Sexual Violence

Andrea Smith’s (2005) work Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide is a critical piece of work that brings to the table some important and relevant information and insights to gender, race, class, politics, Native Americans, communities of color, reproductive politics, and the criminal justice system (this list is NOT exhaustive). For example she interrogates the current “pro-choice” framework and argues that it “undergirds the mainstream reproductive rights movement [and] is inadequate for addressing the attacks on the reproductive rights of indigenous women, women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities” (p. 4). Additionally, she argues that “the antiviolence movement has relied on a racist and colonial criminal legal system to stop domestic and sexual violence with insufficient attention to how this system oppresses communities of color” (p. 5).

In the chapter titled “Better Dead than Pregnant” Smith talks about sterilization and long term contraception abuses towards women, listing off a number of different sterilization and contraception campaigns (often without consent) for Medicaid recipients, Native Americans, people in the “Global South”, and others that continue around the country and globe. Additionally, in this chapter she is critical of reproductive campaigns that advocate choice over rights, and those which “have not addressed racism in reproductive rights policies, marginalizing them as “women’s” issues” (p. 97). For example, “Some activists refuse to address racism in abortion policies, arguing that abortion access represents “genocide” for communities of color. These advocates fail to consider that restrictions to abortions can become another strategy to coerce Native women or women of color to pursue sterilization or long-acting hormonal contraceptives” (p. 87).  

Smith proposes that “a variety of scholars and activists have critiqued the choice paradigm because it rests on essentially individualist, consumerist notions of “free” choice that do not take into consideration all the social, economic, and political conditions that frame the so-called choices that women are forced to make” (p. 99).

She continues that “the choice paradigm continues to govern much of the policies of mainstream groups in a manner which continues the marginalization of women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities. One example of this marginalization is how pro-choice organizations narrow their advocacy to legislation that affects the right to choose to have an abortion- without addressing the conditions that put women in the position of having to make the decision in the first place” (p. 99).  She argues that “we must reject single-issue politics of the mainstream reproductive rights movement as an agenda that not only does not serve women of color but actually promotes the structures of oppression which keep women of color from having real choices or healthy lives” (p. 104-5). 

Overall, she argues that “conceptualizing sexual violence as a tool of genocide and colonialism fundamentally alters the strategies for combating it. We must develop anticolonial strategies for addressing interpersonal violence that also address state violence” (p. 139); [and] “it is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system” (p. 170).

Agency

Agency is something that comes up frequently in feminist studies and women’s studies. Agency is sometimes thought of as the will and self determination within the construction of the “I”, or the collective will and self determination of the many “I’s”, as in a coalition. Butler[i] notes that “the enabling conditions for an assertion of “I” are provided by the structure of signification. The rules that regulate the legitimate and illegitimate invocation of that pronoun, the practices that establish the terms of intelligibility by which that pronoun can circulate” (p. 196).

        With the establishment of the “I” or “I’s”, the “Other” or “Other’s” is/are established. “The language of appropriation, instrumentality, and distanciation… pits the “I” against the “Other” and, once that separation is effected creates an artificial set of questions about the knowability and recoverability of that Other” (Butler, p. 197).

In feminist practices these “I’s” at times attempt to formulate universalistic claims about “Woman”, “Women”, and even coalitions. Butler suggests “the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of “Women” are constructed” (p. 19). Additionally, although Butler claims that coalitional politics “is not to be underestimated…the very form of coalition, of an emerging and unpredictable assemblage of positions, cannot be figured in advance” (p. 20).  Dialogic practices that work towards these universalistic claims about women, or even coalitions, do “risk relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes “agreement” and “unity”” (Butler, p. 20).  Mani[ii] (1990), adds “the example of women’s agency is a particularly good instance of the dilemmas confronted in simultaneously attempting to speak within different historical moments and to discrepant audiences” (p. 402).

Thus, “the shift from an epistemological account of identity to one which locates the problematic within practices of signification permits an analysis that takes the epistemological mode itself as one possible and contingent signifying practice. Further, the question of agency is reformulated as a question of how signification and resignification work. In other words, what is signified as an identity is not signified at a given point in time after which it is simply there as an inert piece of entitative language” (Butler, p. 198).

Further, “indeed to understand identity as a practice and as a signifying practice, is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life” (Butler, p. 198).

““Agency”, then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on …repetition If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e. new possibilities of gender that contest the rigid codes of hierarchal binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (Butler, p. 199).

As such, “the critical task is…to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them” (Butler, p. 201).

Finally, “the deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms though which identity is articulated. This kind of critique brings into question the foundationalist frame in which feminism as an identity politics has been articulated” (Butler, p. 203). 

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[i] Butler, J. (2006). Gender Trouble:  Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. NY: Routledge.  

[ii] Lata Mani, L. (1990). Multiple Mediations:  Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational

Reception, pp. 390- 403. From McCann, C. R., & Kim, S-k. (Eds). (2010). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives 2nd Ed. New York, NY: Routledge.