A Feminist Theory of Violence

A Decolonial Perspective

Françoise Vergès, Melissa Thackway

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780745345697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Femminismo e teoria femminista

'Arobust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism' - Angela Y. Davis

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2022***

The mainstream conversation surrounding gender equality is a repertoire of violence: harassment, rape, abuse, femicide. These words suggest a cruel reality. But they also hide another reality: that of gendered violence committed with the complicity of the State.

In this book, Françoise Vergès denounces the carceral turn in the fight against sexism. By focusing on 'violent men', we fail to question the sources of their violence. There is no doubt as to the underlying causes: racial capitalism, ultra-conservative populism, the crushing of the Global South by wars and imperialist looting, the exile of millions and the proliferation of prisons – these all put masculinity in the service of a policy of death.

Against the spirit of the times, Françoise Vergès refuses the punitive obsession of the State in favour of restorative justice.

1

Neoliberal Violence

Feminist movements and the rise of neoliberalism

Debates within feminism on the ties between patriarchy and the State, or between patriarchy and capitalism remain ongoing. Very early on, there were feminists who challenged the notion that the police and courts operate the same way for all women. Conceived to describe a supposedly homogeneous reality, the concept of “women” highlights the global nature of a form of oppression while at the same time masking the differences in its administering. In the 1970s, feminist movements in the Global South and in the North organized against the patriarchal State and against male chauvinism, virilism, and sexism in political parties, trade unions, and social movements. They rewrote the history of women’s struggles, resituating their place in the revolutionary and anti-colonial movements, highlighting the entanglement of women’s exploitation and that of the land and peoples, between imperialism and women’s vulnerabilization. They debated sexualities, bodies, and representations. In the South and in the North, feminists questioned a Western feminist ideology that saw itself as universalist and claimed to speak in the name of all women. Dissensions emerged during international forums between this Western feminism and feminisms that, particularly in the South, insisted on the connections between capitalism, imperialism, racism, and the oppression of women, and on the way in which social class and forms of racialization interact. At the NGO Forum during the third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985, this position was clearly formulated by Angela Davis, who declared:

in order truly to be an activist in the fight for women’s equality, we have to recognize that women are oppressed as women, but we are also oppressed because of our racial and national backgrounds, we are also oppressed because of our class background. And there are those who might say, “Let’s forget about race and class, we’re all sisters. Let us join hands and across races, across classes.” Well, I think we should join hands across races, across classes, but the specificity of our specific oppression must be recognized and acknowledged. And our struggles are not the same struggles.¹

Maureen Reagan, President Ronald Reagan’s daughter, sent to represent the women of the United States “does not represent me,” Davis stated, adding that the appointment of the first woman to the United States Supreme Court (Sandra Day O’Connor) “was not a victory to the masses of women, … it was a defeat,” as she voted against abortion rights. Feminist agendas thus inevitably differed. In the 1970s and 1980s, Black, Chicana, African, Asian, and “Third World” feminist intellectuals and activists theorized the entanglement of oppressions.² In response, universities and governmental or international institutions added gender studies, feminist studies, women’s studies to their curriculums. Feminists saw this inclusion as an institutionalization that ultimately risked weakening their struggles. While impossible to sum up here, these decades of intense theoretical work and mobilization brought progress in women’s lives in both the South and North. What was clearly visible by the late 1970s was that there were several feminisms, some rooted in anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles, defending radical, emancipatory feminism, others were reformist, others fighting to enter the army, the world of finance, and so on. While there were some circulations between radical feminism and reformist feminism, the former rejected any alliance with State feminism. Although political parties, unions, and social movements, which pushed back against any challenge to their male chauvinism, finally accepted a form of feminism, the links between racism and sexism remained marginalized. But governments and institutions gradually realized their interest in coopting a form of feminism, given women’s massive entry into the wage labor market. In the 1980s, a civilizational and universalist feminism managed to impose itself internationally, minoritizing feminisms of combat that nonetheless did not disappear. The debate on the ties between patriarchy, capitalism, and State protectionism were far from over.

During these decades came another profound upheaval: neoliberalism. This stage of capitalism led to the privatization of public goods and services; the deregulation of finance, and the guarantee of high short-term profit margins for shareholders; the application of technical solutions to social problems; the creep of market rhetoric to legitimize profitability and flexibility norms, and to neutralize all opposition; and the exacerbation of extractivism. Driven by market logics, the structural adjustment programs imposed by international institutions on the Global South had devastating consequences, particularly for working-class racialized women and for Indigenous peoples. Even though, by 1975, “based on the figures, women showed that policies based uniquely on the liberal economic model were harmful to sustainable development and even more so to African women,”³ few French feminist economists showed any interest in the consequences of these restructuration phenomena on women in the Global South.⁴ Or rather, to put it differently, the effects of neoliberalism did not deeply permeate feminist theory in France, with the exception of a few groups linked to the far-left. This “conceptual silence” no doubt explains feminists’ difficulty in revising their universalist theory later on. They ignored these policies’ impact not only on the women of the African continent, but also on the so-called French Overseas Territories—Guadeloupe, Guiana, Kanaky-New Caledonia, Martinique, Mayotte, Polynesia, and Réunion Island—where, already in the 1960s, the government’s de-industrialization policy caused unemployment, which the government then responded to with a mass emigration policy, notably of young women. For those behind the structural adjustment programs, it was for women to bear the brunt of the crisis of capitalism, and for the decisions taken by governments of the South under the constraint of economic measures, or following the abandonment of Independence programs. In the North, factory closures, and notably those that employed women (textiles, appliances, and so on), the development of service and care industries massively employing racialized women, underpaying them, and offering no stability, and the development of part-time work in which 80 percent of jobs are held by women, all led to far greater precarity. The gradual entry into the political vocabulary of the terms “insecurity” and “hazardous” contributed to justifying more police, more control, more surveillance, and less protection.

It is not so much that systemic violence is new—the long history of genocides, massacres, pillaging, and destruction prove the contrary, and capitalism has always had a colonial, racial, globalizing, and imperialist dimension—but hyperglobalization and the exacerbation of its extractivist logics have had an extremely negative impact on the life expectancy of vast populations. Achieved through struggle, progress in the fields of education, health, and training have been undermined, particularly in the Global South. Although people there now die in fewer numbers at birth and live a little longer, they breathe more polluted air, drink more polluted water, and are more often victim to epidemics, debt, the collapse of health and education services, and the consequences of extractivism-related climate change. Feminists reacted differently to these upheavals. In the North, a State and so-called “universalist civilizational” feminism developed, unperturbed by security-based and imperialist policies. This feminism operated a pacification of the “women’s cause,” which soon no longer represented something to fear for those in power. If in 1978, during a rape trial in Aix-en-Provence that mobilized feminists and led to the 1980 law that for the first time clarified what constitutes the crime of rape in France, the French press could still run the headline, “Openly or Secretly Feminist Women are Terrorists”;⁵ by the 1990s, the women’s cause became not only what marketing calls talking points, but also a new object of public policy. Pacified, “gender equality” could enter government.

Against this pacifying feminism which had become complicit with capitalism and patriarchy, certain feminists persisted in analyzing the entanglements, interactions, and intersections between multiple layers of oppression. Queer, Muslim, Indigenous feminists added their voices to these theories. In their view, gender-based and sexual violence could not be analyzed and combatted in isolation from a broader analysis of the conditions in which these forms of violence are unleashed. Violence, then, is “the logical consequence of an analysis that posits women’s oppression and their being kept in the minority as a structural reality of the State.”⁶

Gore capitalism, rape, and murder politics

The analysis of gender-based and sexual violence cannot be dissociated from an analysis of these profound transformations that have produced the world we live in today: acute inequality, wealth concentrated in the hands of the very few, the ever faster destruction of living conditions, and politics of murder and devastation. Separating the situation of women from a global context of the naturalization of violence perpetuates a divide that benefits patriarchy and capitalism, the question becoming that of identifying and punishing “violent men,” and naturalizing the violence of the few without dismantling the structures that generate abominable violence. In a context in which, despite demanding drastic public budget cuts, neoliberalism encourages police reinforcement and greater spending on armies and prisons, is it not crucial to question requests for protection, as they are most frequently formulated?

Rape institutes virilist heteronormative domination. In the war that the State and capital wage against those fighting for justice and dignity, rape is a weapon in the hands of the State. Indeed, “The more militant anticapitalism and international solidarity became everyday features of U.S. antiracist activism, the more vehemently the state responded,” individualizing revolts to better criminalize them.⁷ Rape has always been a weapon of war (and of colonial war in particular); there is no colonization, no imperialist occupation without rape. It is also part of the arsenal deployed for the repression of social movements. Whether in Cairo, Santiago, Baghdad, or elsewhere, the police and the army commit rape and gender-based and sexual violence with complete impunity. This impunity goes a long way back; it is rooted in the ideology of colonial racial war. “We approached another village. I heard officer candidate P … shout out to his section: ‘Go ahead and rape but be discreet about it!’ … On return that night, I learned that a fifteen-year-old young Muslim girl had been raped by seven soldiers, another thirteen-year-old by three other men. That night, I cried my first tears as a man,” Benoist Rey wrote in Les Égorgeurs (The Cut-Throats), his account of being a French soldier during the Algerian war.⁸ In 2016, the United Nations finally admitted that its troops had committed rape in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, South Sudan, and Mali.⁹

The lack of research into sexual and sexist violence against men and boys in conflict and post-conflict situations hides the fact that it is more widespread than admitted. The intention is not in any way to minimize the massive prevalence of the rape of women, but to understand that, as a weapon of racial and virilist domination, rape aims to destroy women and girls, but also men and boys too. Although these cases are rarely studied for fear of belittling the rape of women, because men raping men often remains unspeakable, and finally because we lack the vocabulary to speak about it, incorporating the rape of racialized men, gay men, trans men, and male sex workers into the analysis of gender-based and sexual violence shows that rape is inseparable from imperialism and racism; it is inseparable from virilist heteronormative domination. In 2004, the report on the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib revealed that North American soldiers threatened and sodomized “a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.”¹⁰ That women were involved in sexually torturing Muslim men came as no surprise within the arsenal of imperialist practices. Indeed, “the explicit use of women in military interrogations, precisely because they are women, in order to provoke anguish in men indeed corresponds to an authorized tactic known as ‘the territorial extension’ of the female soldier.”¹¹ In addition to an Orientalist vision of Islam came a “State instrumentalization of sexual identity, sexuality, and sexual difference.”¹² Women’s participation in mechanisms of domination poses ethical and political questions. Female aggression cannot be the “result of their psychosis or their victimization alone,” artist Coco Fusco writes, continuing: “neoconservative ideology promises all those willing to abandon their identification with minorities’ ‘special interests’ access to political power and, at the same time, capitalizes—economically, especially—on women and minorities’ presence, and on the sexual or ethnic difference that this clearly manifests.”¹³ Iraqi prison survivors spoke of forced sexual intercourse by the anus and mouth, of beatings to the genitals (and castration), of forced sexual intercourse by the perpetrator in all orifices of the body (for example, the nose, ear, mouth, and anus), and the insertion of objects, such as sticks and guns, in several orifices. Prison and camp survivors in Congo recounted having been forced by soldiers to watch wives, daughters, or other members of the family being raped, and/ or of being forced to sexually assault their mothers, daughters...