Blockchain Papers

Jess Fournier

Resurgent interest in prison abolition from academics, activists, and popular culture is a response to mass movements: some of the largest protests in US history.1 The George Floyd rebellions during the summer of 2020 responded to the latest series of US police murders of Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and others, by attacking the “carceral institutions [that] have become enmeshed in the daily life of the racialized US working class.”2Françoise Vergès’s Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective and Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie’s Abolition. Feminism. Now. can be seen as interventions into this moment, conditioned as it is by a longer crisis that necessitates prison abolition. The authors—long-time feminist activists and theorists—characterize sexual violence as a social problem that cannot be ameliorated through criminal legal sanctions for individual perpetrators. While prison abolitionists have long debated the appropriate responses to sexual violence,3AFN and FTV go farther by offering a unified theory of sexual violence’s causation.Asserting that “the state does not offer the solution to interpersonal violence,” the authors argue that sexual violence is in fact structurally produced by the state itself (AFN, 75). However, contradictory definitions of structure and state limit their theorization, which relies on analogizing the dynamics of interpersonal sexual violence to the function of states. The abstract state-as-rapist does not ultimately offer a structural theory of sexual violence and risks foreclosing possibilities for political mobilization that could actualize prison abolitionist demands.First published in 2020 and translated into English in 2022 by Melissa Thackway, Vergès’s text is a feminist meditation on violence: historical and contemporary, colonial and neoliberal, systemic and deeply personal. Her examples of violence are far-ranging: Haitian slave rebellions; her own upbringing in the French department of Réunion and her education in the United States; sex workers’ mobilizations in Lyon, France, in 1975; and the elections of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Matteo Salvini. What unites these phenomena is an argument about the nature of violence itself. Vergès’s position is that all violence is “a structural element” of patriarchy, colonialism, and racial capitalism (FTV, 4). The “State and neoliberal politics of protection” promise legal protections for white bourgeois women to obscure the state’s continued violence against women, racialized people, migrants, and the poor (FTV, 8). Instead of appealing to the state, Vergès exhorts feminists to develop a decolonial politics of protection that would “remai[n] autonomous . . . show solidarity with all liberation struggles, [and] nurture revolutionary friendship and love” (FTV, 101).In Abolition. Feminism. Now., Davis, Dent, Meiners, and Richie construct a “critical genealogy” of abolition-feminist activism that illustrates how this decolonial politics of protection might be enacted (AFN, 14). The first two sections, simply titled “Abolition” and “Feminism,” identify a range of primarily US-based historical antecedents for prison abolitionist and feminist thought. These include the founding of Critical Resistance and INCITE! Women of Color against Violence in the late 1990s San Francisco Bay Area; the 1970s campaign to Free Joan Little; the 1960s anti-rape activism of Rosa Parks, Esther Cooper Jackson, and Anne Braden; anti-lynching movements in the 1850s; and African American Women in Defense of Ourselves’ protests in 1991 against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The authors argue that “abolitionist traditions have relied on feminist analysis and organizing from their inception and that the version of feminism we embrace is also not possible without an abolitionist imagination” (AFN, 13). The final section, “Now,” presents a series of “snapshots” of Chicago activism that showcase the “everyday practices, collective experiments driven by necessity, practice, and reflection, and in sinewy networks that crisscross time and space” (AFN, 33). Both texts situate sexual violence not only as a key issue for abolition-feminist activism but as a crucial subject for analysis of the state.Both AFN and FTV define sexual violence as a structural rather than an individual or interpersonal problem. Vergès calls sexual violence “a structural element of patriarchy and capitalism” (FTV, 8). Davis et al. argue that abolition feminism must address the “structural character of gender violence alongside its intersections with violences generated by racism and capitalism” (AFN, 91). Neither text offers a precise definition of structural sexual violence or indeed of structure. At times the authors appear to use the term structural interchangeably with systemic, as when, later in the same paragraph, Vergès characterizes patriarchy and capitalism as “the crucible of systemic violence against women” (FTV, 8).While AFN and FTV do not offer a rigorous definition of structure, their analysis of sexual violence within state institutions echoes public health theories of structural violence. Public health analyses of structural violence focus on the role of inequality in social hierarchies, political institutions, and economic systems that creates conditions that lead to violence or injury.4 Concepts like coercive violence highlight how individuals can weaponize systems to abuse their partners, such as by making reports to child protective services or immigration.5 Finally, theories of structural violence emphasize that structural violence “functions more or less independently of individual behaviors.”6AFN’s and FTV’s analyses of the sexual violence perpetrated by state agents—prison guards, police, soldiers, and border patrol agents—reflect these elements of structural theories of violence. Both texts attend to the way that sexual violence sometimes occurs within the official mandates of carceral institutions, as in the case of prison guards’ use of strip and cavity searches or rectal force-feeding techniques in interrogation. Even when sexual violence is technically extralegal or illegal, state agents perpetrate sexual violence with “complete impunity” (FTV, 15). In the case of police officer Daniel Holtzclaw—whom the Oklahoma City Police Department assisted in covering up the rapes of thirteen Black women7—Davis et al. demonstrate that state agents can perpetrate sexual violence without reprisal because of their institutional power.Vergès’s account of military torture is a similarly compelling example of how rape can be legitimated by institutions. Torture is by definition purposeful and deliberate—a tactic to punish, control, or extract information. In addition to analyzing torture as an individual violation, Vergès defines wartime rape as a “weapon of colonial war” (FTV, 14). Drawing on US Senate hearings and survivors’ testimony, Vergès identifies commonalities between multiple historical contexts—including the Central Intelligence Agency’s rape of Iraqi and Afghani detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as a “means of behavior control” and rape to foster familial humiliation in the Congolese civil war (FTV, 17–18). Rape functions as a tool of social control, owing to the exploitation and reinforcement of gender roles and the legal impunity afforded police officers, soldiers, and even UN peacekeeping forces.These instances of sexual violence perpetrated by military, police, and prison guards form the basis for AFN’s and FTV’s broader theories of sexual violence. For Vergès, sexual violence reflects the purpose of carceral institutions, stating that “we must stop turning to a system—one that claims to save us—that is organized to exclude, lock up, kill” (FTV, 84). The premise that these institutions cannot solve sexual violence because of their own perpetration of violence, however, does not offer insight into what Davis et al. describe as the “structural and institutional underpinnings” of sexual violence perpetrated by nonstate actors (AFN, 90). For these authors, what connects the violence of state agents and institutions to the broader abolition-feminist framework of sexual violence is the concept of the state-as-rapist.Rather than focus on individual perpetrators of sexual violence, the argument goes, abolition-feminists must “point the finger at those truly responsible for femicide and rape: the police and the State” (FTV, 2; emphasis mine). The opening lines of FTV illustrate Vergès’s understanding of the state-as-rapist. Quoting from the song “A Rapist in Your Path” by the Chilean feminist performance collective LASTESIS, Vergès argues, “The oppressive State is a macho rapist” (FTV, 2). While neither AFN nor FTV offers a clear definition of the state, both books use the term to refer to a super institution that connects all forms of sexual violence. Vergès characterizes the state as the institution that “condenses all forms of imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist oppression and exploitation” (FTV, 3). Vergès’s description of the state as “consubstantial” with sexual violence and capitalism suggests that sexual violence, capitalism, and the state share a singular essence that, ostensibly, is responsible for the employment of sexual violence by states in service of capital (FTV, 104).However, Vergès’s own analysis of colonial slavery in Haiti and Martinique calls into question the usefulness of a concept like the “male, rapist State” to describe the functions of sexual violence in a capitalist system (FTV, 25). After the legal abolition of the slave trade in Martinique, the plantation class sexually exploited enslaved African women and men to increase their profits and resisted the state’s attempts to institute paid leave for pregnant women as an infringement of private property rights. To suggest that the state has a consistent function across all time and space neglects the historical specificity of legal regimes, racialization and gendering schema, and forced labor. In addition, Vergès’s account of British and French racialized immigration exclusion highlights distinctions between the two countries: distinctions that the transhistorical concept of a singular state falls well short of addressing.Like Vergès, Davis et al. understand sexual violence in state institutions as merely the most visible manifestation of the state’s sexually violent nature. Citing Monica Cosby’s Intimate Partner Violence and State Violence Power and Control Wheel, Davis et al. assert that “prison is quite literally a form of gender violence,” because “in both instances, harm results from the arbitrary use of authority, the abuse of power with impunity, [and] the absolute control of bodies, minds, and spirits of survivors” (AFN, 93). In other words, the violence of prisons and sexual violence are connected because of shared tactics of control. The concept of the state that AFN develops is also based on a perceived tactical similarity between the nature of abusive relationships and the nature of governance. Davis et al. argue: The pretext of ending gender violence allows the state to determine the nature of the problem, to decide on “reasonable” solutions, and to categorize people as either deserving to be free from injury or not. These are the same tactics that people who cause harm in intimate relationships use: arbitrary authority, attribution of blame to justify punishment, and expulsion of those who are objectionable, threatening, or obsolete. (AFN, 93; emphasis mine)Davis et al. suggest that the common tactics of abusive relationships can provide insight into the purpose or behavior of the state. However, the claim-by-analogy that interpersonal sexual violence is like prison violence does not substantiate the claim that interpersonal domestic or sexual violence is state violence, or that all interpersonal sexual violence originates with the state. The frameworks on which AFN bases its analysis of domestic violence reveal the limitations of this method of analyzing the actions of states or the purpose of governance. Cosby’s State Violence Power and Control Wheel is an adaptation of a ubiquitous model of domestic violence: the Power and Control Wheel (fig. 1).Also called the Duluth Model of domestic violence, the Power and Control Wheel was developed in 1984 as an educational tool to explain heterosexual men’s physical and sexual violence against their female partners. At the center of the wheel are the words power and control to represent the notion that domestic violence tactics—restricting a partner’s finances, destroying property, or threatening children—are deployed to “intentionally control or dominate” an intimate partner.8 Physical and sexual violence, in the Duluth Model, instill fear and exacerbate existing power differences between men and women. The Duluth Model does not suggest that domestic violence is structurally produced. Describing common behavioral tactics in abusive relationships does not explain the reasons that people may perpetrate domestic or sexual violence in the first place, which remain poorly understood.9 The framework’s numerous adaptations—for LGBTQ domestic violence and immigrant and refugee women, to name a few10—further suggest that the Duluth Model does not offer a comprehensive theory of interpersonal sexual violence, either.Central to the Duluth Model is the idea that abusive tactics are perpetrated intentionally—in other words, the model promotes an understanding of abuse that is at odds with the aforementioned definitions of structural violence. Vergès and Davis et al. similarly attribute interpersonal sexual violence to individual sadism. Vergès develops Sayak Valencia’s concept of gore capitalism—an extension of Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—to analyze femicide and intimate partner violence not committed by state agents. Without providing evidence for her claim, Vergès states that these forms of violence have intensified under neoliberalism because “violence gives meaning to an existence programmed for premature death; it allows people to exist for an ephemeral moment, having access to what has become proof of existence” (FTV, 19). Vergès’s description of neoliberalism as a period when “brute, cruel violence is a form of government, a regime of existence” suggests that neoliberalism creates or perhaps licenses a preexisting desire for sexual violence (FTV, 19). If interpersonal sexual violence is a meaning-making tool for working-class people to exercise to feel powerful in the face of economic and social dislocation, sexual violence appears to be a by-product of structures that produce said economic and social dislocation rather than itself a structuring force. Elsewhere Vergès’s reference to the causes of sexual violence as “greed, cupidity, and power” emphasizes the emotional states of perpetrators rather than any systems or structures that are responsible (FTV, 106). Davis et al. suggest that “police are trained to use force rather than to prevent or address root causes of violence, which is perhaps why police officers are more likely to engage in violent behavior with their partners than other groups” (AFN, 97–98). The implication that police officers are more likely to abuse their partners than other groups because of their training still does not identify the root causes that the authors say are in fact truly responsible for sexual violence. What, precisely, are these root causes?The question about the underlying causes of interpersonal sexual violence—be they structural or otherwise—is a significant one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey suggests that nearly 80 percent of rapes are perpetrated by someone the victim knows personally: an acquaintance, friend, current or former romantic partner, or family member.11 This does not discount the widespread prevalence and institutional suppression of sexual violence within prisons, jails, and detention centers.12 But the premise of AFN and FTV is that a theory of structural sexual violence can explain sexual violence on a societal level, even outside these specific institutions. Instead, as I have argued, their own theorization affirms the of interpersonal sexual violence as the of While AFN and FTV argue for the to individual their analysis simply the rapist for the individual without the root causes of sexual violence, on what basis can a for political to address it be the authors, the state-as-rapist is to in popular of how sexual violence to be If the state is a as Vergès appealing to it for because it is the first that social (FTV, 2). 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Emma Porio

No abstract is available for this record.