ABSTRACT
Gender is constitutive of how we think about the perpetrator, perpetration, and violence. Even on an etymological level, gender is written into the category: “to perpetrate” derives from the Latin per (completely) and patrare (to carry out/bring into existence) from pater (father). Still today, and not least on account of crucial work conducted by feminist activists and scholars since the 1970s in drawing attention to violence against women, the categories of “perpetrator” and “victim” tend to be gendered male and female respectively. As a result, there has been little discursive space to imagine women’s perpetration, whilst the gender of the male perpetrator has tended to be taken for granted. Against that backdrop, this chapter seeks to gender both the category of the perpetrator and the field now coming to understand itself as interdisciplinary Perpetrator Studies, where gender analysis, as V. Spike Peterson reminds us, is “neither just about women, nor about the addition of women to male-stream constructions”; rather it “is about transforming ways of being and knowing” (1992, 205).
