A feminist theory of violence for an anti-racist policy of protection Vergès, Françoise
A feminist theory of violence for an anti-racist policy of protection Vergès, Françoise
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Today, in our modern and progressive West, it is difficult to imagine a public policy that does not mention women's rights. In a particularly cruel turnaround, governments only retain the most frankly repressive aspect, namely the fight against violence against women. In this book, and after having signed a pamphlet for a decolonial feminism, Françoise Vergès proposes to tackle this donkey bridge of violence head on.
She suggests turning the question around: Who produces the violence? A few violent men and sex offenders, who are all the more exposed to public vindictiveness because they are black, Arab or Muslim? Or is it above all the State, its army, its police, its prisons, its ideological apparatuses?
Put like that, the answer seems obvious, as long as we subscribe to the policy of emancipation. It is much more difficult to draw all the consequences of this laudable principle: accuse the State and the system first. We will quickly be tempted to stop halfway with a "I know, but still": how to protect the victims? What to do with the aggressors if we attack the police and prisons? Isn't the urgent thing first to record complaints of rape, or to prevent a man from killing his wife by forcing the aggressor to be removed?
And yet, Vergès shows that it is rather urgent to dissociate the protection and violence of the State. This is why it is a question of starting by showing how the so-called protection of the State is itself part of the spiral of violence that must be stopped. This crazy mechanism is the production of toxic masculinities through prison; it is the persecution of racialized men and the violence in return that falls on racialized women; it is the preventive civil war in working-class neighborhoods and civil war pure and simple in the Global South; it is the destruction of working-class and racialized families under the battering rams of neoliberalism and racism.
In this context, a policy of prevention must be considered through the dismantling of these structures, through another idea of justice (rather restorative than punitive), through the recognition of proletarian and racialized mothers as feminist subjects, through a policy of civil peace.
She suggests turning the question around: Who produces the violence? A few violent men and sex offenders, who are all the more exposed to public vindictiveness because they are black, Arab or Muslim? Or is it above all the State, its army, its police, its prisons, its ideological apparatuses?
Put like that, the answer seems obvious, as long as we subscribe to the policy of emancipation. It is much more difficult to draw all the consequences of this laudable principle: accuse the State and the system first. We will quickly be tempted to stop halfway with a "I know, but still": how to protect the victims? What to do with the aggressors if we attack the police and prisons? Isn't the urgent thing first to record complaints of rape, or to prevent a man from killing his wife by forcing the aggressor to be removed?
And yet, Vergès shows that it is rather urgent to dissociate the protection and violence of the State. This is why it is a question of starting by showing how the so-called protection of the State is itself part of the spiral of violence that must be stopped. This crazy mechanism is the production of toxic masculinities through prison; it is the persecution of racialized men and the violence in return that falls on racialized women; it is the preventive civil war in working-class neighborhoods and civil war pure and simple in the Global South; it is the destruction of working-class and racialized families under the battering rams of neoliberalism and racism.
In this context, a policy of prevention must be considered through the dismantling of these structures, through another idea of justice (rather restorative than punitive), through the recognition of proletarian and racialized mothers as feminist subjects, through a policy of civil peace.
