Open Access“There’s Girls Who Can Fight, and There’s Girls Who Are Innocent”: Gendered Safekeeping as Virtue Maintenance Work
Author(s) -
Rebecca Lennox
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
violence against women
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.807
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1552-8448
pISSN - 1077-8012
DOI - 10.1177/1077801221998786
Subject(s) - work (physics) , virtue , occupational safety and health , poison control , suicide prevention , human factors and ergonomics , public security , injury prevention , public relations , medicine , sociology , gender studies , criminology , political science , environmental health , law , engineering , mechanical engineering
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.