A Feminist Theory of Violence

Reviews

'In this robust, decolonial challenge to carceral feminism, Francoise Vergès elucidates why a structural approach to violence is needed. If we wish to understand how racial capitalism is linked to the proliferation of intimate and state violence directed at women and gender-nonconforming people, we need to look no further than Vergès' timely analysis' 'A powerful and uncompromising text … A stunning reflection on the recurrence of assault – gender-based, sexual, racial violence' 'An important and courageous book, which raises difficult questions and uncovers invisible structures of domination' 'Vergès's incandescent writing casts a light on the global inequalities, brutal carceral systems, unfettered militarisation and punitive ideologies that shape violent intimacies' 'A call to join in the urgent decolonial feminist work of rethinking the practices of (so-called) protection outside of the logics of violence. We have the ability, Vergès insists, to enact a post violent society, to bring another world into being' 'A road map of radical emancipatory imaginaries for shaping urgent social and political change. Vergès' arguments rise from the ground up, from the lived experience of grassroots dissent, action and mobilisation against the wounds and damages inflicted by extractive capitalism across the world' 'Françoise Vergès asks a simple question: what actually is the politics of protection? What she reveals is a paradigm spinning analysis. Once she establishes the perspective of people without power, the 'protection' offered by the state and the meta-state of global capital, is exposed as a killing machine of enforcement and endless punishment. A door opening work' Expand reviews