Introduction

Anthropological studies of sexuality and violence apparently hold out the promise of delving into two central western fantasies – the eroticization of domination and the eroticization of ‘the (dominated) Other’. To read and to write about sexuality and violence in other cultures might in itself be an activity that affords pleasure. Western cultures have constituted and responded to sexuality and violence by discourses and policies of exclusion, expulsion, and repression. Violence is excluded by its defining anti-social nature, sexuality by its location in an intensely personal space of embodiment. Feminism operates on the basis of a common identity among women while anthropology builds on the premise of difference and the possibility of incommensurability. The radical aspect of feminist scholarship is the concern to challenge the misrepresentation of women’s experiences brought about by the totalizing discourses of male-dominated disciplines.