In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this “may prove more harmful than helpful.” This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women’s bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the “colonization of the everyday.” This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women’s bodies and women’s status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as “more harmful than helpful?” Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of “witches,” the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare’s “Taming,” to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.

中文翻译：

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仇恨女性：显而易见的仇恨宪法


2023 年 4 月，英国政府宣布厌女症不会被归类为仇恨犯罪，并表示这“可能弊大于利”。本文认为，在仇恨犯罪之前和之后，厌女症，被理解为对女性的仇恨（来自希腊语misein [仇恨] gynae [女性]），是我们西方法律、社会和政治秩序的基本逻辑。这种仇恨的构成依赖于白人男性制度对女性身体的主动非人化、剥削和所有权，使女性成为“日常殖民化”的对象。这种令人筋疲力尽的仇恨是通过重复、持续、日常的针对妇女的暴力行为而产生的。简而言之，父权制、殖民主义、资本主义民主只能通过针对妇女的暴力来维持。因此，仇恨女性并不是社会的病态，而是我们法律政治宪法的必要存在条件，显而易见，但却隐藏在显而易见的地方。厌女症确保了女性身体的不稳定，以及女性在日常空间中作为侵入者的地位，而这些空间总是故意已经厌恶女性的。鉴于厌女症的根本性质，政府将普遍存在的针对妇女的暴力行为排除在仇恨犯罪之外是否有意义，因为“弊大于利”？仇恨犯罪仅仅是厌女症文化矩阵的构成吗？本文通过将仇恨犯罪与法律政治宪法和文化变革一起思考，制定了一个去殖民主义女权主义棱镜，以破坏厌女症的文化状况。 本文探讨了针对女性的暴力行为，以历史上厌女症的出现为背景，从希腊的非人化，到中世纪对“女巫”的迫害，对女性的限制和禁止进入公共场所，莎士比亚的“驯服”，再到当代女性被杀率。通过这个棱镜审视仇恨犯罪，为如何破坏厌女症的法律政治构成提供了微妙的途径，这既不是隐藏的，也不是新的。厌女症是持久的。