strangulation is torture. Researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels—painful, terrifying—and its subsequent social meaning. It is characterized as a demonstration of authority and domination (Sorenson, Joshi, and Sivitz 2014). As such, together with its gendered nature, it is a type of action paradigmatic of misogyny, according to the account of it I develop in these pages. Also characteristic is the indifference or ignorance surrounding the practice, as well as the fact that many of its victims will minimize—or may, as I’ll go on to discuss
...more
