Symbolic Violence against Women as a Social and Cultural System

Abstract

The focus of this article is the system culture and society have availed themselves of down through the ages to enact symbolic violence against women. It dwells, in particular, upon the strategies implemented to exclude women from the grand course of mainstream history, from the canon of the various academic disciplines and reference books, as well as from the arts. It discusses how the schools and academia have failed to remember and cite women in textbooks, because of their presumed fragility and the roles as wives and mothers that patriarchal culture imposed upon them for millennia, strong traces of which survive even today in the culture and mindset of western civilisation, in contemporary storytelling and the media in particular. Furthermore, symbolic violence has always favoured and continues to legitimise physical abuse of women and girls.

The article also addresses the issue of females not only as the subject of mythology, literature and the arts, but also as sources of proactive thinking, innovation and creativity, something which modern historiography has frequently chosen to ignore.