspects of securitising subjectivity at different levels of analysis.

Escaping the ontological trap: ontological (in)security and narrative

According to Giddens (relying on the object-relations theory developed by Winnicott), subjectivity derives from intersubjectivity, and learning the qualities of others is connected to the earliest explorations of the object world and with the first stirring of what later become established feelings of self-identity. It is here, that Giddens most explicitly states that trust in others is at the origin of the experience of a stable external world and a coherent sense of self-identity. Here, Giddens argues that in the past, the particularities of time and space merged with religion and mythology to create a ‘privileging of place’ that could provide personal security and ‘rootedness’ in the world, or at least security against the anxiety of identity crisis (Giddens, 1991: 26). With the advance of modernity a number of dislocating tendencies became, according to Giddens, manifest in the search for this loss of culture, religion or stable structures making individuals and groups long for past securities.

As is the case for globalisation and modernity, there are a number of problems with Giddens’ conception of self and identity. For one there is little or no differentiation between the two, thus overlooking that identity is a collective and changeable phenomenon that is not equivalent to the sum of the individuals. But also the assumption that ontological security – in terms of security of being – rests on the idea of a reflexive self. Hence, rather than contextualising self and others as inherent in structural and psychological power relations, Giddens’ (1991) belief in individual reflexivity is rooted in clear assumptions that social agents are in command of some implicit knowledge and self-understanding regardless of their social and political context. By submerging self and identity (self-identity), Giddens also runs the risk of ignoring multiple subjective identifications as spelt out in much psychoanalysis in terms of unconscious fantasy and repressed desire and thought. As Frosh (2014: 60) has argued: ‘the subject believes itself to be an active conqueror of the domain of otherness, consuming its gifts in order to strengthen itself; but it is also at the mercy of the Other, dependent on it, unconsciously infiltrated and knocked off course by it, tied to it by processes of desire and need, yet always fighting against this awareness’.

This is not to deny that both individuals and groups can believe and even feel a strong sense of self – a security of being, that is, ontological security – and that such a self is assumed to be connected to certain feelings of identity. The search for unitary, consistent and singular identities continues to play a crucial part in the linear narratives that people and groups construct in order to make sense of their selves. As the countrywide protests in Delhi seem to illustrate, there exists among large parts of the young middle-classes a profound sense of existential anxiety as they attempt to reconcile a rapidly changing and increasingly global society with the legacies of patriarchy. In this sense the protests cannot be interpreted as a sudden self-realisation among Indian men for gender equality, but must be seen as a search for a secure ontological position in face of a transition process that has opened up space for increased mobility across class, caste and gender, while simultaneously being caught in the realities of underdevelopment, corruption and unchanged patriarchal practices.

Understanding the psychological consequences of this kind of structural disordering is in many ways fundamental for appreciating how ontological insecurity and existential anxiety can result in the search for one stable identity – the securitisation of subjectivity – regardless of any actual existence of such an identity. To avoid psychological reductionism or essentialist readings of this process, it should be emphasised that securitising subjectivity is both a psychological and a structural process. In other words, just as structures cannot be understood in objective terms as a denial of the reality of subjects, so it becomes difficult to understand group action without having a reference point in the subject (Kinnvall, 2012). People and groups use ‘emplotted’, (often) causal narratives to make sense of their position in the world and through this they construct their identities and experiences (Bamberg, 2011; Somers, 1994). These narratives allow a group or state representatives to relate to other people or states and provide the means to distinguish ‘them’ from a collective ‘us’, thereby contributing to ‘our’ claim of unique identity (Billig, 1995). In working upon available discourses and narratives, we routinely reproduce, justify, critique, or negate social relations through our utterances and writings (Andrews et al., 2015; Kinnvall and Nesbitt-Larking, 2011). Thus, careful attention to narratives facilitates an understanding of how both the political mind and the political society come to be interwoven and mutually constitutive.

A narrative approach to identity and identification allows us to interpret the search for security, the securitisation of subjectivity, in relational terms in which everyday interactions and norms are reproduced to create a sense of order – what most ontological security scholars refer to as routines (see Mitzen, 2006). When order is disrupted, some of us may feel threatened and at loss while others are able to cope just fine – both depend on the particular position (of power) in which we are situated. Some of the most significant master narratives of ontological security involve ideas about nationhood, culture, religion and gender (Andrews et al., 2015). Such narratives tend to rely on a constructed, gendered and idealised nostalgic past intermeshed with discourses of national (physical and cultural) survival in the light of rapid change and economic insecurity. Interpreting narratives in terms of gendered space thus means investigating how gender works in and through these master narratives.

In the case of India two co-constitutive master narratives have been particularly dominant during the last decade. One is the unfolding tension of a ‘war on terror’, while the other refers to a more long-standing socio-economic and political marginalisation of Muslims. Both have increased the physical and psychological distance between Hindu and Muslim communities. In the case of Hindu nationalists, such ‘othering’ has relied upon the projection of some common myths or themes onto the other, in this case the Muslims. For instance, in response to the Muslim League’s insistence on a separate nation state, Muslims are depicted as responsible for the partition of the ‘sacred’ Hindu homeland in 1947. Although Muslims (today) constitute only 14 per cent of the population, India is the second largest Muslim country in the world – counting over 112 million people (Kinnvall and Svensson, 2010).

Hindu nationalists have hailed this number as a threat to the Hindu majority as Muslims tend to act as a vote bank (Kolodner, 1995). In the construction of the Muslim ‘other,’ Muslims are recurrently referred to as not truly Indian – as potential collaborators with neighbouring states and transnational Islamist groups. Events, such as the Moghul invasion, the partition, Indo-Pakistani wars, and attacks against the parliament and the city of Mumbai are linked together to form what Volkan (1997) has referred to as ‘Chosen Traumas’ of Muslim defiance. This preoccupation with the Muslim other has tended to define most interpretations of Hindu nationalism. The role of gender has been crucial to this process – especially as manifest in narratives of the ‘Nation as Mother’. Narrating the ‘Nation as Mother’ – a common theme following criticism against Indian politicians for failing to protect Indian women after the rape-case had been made public – has thus been an important source of ‘authenticity’ for Hindu nationalists. The female, as Tanika Sarkar (1999) has noted, is portrayed as the origin of nation-making, and of freedom from repression by external others (i.e. Muslim, Christian, and also Western forces). As illustrated through the initial quote on Bharat as the ‘real India’ – a gendered space in which Indian women can find protection through the realisation of a Hindu state, a Hindu Rashtra – such realness is constructed in both spatial and temporal forms as having existed before the ‘invasion’ of the Muslims and before the colonisation by the British. Implicit in the struggle between the pre-colonial and the colonial nation is the idea that the Hindu nation is also an amorphous female (the Nation as Mother) who through her absorptive power is able to threaten both the aggressive Muslim male and the rational Western male in the encounter (see Inden, 2000: 86–87).

This idea of gendered nationhood intersects with more general ideas of ‘motherhood’ as signifying the local dimension of gendered space in India. First, women’s ability to bear children, especially sons, is used to signify their role in producing citizen soldiers ready to defend ‘Mother India’. Second, as caregivers, women are portrayed as socialisers of future warriors by transmitting culture, rituals and nationalist myths to the next generation (Bannerjee, 2003). And, finally the role of ‘Hindu motherhood’ becomes an instrument for shaping political rhetoric and political emotions in ways that serve to further polarise nationalist conflict – especially as this role is contrasted to Islamic women as ‘demographic bombs’ that threaten the Hindu nation at its core. In this sense gender has been instrumental in the search for a secure Hindu identity in the light of global change and modernity, as well as in relation to local resentment to powerful elites and under-development. This gendered dimension is often overlooked in much work on ontological security but is crucial for understanding the particular form norms and routines take in shaping narrative interpretations of individual and state behaviour.

The renewed impact of Hindu nationalism in India can thus be interpreted in the light of these narratives as the protesting youth are manoeuvring between a hinduised gendered space and a liberal, albeit increasingly corrupt, global order. The gang rape in Delhi has increased a sense of crisis in the Indian society in which narratives of a hegemonic gendered order are being interrogated if not changed. Within such a crisis or in response to traumatic events more generally, the search for security takes many shapes as it is related to performances and to securitisation. This is at heart a politics of fear in which exceptional rule (swift retribution and death penalties in the Delhi rape-case for instance) is being called for as social order is interrupted. In the following section, we turn to this interplay between a politics of fear and traumatic events to show how these are perhaps not just extraordinary events but also traumatic everyday occurrences that normalise patriarchal dimensions of gendered space.

Crisis and trauma: gendered space and the performance of ontological (in)sesurity

A politics of fear is often related to traumatic events. Traumatic events tend to disrupt continuity and generate powerful emotions, such as a heightened sense of vulnerability and a dread of the unknown. The significance of these events can become exacerbated through difficult life conditions and other structural uncertainties, such as, for example, intense economic problems, major political turmoil or rapid cultural change (Staub, 2005). Trauma exposure can cause a rupture, and can bring about a state of being stuck in the ‘fixity’ of the trauma (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, 1995). Here I will argue that trauma has a social dimension (Erikson, 1995; Eyerman et al., 2011). It can result from a constellation of life experiences, from a persisting condition, as well as from singular events. Trauma can create community, a sense of belonging, by setting those affected apart from others.

Viewing trauma as a persistent condition, not only as a singular event, makes it possible to understand everyday gendered violence as a form of trauma and to reinterpret the Delhi rape as symptomatic of the everyday, the normal, in which women’s bodies are not only violated but where such violation is justified in terms of a hinduised order of society. Viewed as such, trauma becomes another way to describe the extraordinary that is yet so ordinary, the ontological insecurity inherent in unequal and patriarchal power structures. What happened in Delhi may have been perceived in terms of an extraordinary occurrence, as something exceeding representation and beyond our everyday experiences, thus signifying occasions that are so shocking that they disrupt our previous understandings of how the world is constituted. However, the events in Delhi can only be partially interpreted in these terms. Rather, they were significant of a more enduring global pattern of securitisation of women’s bodies in which physical and ontological security merge and are played out in the battle between traditional and liberal interpretations of gendered space. The promise of swift retribution and harsh penalties becomes a way to restore faith and security to the Indian government and the nation, at home and abroad, while normalcy is to be restored by cracking down on the protesters. In the discourse of the Hindu right a return to normalcy is also focused on the outlawing of Western cultural products as these are viewed in terms of corrupting Hindu youth, as well as a return to pre-colonial values.

Hence, when looking closer at the event it is easy to see how it differs from more general conceptualisations of gendered space, and thus how this event may have a greater impact on how gendered violence is theorised. Much work on gender and international relations, despite claims of how the ordinary and the personal are implicated in the international, is focused on conflict, wars, ethnic violence and similar events as exceptional cases (see e.g. Enloe, 2000; Goldstein, 2003; Nordstrom, 2004). However, the Delhi rape-case, and its responses, puts into focus everyday violation of women’s bodies as a constant repetition of the trauma. The woman who was raped was neither in a war zone nor was it violence inflicted by police or military personnel; rather she was subjected to extreme forms of violence because she resisted to being confined to the patriarchic order in which she lived (Parashar, 2013). These everyday violations are not usually included in agreed-upon traumas, like war and genocide, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, car accidents or other common experiences. As Laura Brown has noted, these agreed-upon traumas are often regarded as disruptions to ‘male human experience’ or as experiences common to both men and women. ‘Public events, visible to all, rarely themselves harbingers of stigma for their victims, things can and do happen to men – all of these constitute trauma in the official lexicon. Their victims are rarely blamed for these events’ (Brown, 1995: 100–101). The ongoing trauma of gendered insecurity, in comparison, puts emphasis not only on the psychic dimension of trauma, but also on the subtle manifestations of trauma as closely connected to hegemonic narratives of the state and its representation throughout society – not least a tendency to blame the victim herself as the Indian case informs us. A focus on the gendered dimension of trauma thus ‘draws our attention to the lives of girls and women, to the secret, private, hidden experiences of everyday pain’ which ‘reminds us that traumatic events do lie within the range of normal experience’ (Brown, 1995: 100–101).

Viewing female violations as an ongoing trauma highlights how gendered space can represent more or less permanent feelings of ontological insecurity in which structures of emotions play many roles. As such, it challenges Giddens’ tendency to clearly distinguish between routine situations and critical ones, in which routines are said to constitute the core of ontological security, which are disrupted at times of critical situations. According to Giddens, but also many ontological security scholars (see Kinnvall and Mitzen, forthcoming), such routines are organised by the specific rules and resources that are embedded in particular institutional and social settings. Critical situations, in comparison, involve those instances when the certitudes of these institutionalised routines are threatened or destroyed (Giddens, 1991: 61). However, this disjuncture between normal, routinised order, and the exceptional, critical order, cannot be as easily bracketed if we consider trauma as ongoing. The state of permanent ontological insecurity is thus as much a psychological as a structural process in which the routines themselves act as a continuous threat.

To exemplify our argument, we can look at how the bodies of Muslim and Dalit (what has been referred to as ‘untouchables’) women in India – two of the most marginalised groups in the current state structure – often become pawns in competing narratives of the secular state and religion. There are nearly sixty million Muslim women in India, but despite this number Muslim women remain largely absent and silent in the world of politics as well as in the professions, bureaucracy, universities and public and private sectors. At the same time they probably constitute the most politicised group in the Indian context. Not as women in their own right, however, but by being subsumed and then made visible in the debate about minority rights versus minority appeasement, personal law versus uniform laws, secularism versus communalism and modernity versus communitarian traditions. The state government, as Hasan (2000) notes, has thus succeeded in constructing an identity where Muslim women’s rights have been secondary to religious rights. Similarly, we can see how Dalit women are repeatedly targets of sexual violence whenever Dalit communities are challenging oppression and exploitation. Dalit women and girls are facing a constant onslaught of gender, caste, and class-based violence to which the Indian state government cooperates. Less than one per cent of the rape cases of Dalit women lead to conviction (Kabeer, 2014) and the 2014 election of Narendra Modi and the BJP is likely to further embolden upper caste and economically powerful conservatives. The Brahminical–patriarchal ideas of the Hindu right, in which Dalit women have no value, are being intensified through liberal economic policies that leave the Dalit and other exploited people even more vulnerable. After the recent Badaun case in May 2014, when two Dalit girls were raped and hanged, Modi condemned the appalling levels of violence in the state of Uttar Pradesh. However, the fact that he has given a ministerial post to Sanjeev Baliyan, one of the main people accused of being involved in the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013, involving mass rapes of Muslim women, gives a very different message (South Asia Solidarity Report, 2014).

These cases serve as illustrations of how the ontological insecurities of gendered space constitute an ongoing trauma that links together global and local space with state security. But they also illuminate the unconscious elements of these insecurities described by Frosh (2014) earlier, as fear, distrust and resentment of others, especially female others, become normalised and governed through everyday practices. Hence, the next section deals with such governance of ontological (in)security in which the securitisation of gendered space becomes a way to link together state borders with structures of emotions and emotional governance.

Gendered space and violence: the governance of ontological (in)security

The governing of fear and insecurity is often viewed as a field of domination in relation to other fields as actors and institutions struggle to monopolise the power to define legitimately recognised threats (Bigo, 2006). That security is not only about state security was a theme developed early on by the so-called Copenhagen School with its focus on societal security and securitisation as a discursive practice, a speech act (Buzan et al., 1998). In this work, securitisation is defined as the process in which an issue once presented and accepted as an existential threat, prompts reactions outside the normal bounds of political procedure. This implies that securitisation is about extraordinary politics and imbued with a national security concern (Roe, 2014). Despite the relevance of securitisation theory and its focus on individual security, the notion of security remains heavily influenced by its international policy heritage and is only rarely used to explore daily life experiences of gendered security matters, risk, and vulnerability and how such matters intersect with larger socio-political consequences (Eriksen et al., 2010; Kent, 2006). In addition, gendered security often emerges as a marginalised issue on the political agenda of many societies, and its socio-psychological as well as political–economic consequences for the individual tend to be circumvented by states.

By focusing on securitisation in a gendered sense, as being inherent in the mundane (Phillips, 2013), we can better understand how ontological security is governed and its relationship to the state and to state borders. With the exception of Croft (2012) and Huysmans (2006), the governance of ontological security has only been briefly dealt with in the ontological security literature, and its gendered aspects have been largely neglected. As discussed earlier, policies aimed at securing territorial borders are often implemented through the use of emergency narratives intended to create a sense of uncertainty and fear in which identities can be governed (Amoore, 2006; Honig, 2011). Emergency narratives call for immediate action and direct interventions, and can justify polarised boundaries. Responding to narratives of emergency is also a way to create order from projections of chaos and flux in which security becomes a ‘solution’ (Walters, 2006). Bordering processes can thus be adopted in order to reinstate state power and an idea of a collective secure self. Analysing the governance of ontological (in)security in which especially the female body is rendered vulnerable, means to critically focus the analysis on those instances that have meaning and implications for everyday gender relations, violence, and socio-economic and political structures. Here, it is important to emphasise that violence is not an arbitrary act but constitutes a real or imagined relationship between the perpetrator and the victim (Schmidt and Schröder, 2001). To make any kind of ‘sense’ of violence, it must be placed in the relevant context in which it is legitimated, normalised, and simplified (Kleinman, 2000). Studying the governance of ontological security from a gendered perspective thus takes seriously violence as an integrated part of gendered space.

When looking at violence against women in India, especially sexual violence, this is mainly perpetrated by men in powerful positions against women in positions of structural subordination. This involves men from higher castes against Muslim, Dalit or other low caste or tribal women, or such acts are committed by the police against poor women or by the army against women classified as belonging to the enemy within – women in areas of uprisings or insurgency, such as Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and the north-east region (Kabeer, 2014). The Delhi rape differed in this respect, as it was an attack on a female student perpetrated by lower caste migrant labourers, men who, as Naila Kabeer notes, ‘will never share in the benefits of “shining” India, against a woman who symbolizes the country that India hopes to become’ (Kabeer, 2014). However, not all of India shares in this hope. The state project condoned by representatives of the Hindu nationalist state thus violently targets minority women while intensifying surveillance and control over all women. Included are surveillance of students and other young people who become targets of ‘moral policing’, at the same time as members of the political establishment invoke ‘protection’ of Hindu women to justify violence against religious minorities and Dalits while urging Hindu men to demonstrate their masculinity by raping the women of these communities (Kabeer, 2014; Wilson, 2013). The notion of ‘love jihad’ is particularly illustrative of this phenomenon as it refers to campaigns run by Hindu right-wing groups against what they say is a Muslim conspiracy to convert Hindu girls into Islam (Dixit, 2014; Times of India, 2014). The BJP–RSS establishment has even claimed that Muslim boys are financially rewarded for the conversion. Shanthakaka, the head of Rashtra Sevika Samiti, the women’s wing of the RSS, stated for instance that, ‘Muslim boys are encouraged to elope with our girls. The money they are paid to elope and marry a Hindu girl depends on the caste of the girl. The remuneration for Rajput girls is Rs 1 lakh ($1,635) and for Brahmin girls is Rs 2 lakhs ($3,270)’ (Al-Jazeera, 2014, quoted from Dixit, 2013; 2014). As referred to earlier, such conspiracy theories are closely tied to narratives about the Hindu nation and the threat of Muslims.

Using the revolution in communication, the Sangh Parivar has been able to manipulate language, symbols and ideas to control and change the mind of a section of the people with the intention of capturing political power. Here, Barry Richards (2013) has suggested that we need to understand the ways in which all leaders, politicians and movements are engaged in reading and responding to current feelings that seem to be out there and how they, in so doing, are engaged in ‘emotional governance’. By shaping the emotional climate on a national and international level such governance shapes the ‘tone of the emotional public sphere’ (Richards, 2013: 125). Recreating a past, in terms of a singular, and often linear, reading of the nation, history, culture and people is a good example of this governing process. Hence, the leaders of the current political establishment, in attempts at emotional governance of identity boundaries and the securitisation of subjectivity, deploy a discourse which seeks to capture and organise the unease, fear and resentment that is felt among some parts of the Indian public, cleverly playing upon the ‘risky’ status of Indian Muslims to the Indian homeland.

This seems to be particularly appealing to those segments of the male Indian society who are anxious about the future of India, and discontent with liberal policies that advance the power of women and marginalised groups. Important though is to recognise that the connection between a particular kind of masculinity and violence is also symptomatic of some men’s perception that they are losing power within a constantly changing, multi-religious and multicultural landscape, and that the use of violence may somehow curtail this loss (Richards, 2013; Treadwell and Garland, 2011). This became particularly evident in the interviews with one of the perpetrators after the Delhi rape in which he described the woman who was raped in derogative terms, comparing her to ‘real’ women who know their place in society (India’s Daughter, 2015). Modi, the current Prime Minster, has been able to utilise such emotional governance by promising to restore Indian pride and bring order to the chaos of modern India. He is being portrayed as someone who understands the concerns of the frustrated lower middle classes (because of his ‘humble’ background): ‘I understand you because I am from among you’, Modi told a rally in Gujarat with some justification (Burke, 2014). However, Modi’s particular kind of emotional governance is also rooted in the resentment and anger directed towards the local political elite, Westernisation of society, as well as towards changed gender roles.

In this sense, a government that is facing increasing political pressure from anti-Islam political actors – as has been the case in India – can attempt to capitalise on these actors’ rhetoric and depict particular groups of Muslims as a security threat, ‘By taking charge of the situation, sovereign power is re-established’ (Edkins, 2002: 250). Gender directed violence relates to the construction of sovereign power, which takes (female) bodies as its primary target – as corporeality upon which abuse and death can be enacted. Such attempts at sovereign power can be found in efforts to classify someone as being beyond dignity and full humanity or through the expulsion of someone as a citizen. Such people are not even subjects of a benevolent power but symbolise only ‘bare life’ (or Homo sacer) (Agamben, 1998). Precariousness thus prevails when individuals are rendered susceptible to multiple techniques of violence of a sovereign power in particular spaces (Butler, 2004; Stranghellini and Rosfort, 2013). The governing of ontological (in)security thus becomes an instrument to further reinforce the ‘sovereign’ as a prototype of masculinity in which gendered violence and repression becomes not only sanctioned but normalised as part of an everyday securitisation process of gendered space.

In conclusion

Using the case of India as an example of how this governing process works in practice brings together the two questions framed at the outset of this article. It shows how an ontological (in)security perspective that takes seriously the notion of gendered space is able to problematise the relationship between self, identity, states and traumas in at least three ways. First, it challenges dominant versions of globalisation and modernity as external forces that change societies and states in a linear fashion. The search for ontological security is thus not only a reaction to globalisation and modernity, as Giddens and others would like us to believe, but is also signifying the emotional dimension of power as being co-constituted in the narrative and institutional relationship between individuals and the state.

Second, it problematises ideas of traumas as single events, as related to extraordinary circumstances, through its focus on everyday violation of women’s bodies as a constant repetition of the trauma. A focus on trauma as ‘ongoing’ thus highlights how gendered space can represent more or less permanent feelings of ontological insecurity in which structures of emotions become ordered throughout society. In addition, by questioning the rupture between normal, routinised order, and the exceptional, critical order, it becomes obvious how ontological insecurity is as much an unconsciously narrated process as a conscious one in which the routines themselves act as a continuous threat. Both observations add a critical dimension to much current work on ontological security as well as to international relations literature on gender and conflict.

Third and finally, by focusing on securitisation in a gendered sense we are able to address the constitutive interplay between particular global and local contexts that have meaning and implications for everyday gender relations, violence, and socio-economic and political structures. Reading the governance of ontological (in)security in a gendered sense thus underlines how bordering processes are intimately connected to violence, and how these processes become adopted as a means to reinstate patriarchal state power. It also shows how such power has as its core the idea of a masculine collective secure self in which the female body is rendered vulnerable. This focus on the everyday adds an important gendered perspective to much ontological security literature focused on the state as well as to securitisation studies in general.

The Indian case also clearly demonstrates how narratives about daily experiences of gendered vulnerability, insecurity, and risk are related to the institutionalisation of larger narratives about the nation-state, ideology, religion, and norms. Hence, by proceeding from the Delhi rape-case I show how the rise of Hindu nationalism is interconnected with ideas about India’s role in the world and the intensification of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim politics, and how these interconnections have a gendered bias. Ideas about ‘Mother Nation’, the ‘protection’ of Hindu women and ‘justified’ gendered violence against minority and Dalit women thus bring together religious state narratives with everyday experiences of gendered insecurity. As a result, the search for ontological security, in the case of India, becomes a permanent feature of the securitisation of female bodies and gendered space. Here, it is important to point out, however, that the Indian case is not unique, but is tied to more general notions of everyday violence of female subjects in a global sense. Hence, by addressing the local and subjective level of globalisation and securitisation in constitutive terms, we can better understand the impact of trauma and gendered space for emotional governance and their relationship to the state and to state borders. The analysis of the Indian case thus illustrates more generally how a gender-informed analysis of ontological (in)security and the securitisation of subjectivity adds a novel dimension to much work in this field.