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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
School shootings, police misconduct, and sexual assault where people are injured and die dominate the news. What are the connections between such incidents of violence and extreme harm? In this new book, world-renowned sociologist Patricia Hill Collins explores how violence differentially affects people according to their class, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity. These invisible workings of overlapping power relations give rise to what she terms "lethal intersections," where multiple forms of oppression converge to catalyze a set of violent practices that fall more heavily on particular groups. Drawing on a rich tapestry of cases, Collins challenges readers to reflect on what counts as violence today and what can be done about it. Resisting violence offers a common thread that weaves together disparate antiviolence projects across the world. When parents of murdered children organize against gun violence, when Black citizens march against the excessive use of police force in their neighborhoods, and when women and girls report sexual abuse by employers, coaches, and community leaders, the ideas and actions of ordinary people lay a foundation for new ways of thinking about and combating violence. Through its ground-breaking analysis, Lethal Intersections aims to stimulate debate about violence as one of the most pressing social problems of our times.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Detailed Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Violence is intersectional
Overview of the book
Notes
1. Lethal Intersections and Violence
Being in a lethal intersection
Disciplinary power and surveillance
Dangerous places and weapons of violence
Gun violence
Living in a war zone
When resistance is not optional
Notes
2. Violence and the Power of Ideas
Intersecting ideologies of race, gender, and nation
Durable ideologies in popular culture
Propaganda, hate speech, and violence
Hate speech and violence
Kill the messenger, kill the ideas?
Notes
3. Violence and National Identity
A special case? Gun violence in the United States
Violence, participatory democracy, and citizenship
Rewriting the national story
Notes
4. Invisible Violence
Capitalism, colonialism, and children
Disposable children: Then and now
Coming of age in popular culture
Memory and the politics of care
Notes
5. Resisting Intersectional Violence
Living in a war zone: The City of Joy
Legacies of war: The People vs. Agent Orange
The road ahead: March for Our Lives
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Lethal Intersections
Race, Gender, and Violence
Patricia Hill Collins
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Patricia Hill Collins 2024
The right of Patricia Hill Collins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5315-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5316-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023931317
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Detailed Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Violence is intersectional
Overview of the book
1. Lethal Intersections and Violence
Being in a lethal intersection
Disciplinary power and surveillance
Dangerous places and weapons of violence
When resistance is not optional
2. Violence and the Power of Ideas
Intersecting ideologies of race, gender, and nation
Durable ideologies in popular culture
Propaganda, hate speech, and violence
Kill the messenger, kill the ideas?
3. Violence and National Identity
A special case? Gun violence in the United States
Violence, participatory democracy, and citizenship
Rewriting the national story
4. Invisible Violence
Capitalism, colonialism, and children
Disposable children: Then and now
Coming of age in popular culture
Memory and the politics of care
5. Resisting Intersectional Violence
Living in a war zone: The City of Joy
Legacies of war:
The People vs. Agent Orange
The road ahead: March for Our Lives
References
Index
Acknowledgments
International travel has been crucial in shaping the arguments that I make in this book. I cannot possibly thank everyone, but being able to travel to Brazil has been pivotal. I want to thank the following individuals for their support and encouragement. In Rio de Janeiro: Angela Randolpho Paiva, Thula Pires, Marco Casanova, Amanda Domingos de Souza, and Julio Ludemir; in São Paulo: Maria Carla Corrochano, Majoi Gongora, Eugênio Lima, Melvina Afra Mendes de Araújo, Clarice Cardoso, Kim Doria, and the wonderful team at Boitempo; and in Brasilia: Ana Claudia Pereira, Ana Flávia Pinto, Joaze Bernardino-Costa, Bruna Pereira, Kleber Aparecido da Silva, and Raíla Melo. Special thanks to my Brazilian colleagues who have supported my work, especially Ana Lúcia Silva Souza, Djamila Ribeiro, Núbia Regina Moreira, Nilma Lino Gomes, and Winnie Bueno. I also want to thank the institutional actors who supported my travel, the Fulbright Specialist Program, and the amazing SESC teams in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, whose programming continues to enrich the cultural life of Brazil.
My month-long trip to Australia in 2020 was crucial in shaping this particular project. I cannot thank Victoria Grieves enough for taking me at my word when I said that I wanted to learn as much as possible about race, indigeneity, and Aboriginal concerns during my first, and thus far, only trip to Australia. Special thanks to Olivia Guntarik, a valued colleague and friend, who was instrumental in organizing my visit. I also want to thank Suvendrini Perera, Hannah McGlade, Bronwyn Carlson, Alana Lentin, Rhonda Collard-Spratt, and all those who were so gracious with their time and ideas. I especially want to thank Robert Eggington and Selina Eggington for honest conversations at the meeting space and art gallery maintained by the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation in Perth. Their unwavering resolve to create a space of remembrance and cultural affirmation for at-risk Aboriginal youth deepened my understanding of how ordinary people resist violence in their everyday lives.
Working in isolation on a book on violence during the Covid pandemic presented many challenges. Special thanks to Karen Wolfe, Patrice Dickerson, Randi Solomon, and Bobbie Knable, who listened patiently to me as I worked through the arguments in this text, even when they, or even I, did not realize we were doing so. I deeply appreciate the intellectual and personal support of my colleague Kanisha Bond, who manages to fuse rigorous scholarship on political violence with a commitment to social justice.
Special thanks to the editorial team at Polity, who stuck with me as I struggled to finish this manuscript. Louise Knight, my editor, was a rock in steering my book through the storm. I want to thank Inès Boxman, Rachel Moore, and all those who worked on getting this book into print. As every author knows, a great copyeditor makes all the difference. In this regard, special thanks to Sarah Dancy – she had the editorial eye of a tiger, the patience of Job, and endless compassion for an author who routinely submitted drafts of this manuscript that needed considerable revision.
Finally, I want to thank my family for their support and understanding during this project. Knowing that someone has your back makes all the difference.
Introduction
The fact of violence is all around us if we only choose to see it as such. As human beings, we do not begin our lives as inherently violent or prone toward violence. Anyone who has ever cared for a newborn baby can tell you that. But as we move through life, we encounter violence in two ways: violent acts that are visible and that can be associated with individuals and groups; and violence that is invisible because it is embedded in the taken-for-granted rules and practices of everyday life. This theater of violence, with the actors on stage who engage in violent actions, and the staging of violence through social structures, is explained to us by ideas that surround us. We may experience violence as individuals, but taking a step back and seeing how violence affects our families, communities, neighborhoods, villages, cities, and nations can be daunting.
The reality of violence may be all around us, yet we are encouraged to turn a blind eye to violence that appears to be far away or to affect people who are not like us. The tragic stories of child soldiers who have been forced to witness and commit war crimes, often against members of their own families and communities, point to the lifelong trauma that can affect an individual who grows up in violent settings. Like child soldiers, we may live in places that solicit and/or compel our support for violence, seemingly in our own self-defense or in defense of our loved ones. We get guns to protect ourselves from our enemies and build walls around our houses, communities, and nations to keep out unwanted intruders. In situations where the threat of force reigns supreme, violence and fear are closely interrelated. When it comes to violence, we are taught to remain vigilant so that we can identify the bad actors who are responsible for violence. But when it comes to identifying so-called good guys and bad guys, where do we ourselves fit? How often do we look away, explain away, or remain indifferent to the suffering that violence engenders?
We cannot change the facts of violence to suit us, but we can change the stories that we offer to explain those facts. Changing the stories that we tell about violence allows features of violence that remain hidden to come into view. Stories that attribute violence to individual causes such as bad luck, poor choices, or moral failures are pervasive and circulate as taken-for-granted truths. Some stories maintain that human beings are inherently violent and must be disciplined into a moral, social order.1 But because violence is so widespread and affects so many people, the human suffering that it generates cannot be explained away as the work of a few individual bad apples. When a young man takes a gun to his high school and murders his classmates, who is responsible? Can personal choice really explain such a horrific event? When babies die from hunger in war zones, are they simply unlucky? Who is responsible for these excess deaths of children who never got to grow up? Violence may be individually experienced but is collectively structured and condoned. Stories about violence told by those who benefit from it, or who at least do not appear to be harmed by it, often deflect attention away from serious critical analysis of how the theater of violence is organized. Easy answers to difficult social problems like violence can foster complacency where everyone has an opinion, but no one has a solution.
We cannot make the fact of violence disappear, but we can develop new explanations for its causes and contours. Lethal Intersections: Race, Gender and Violence offers a different story that examines the relationship between violence and power. In this book, I argue that violence is widespread precisely because it has been and remains essential to upholding power relations and pervasive social inequalities. Violence is an essential tool of political domination, a situation in which one actor or group of actors imposes his/her/their will on others.
Power often shows its face through a violent act – a slap that seemingly came from nowhere, or a simple traffic stop where a motorist dies for no clear reason. Digging deeper into cases of violence reveals power relations of gender and race that structure the invisible workings of violence. When a man slaps his wife, the gendered violence that exists in many intimate partner relationships becomes more visible. When a white police officer shoots an unarmed Black motorist, the workings of racial violence come to light. These violent acts are visible sites of power relations – in these cases, of gender and race – where people aim to maintain social inequality.
To investigate this complex relationship between violence and power, I rely on the construct of lethal intersections as sites where the visible effects of violence are more pronounced. Lethal intersections constitute sites of political domination where death, or the threat of death, is evident – they are potentially “lethal” in some way to those who are harmed by social inequality. The slap and the police stop both contain the potential to be lethal. Men murder their wives and police kill motorists. Such sites also reflect the convergence or “intersection” of systems of power – for example, the lethal intersection formed by a convergence of racial and gender inequality within intimate partner violence and traffic stops alike. Lethal Intersections offers a social structural view of power relations, one in which an individual’s experiences with violence reflect the ways that power relations are both organized and enforced. Examining violence offers a window into the complex relationship between violence and power relations that sustains social inequality.
Violence is intersectional
Because the term intersectionality is widely used to study social inequality, a brief history of this term provides a way of thinking about the complex relationship between violence and power.2 As a form of critical analysis, intersectionality posits that systems of power are interlocking, interdependent, or intersectional – for example, racism gains meaning through sexism, and capitalism is tightly linked to nationalism (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016]). Intersectionality describes how multiple systems of power converge to catalyze expressions of violence that fall more heavily on particular groups – for example, Black people, Indigenous people, women, the young, poor people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people – and less heavily on others. Intersectionality relies on shorthand terms to examine how such systems are interconnected – for example, those of race and gender, or class and nation. These systems each rely on violence in some fashion.
Women of color in the United States have been especially harmed by violence, both to themselves personally as well as to members of their families and communities. As a result, they have long argued that violence and power are interconnected, and that these power relations shape the social inequalities that they experience. Women of color do not go willingly to places at the bottom of the social hierarchy – they are forced to go there, often through violent means. Although such violence takes different forms, the reality of violence unites the experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, immigrant, and poor women in the United States. Combating various expressions of violence was central to mid-twentieth-century social movements for social justice, including civil rights, the women’s movement, gay rights, and the anti-war movement. Fighting violence also occurred through a variety of grassroots and local projects that developed a view of violence from below. Women of color in the United States who participated, and often took leadership roles, in these political struggles developed multifaceted ways of analyzing and resisting violence (Collins and Bilge 2020 [2016], 70–100). Their activism, which took power into account, fostered analyses of violence as intersectional.
Several important ideas advanced by women of color foreshadowed contemporary understandings of violence as being intersectional. First, systemic racism informed the varying forms of violence that women of color experienced both in the United States and globally. Colonial conquest, slavery, genocide, ghettoization, and restrictive immigration policies shared a common ideology of white supremacy that in turn shaped distinctive histories of violence. Initially, arguments about violence against women developed in the context of racial violence targeted toward their racially segregated communities. Because Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant women were uniquely positioned to see how their lives were influenced by racism, they brought distinctive angles of vision to their analyses of racial and gendered violence both within their communities and within US society. The forms of violence that targeted Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant communities generated different histories, but violence against women in such communities was a common thread of political domination. In this sense, violence against women within racial/ethnic communities was a connective tissue joining such communities. Here, the work of Angela Davis (1978) on slavery, capitalism, and rape and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) work on political violence within borderlands as geographic and political spaces offered classic ideas for conceptualizing intersectional analyses of violence and systemic racism.
Second, attending to the intricacies of sex/gender/sexuality as a system of power brought added complexities to understandings of violence. Women of color were uniquely positioned to see how patriarchy, or male domination of women, took specific forms in their individual lives as well as within their distinctive communities. Identifying sexual assault, rape, wife battering, and forced sterilization as practices that constituted assaults on their bodies, they argued that these distinctive forms of violence against women worked with and through racism. For Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant women, resisting such violence meant analyzing how racial violence was organized through a gendered body politics. If all gendered violence was inherently racial and embodied, then all racial violence was similarly gendered and embodied. Sexuality added another layer of complexity. Lesbian and nonbinary women of color identified how compulsory heterosexuality shaped their experiences with and analyses of violence. For Black women, the work of the Combahee River Collective Statement was groundbreaking in that it offered an analysis of how capitalism, colonialism, sexism, and homophobia all influence African American communities (Combahee River Collective 1995 [1977]).3 Just as it was impossible to separate race, gender, and sexuality in the lives of women of color, the convergence of race, gender, and sexuality as systems of power produced distinctive individual and group-based effects.
Third, this antiviolence work by women of color fostered an awareness of the necessity of multifaceted political coalitions for antiviolence activism. As individuals, women of color developed an array of community-organizing projects to highlight the contours of gendered violence; many found new allies outside their own communities. Women of color who exerted leadership within their respective communities concerning the gendered contours of racial violence were in a position to build networks among racial/ethnic communities. But women were also in a position to form new groups among themselves. Despite their distinctive histories, women of color, or Third World women as they called themselves at the time, shared commonalities of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. The phrase “women of color” encapsulated the coalitional politics that unified women around the shared social problem of violence.
Women of color faced the formidable task of coordinating social justice projects within their respective communities of color that acknowledged various forms of gendered violence within African American, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx communities. For example, African American women pointed out the differential effects of racism, sexism, and homophobia on Black women, Black men, and Black LGBTQ people. Women of color also faced the challenge of building coalitions among women of color that recognized the different histories of violence of Black, Indigenous, and other women of color, but that also took into account the shared causes and consequences of each history. This coalitional work also highlighted the significance of American national identity, thereby bringing the significance of national borders and national belonging into view. In essence, these ongoing political actions to resist violence stimulated a range of intellectual and political projects, a view of racial and gendered violence from below, one advanced by women who lacked power within systems of race, gender, sexuality, and class.
Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced academic and activist audiences to the term intersectionality to name the set of ideas emerging from these antiviolence projects. Writing in the 1980s and early 1990s during an important historic juncture when women of color had not yet settled on a shared language for this antiviolence activism, Crenshaw’s status as a law professor gave her a distinctive perspective on the possibilities and limitations of law as an instrument of social change. She also saw the need for a unifying vocabulary for the ongoing, multiple antiviolence community-organizing projects. She bridged the intellectual activism of women of color within social movements and scholarly work in gendered violence in the academy. Her use of the term intersectionality originated in the quest to find a common language for understanding how violence requires more than addressing any one system of power or set of institutional practices. She also aimed to support ongoing antiviolence activism by women of color.
Crenshaw’s two groundbreaking articles, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991), drew upon the ideas advanced through decades of women of color activism. Crenshaw argued that solving the social problem of violence targeted toward women of color in the United States required political responses that took race and gender as systems of power into account. Her immediate concern was to offer a more robust analysis of violence that might strengthen grassroots and public policy antiviolence mobilization initiatives. Crenshaw drew from existing social justice projects, primarily Black feminism (Collins 2022 [1990]) and Latina feminism (Blackwell 2011), that were already engaged in antiviolence activism, and included the challenges facing immigrant women of color as an expansion of this ongoing work.
Crenshaw is often acknowledged as naming intersectionality as a construct, yet the significance of resisting violence as the immediate catalyst for her analysis drops away within subsequent use of the term, especially within academic settings. Angela Davis describes the shifts in the meaning and use of the term intersectionality:
Today when people refer to “intersectionality” as if that category had always been around … they don’t take into consideration that much of the impetus for developing a framework that was capable of addressing these issues together came directly from people, women especially, working on the ground, doing activism against war, activism within the labor movement, activism against, for example, sterilization abuse. “Triple jeopardy” referred to racism, sexism, and imperialism; those were the three categories and, of course, imperialism embraced capitalism. I felt drawn to that analysis all along but did not necessarily see it as feminist. It was the alternative framework to what was then considered to be feminism, and it was that framework that didn’t make it into the academy and would take another ten years before it became available … It’s really important to look at all of the ways in which work outside of the academy had a direct impact on what would eventually be taken up within. (Cited in Mohanty and Carty 2018, 39)
Davis’s retrospective view of the origins of intersectionality rests not just on race, gender, and sexuality, but also signals the complex relationships of class and capitalism. She points out how the term imperialism “embraced capitalism.” Contemporary vocabularies of colonialism, decolonization, and nationalism offer many terms that expand Davis’s attention to imperialism. Significantly, she explicates how the broader context that informed understandings of violence as intersectional emerged within a coalitional politics advanced by women of color who were resisting violence. Fortunately, women of color chose to archive their intellectual and political work by writing their own history, thereby signaling the importance of preserving and passing on their own experiences of resisting intersectional violence. Originally published in 2006, and reissued in 2016, the anthology Color of Violence, edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, provides a glimpse into the vibrant range of ideas and actions characterizing this dynamic social movement that conceptualized violence as intersectional. As the term intersectionality traveled beyond American borders, the idea that violence is intersectional proved to be elastic enough to speak to the realities of women in other national settings. Whether they used the term intersectionality was less important than the growing recognition that the violence associated with racism, sexism, ethnic and religious intolerance, and homophobia might be organized quite differently, yet serve the same purpose for political domination (see, e.g., Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992).
Crenshaw did not set out to name a new field of academic inquiry, but rather to address violence as a social problem.4 The corpus of her intellectual and activist work offers a bridge between the ideas and activities of the women of color activists showcased in the Color of Violence anthology and those of contemporary antiviolence and human rights projects.5 Viewing violence as intersectional suggests that violence takes different forms for women according to their race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and ability. Moreover, violence also takes varying forms for men, based on these same categories. Broadening the intersectional lens beyond the experiences of any particular group suggests that the realities of violence as intersectional are far broader than previously supposed. By claiming that violence is intersectional for me/us in this place and time, women of color laid a foundation for analyzing and resisting violence as intersectional. This shift in perspective opens up an entirely new set of questions and possibilities for conceptualizing violence, explaining it, seeing how it’s organized, and deciding what can and should be done about it.
Increasingly, intersectionality is seen as offering a unique framework for analyzing violence as one important site where intersecting systems of power converge. In this sense, violence is a link between power and social inequality. Just as power relations are intersectional, so too may be the violence that they engender. At the same time, resisting violence offers a window into how people resist social inequalities of intersecting power relations. Examining how violence is intersectional offers possibilities for understanding these broader concerns.6
In Lethal Intersections, I analyze case studies of intersectional violence as a way to understand how power is organized and operates. Because the perspectives of individuals and groups that grapple with intersectional violence are not often well represented within academic discourse, I made the decision early on to organize this book around cases of lethal intersections – namely, cases where the visible effects of intersectional violence and struggles against it are especially pronounced. To investigate this relationship, I engage four core questions: What counts as violence? Why does violence exist? How is violence organized? And what can we do about it?
First, what counts as violence? Broadly defined, violence consists of practices where death or the threat of death is prominent. Violence stems from human actions, words, and institutions, both intended and unintended, that cause harm to human life and all that sustains it. Violence is a social problem that results from human actions or inactions. In this book, I offer an expansive view of violence as permeating the rules and regulations of society that foster both premature and excess deaths. This invisible, systemic violence offers a backdrop for the visible acts of violence that stem from human action. When violence results in the premature death of an individual who would otherwise have lived, violence as a cause of death is easier to see and analyze. In contrast, excess deaths are more hidden, and often designed to remain so, because they point to institutional culpability in fostering violence. Excess deaths are social patterns, trends that affect some groups over others – for example, the shorter life expectancy of poor people who die from preventable diseases.
What counts as violence often pivots on whether it is visible and easily recognizable as such to most people, or whether it remains invisible to people as they go about their daily lives. It’s far easier to see gun violence that results in the death of a child as a premature death. Food insecurity contributes to malnutrition and excess deaths. But is withholding food from a hungry child an act of violence? Just because we are spared from witnessing a baby’s premature death from hunger does not make that one death any less painful or violent. Death from hunger is preventable – all you need to do is feed the baby. There are many such instances where the evidence of violence lies in the patterns of excess deaths that it engenders. The interplay of visible and invisible violence is woven throughout this book and offers a partial answer to this question of what counts as violence. Sometimes the answer is quite simple – violence that targets elite groups gets defined as violence. In addition, violence that harms elite groups is more likely to be defined as violence especially when it originates from subordinate groups. In contrast, when elite groups enact violence on their subordinates, it is far less often defined as violence, even when it occurs in plain sight. This is how power relations shape definitions of what counts as violence. In essence, the very definition of violence rests on who gets to decide what counts.
Second, why does violence exist? In this book, I argue that intersecting power relations rely on violence as a core mechanism to manage social inequality. People use different terminology to describe the distinctive systems of power that together shape intersectional violence. For example, the term race offers a shorthand way to describe race as a system of power, with a constellation of terms such as racism, racial oppression, white supremacy, anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, structural racism, and systemic racism used to fit the situation at hand. The term gender invokes a similar array of terms to explain gender as a system of power – for example, sexism, gender oppression, misogyny, patriarchy, and heteropatriarchy. As the distinction between biological sex and societal norms about gender became specified, the terms sex and gender came to describe different aspects of gender as a system of power. In addition, the term sexuality invokes its own collection of terms, including homophobia, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Because the relationship between these terms continues to evolve, in this book I use the term heteropatriarchy to describe this convergence. The phrase “sex/gender/sexuality” as a system of power invokes a more robust understanding of each individual term, but it can be unwieldy. Some shorthand terms for power are inadequate – for example, using the term class to invoke the complex dimensions of capitalism as a system of power. Capitalism is far more complex than working-class or middle-class identity. There is no adequate shorthand term to describe some power relations – for example, the use of the term nation to invoke the many political projects associated with nationalism. Throughout the book, I try to retain language that is appropriate to the cases I present, recognizing that linguistic shifts may change the meaning.
In Lethal Intersections, I begin with race and gender as two important systems of power because the connections between these systems of political domination and violence are becoming increasingly well known. But as the book progresses, I also examine how racism and heteropatriarchy intersect with capitalism and nationalism as systems of power. While violence is implicated in upholding power relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and nation, it actually does more than this. Violence is itself a social problem precisely because it is a common thread that both permeates power relations, leaving premature and excess deaths in its wake, and transcends any one system of power. When it comes to violence, I use the terms racial violence and gendered violence to illustrate the discriminatory and unequal treatment of many distinctive groups – for example, the experiences of women of color as victims of sexual assault, or the excess deaths of men of color in war zones.
Third, how is violence organized? In this book, I make a distinction between systems of power such as race and gender and how such systems are organized. Each system of power considered here relies on a universal organizational framework. Throughout this book, I utilize a framework that identifies four domains of power – namely, the interpersonal, the structural, the disciplinary, and the cultural. Interpersonal power relations shape how people treat one another in everyday life. This is the visible violence that most people experience or witness in daily life. The workings of structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains of power are less visible and take more work to uncover. Structural power relations organize how core social institutions of any society – such as employment, housing, education, health, religion, prisons, and the military – endorse, promote, ignore, or oppose violence. Disciplinary power relations refer to how rules and regulations are differentially applied to people based on their categories of belonging. People are disciplined to remain in their proscribed places, and are punished, often through the threat of violence, when they venture out of them. Cultural power provides ideas that explain what counts as violence and how it is organized in a given society. Intersecting systems of power share common design principles. The specific forms that intersectional violence takes in racism and heteropatriarchy may differ, but these organizational dimensions of power itself are constant.7
Cases of intersectional violence, or lethal intersections, provide an important angle of vision on how the interpersonal, structural, disciplinary, and cultural power relations in specific places, or among particular individuals and groups, converge, interlock, or intersect. For each case, people’s social location within intersecting power relations shapes their experiences with and perspectives on violence. This produces a view of violence from above by those who cause, engage in, and/or benefit from violence, and also a view from below – namely, how violence looks and feels to those who experience it.8 People who are male, white, and affluent may be shielded from intersectional violence, and may view the violence that plagues their subordinates as justified, if they see violence at all. It is no accident that members of oppressed groups who experience or witness violence are more likely to see it, criticize it, and marshal a range of responses to it. But exposure to intersectional violence is no guarantee that being female, Black, or poor will foster resistance or even understanding of violence. Violent ideas and practices are designed to suppress dissent and to mask power. Most people do not organize to resist the specific expressions of violence that inform their everyday lives. But some people do, offering an analysis of violence from below that is implicitly intersectional, often without recognizing it.
Fourth, what can we do about violence? Rather than imagining what resisting violence might look like, this book investigates what people are already trying to do about it. Violence has long been an issue of concern to people whose personal experiences grant them a special angle of vision on violence as a social problem. Those who are negatively impacted by violence have a vested interest in social change. I assume that the violence stemming from intersecting power relations is far more prevalent than meets the eye. If so, people who are harmed by violence are more likely to see it, think about it, and try to do something about it. When violence touches your life in a visceral way, you are more likely to see it as a social problem. This is especially the case when an individual dies prematurely or where patterns of excess deaths in the family, community, or nation are visible and threatening.
No one has a monopoly on intersectional violence, but some social actors do have authority over the legitimate use of it, whether they choose to exercise that right or not. Political resistance to intersectional violence can be understood through the same organizational principles of the interpersonal, structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains of power. Violent acts engender a view of violence both from above and below, one where experiences with interpersonal violence, especially those with lethal outcomes, bring other aspects of power into view. The organization of power offers varying possibilities for resisting intersectional violence by those who benefit from it as well as those who are harmed by it. The tools of political resistance are as varied as the people who use them. For example, because the cultural domain generates knowledge that explains the why and the how of violence – namely, who is deserving of protection and who is a legitimate target for violence – cultural politics constitute an important site of antiviolence activism. In essence, the domains of power framework offers an array of political possibilities for defending, resisting, or remaining indifferent to intersectional violence and the social injustice that it upholds.
Overview of the book
In Lethal Intersections, I explore cases that shed light on varying dimensions of intersectional violence and, in doing so, draw attention to aspects of resistance. I spotlight cases where people view violence as a social problem to be solved, and not as an inevitable fact of life to be explained, accepted, condoned, or endured. Just as women of color found themselves within a lethal intersection, so too do many other people. The experiences of women of color in the United States constitute one case among many instances where resisting violence from within a lethal intersection can generate ideas and actions that resonate far beyond personal experiences. Like women of color, people who experience violence within systems of social inequality have a distinctive angle of vision on the intersectional violence that they experience. But the reasons that we know about lethal intersections and the intersectional violence that they engender is because people who have a view from below take some kind of a stand against such violence. They survive, protest, rebel, report, make films, communicate with each other, start programs, organize their communities, create social media accounts, capture positions within governments and other social institutions, write songs, and just refuse to stand by silently as witnesses to the suffering of others.
Because violence constitutes a major preoccupation for small communities and contemporary global geopolitics alike, to select cases for this book, I turned to sources in popular culture. I use journalistic accounts, nonfiction, fiction, memoirs, and similar materials from contemporary cultural production to identify cases of lethal intersections. Documents that are readily accessible to a general public and that aim to reach general audiences offer current and comprehensive information on how people conceptualize and respond to the violence that touches their lives. Popular culture offers numerous cases of violence where intersecting power relations seem to be at play. Initially, I developed a massive file on cases of violence that contained notes on journalistic sources and popular culture. I read award-winning popular books of fiction and nonfiction, watched feature films and documentaries, and consulted journalistic coverage of contemporary cases of intersectional violence. The coverage of violence in popular culture is massive, and I quickly found that, within popular culture, specialized forms of violence are widespread – for example, domestic abuse, warfare, murders, and gun violence. Connections to violence are quite clear in some problematic social situations, but in a number of others the threat of violence, if not actual violence, was less visible – for example, illiteracy, poverty, homelessness, and hunger, to name but a few. Scholarly research on violence certainly informs my argument, and I do include selected relevant citations in the notes, but such research comes well after the immediacy of what’s going on now in the social world. Because many of the cases were ongoing, each one opened new doors of connection as well as new questions for the project itself.
The cases in this book serve as anchors for my argument as well as touchstones for navigating the expansive and ever-changing world of violence.9 For each case, I highlight the ideas and actions of the people who were responding to violence, not to those who caused it. In essence, I flip the standard script of beginning with the ideas and actions of elites and studying how people respond. We know about the cases included here because people spoke up, even if they themselves were not harmed by violence. Extracting the details of suffering in someone’s life to advance a preconceived argument can itself be a violent act. Here I present cases not by dwelling exclusively on the details of harm – an approach that overemphasizes oppression to the point that fosters hopelessness – but rather by highlighting the agency of people whose words and actions defied violence. Unsurprisingly, many such cases are brought forward by women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, poor people, people living with disabilities, and others who find themselves confronting varying lethal intersections. It is important to note that such groups resist violence with or without allies. Confronting intersectional violence offers possibilities for coalitions, often among unlikely allies. Collectively, the cases in this book stress the response to violence on the part of survivors, witnesses, allies, and those who refuse to forget the violence done to others, no matter how long ago it happened.
I cast a wide net to identify a variety of cases of lethal intersections from different places and times, using different weapons and with varying degrees of visibility. I had no problem finding cases of lethal intersections where some people, though not all, saw violence as a social problem. But recognizing the heterogeneity of the forms that violence assumed, as well as analyzing the substance of each case on its own terms, turned out to be a challenge. At first glance, gun violence, sexual assaults, police misconduct, child neglect, rape as a weapon of war, and fascist hate speech – all cases in this book – may appear to be primarily about one system of power over others. For example, police use of excessive force in Black neighborhoods and sexual assaults on women in custody are seemingly unrelated; one is focused on race and the other on gender. But if violence is intersectional, then surely these practices are interconnected. The question is, how? The reliance on case studies of lethal intersections constitutes one distinguishing feature of this book. Each case of a lethal intersection described here offers a closer look inside these questions. The cases identify the forms of power that are at play (race and gender, for example) as well as the way in which they illuminate how power is organized – e.g., interpersonal, structural, disciplinary, and cultural.
Lethal Intersections uses an intersectional lens to define, explain, strategize about, and resist multiple forms of violence. Collectively, the five chapters address the core questions of this volume, namely: What counts as violence? Why does violence exist? How is violence organized? What can we do about it? To do so, Lethal Intersections emphasizes varying systems of power – for example, race and gender in Chapters 1 and 2, race and nation in Chapter 3, and class, age, and race in Chapter 4. Cases in the earlier chapters focus on key ideas of how intersectional violence is organized, whereas later chapters emphasize resistance to such violence. Each chapter also draws upon the vocabulary of how power is organized (the interpersonal, structural, disciplinary, and cultural domains of power). The cases presented are not meant to be comprehensive but, rather, introduce and/or highlight important aspects of the particular chapter as well as the overall argument of the book. Each case examines the ideas and actions of people who found important and often innovative ways of resisting intersectional violence. In choosing cases, I sought out different national contexts – specifically, Australia, Brazil, the United States, Ireland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Vietnam. Moving through the book reveals a deepening analysis of violence as intersectional, as visible and/or invisible, of the notion of the view from below, and of the strategies that people use to resist violence.
Chapter 1, “Lethal Intersections and Violence,” juxtaposes the invisibility of intersectional violence that affected Ms. Dhu, a young Aboriginal woman who died alone in police custody in Australia, with the visibility of violence in the case of Philando Castile, an African American man who was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop in the United States. Both cases highlight different aspects of the invisible violence of structural institutions and the disciplinary practices that sustain them. Both cases also introduce the significance of place for what counts as violence as well as the visible and invisible weapons of violence. All violence occurs somewhere in physical space – in private homes, in state institutions, in one’s own neighborhood, or in a different country. The weapons of violence are also similarly diverse, with the growing visibility of gun violence as one outcome of lethal intersections. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how trans women of color use a visible body politics to resist intersectional violence.
Chapter 2, “Violence and the Power of Ideas,” examines the significance of ideas as a site of political domination and resistance. Ideologies and political speech constitute a vitally important realm, convincing people of, or dissuading them from, violence. When intersecting ideologies that uphold intersecting power relations become politicized, they can be transformed into dangerous political speech, with violent outcomes. Asking the question, “Kill the messenger, kill the ideas?” the chapter examines the ways in which ideas shape intersectional violence but also how ideas constitute an important form of resistance to such violence. Cultural politics has long formed a site of resistance from below, using ideas as weapons of choice, often the only weapons available. Cases of lethal intersections include that of Marielle Franco, a Black feminist human rights activist in Brazil who took a strong stance against violence in all its forms, the role of popular culture in crafting ideologies of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, the strategic use of propaganda and disinformation campaigns by the Nazi regime, and multiple forms of resistance through memoirs, fiction, film, and other aspects of an increasingly global popular culture. Killing people to silence their ideas certainly can dampen political resistance, but political resistance to intersectional violence never fully disappears.
Chapter 3, “Violence and National Identity,” examines how, in the United States, participatory democracy, unequal citizenship, and violence have long been intertwined. Contemporary gun violence in the United States raises new questions for ordinary citizens about the actions they can take to strengthen participatory democracy. The opening case described in Chapter 3, where artists and activists contributed to the successful removal of a massive confederate memorial, offers a glimpse into broader struggles over the place of unequal citizenship within American national identity. Taking down this monument, which celebrated a version of white supremacy and the intersectional violence needed to maintain it, was highly significant. Political activism often takes the form of visible social protest, but far more often institutionalized change occurs through laborious processes of changing the rules, regulations, and disciplinary practices of social institutions. Looking to specific cases where ordinary citizens took action in response to intersectional violence – fighting back against lead in public drinking water, suing major media figures who spread “fake news” about a school shooting, or refusing to allow a pipeline to pass through Indigenous ancestral land – suggests that far more people want to preserve and perfect US democracy than to destroy it.
Chapter 4, “Invisible Violence,” examines how memory can be a tool for resisting intersectional violence, especially violence that remains invisible and/or has been forgotten. This refusal to forget, often from one generation to the next, constitutes an important dimension of resisting intersectional violence. Whether past or present, the invisible violence shaping the lives of children and young people offers a compelling case for broadening analyses of intersectional violence to incorporate age and class as intersecting systems of power. Capitalism works with and through racism, sexism, and nationalism, bringing special hardships to poor children and young people. The opening case of the discovery of the bones of babies buried in a mass grave in Tuam, Ireland is both an example of a lethal intersection that became visible through citizen activism, as well as a metaphor for being in an invisible lethal intersection. Other cases in this chapter examine the invisible violence visited upon disposable children, among them (1) the historical hardships and differential treatment of poor white children in industrializing Britain, Black children and slavery, and Indigenous children in boarding schools; and (2) contemporary hardships of disposable children and youth in a global context. Chapter 4 also identifies how women have been important in making visible the invisible violence that affects children and young people.
Chapter 5, “Resisting Intersectional Violence,” examines the actions and ideas of women and young people who are often the collateral damage of violence of war. Depending on the nature of the war and the vested interests of those who benefit from warfare, women and young people living in war zones face differential patterns of intersectional violence. This chapter investigates three cases of political resistance by women and young people that highlight the view from below. Each case showcases the ideas and actions of ordinary people in response to different expressions of intersectional violence and highlights how ordinary people react when faced with extraordinary and/or extremely troubling circumstances of war. The cases concern rape as a weapon of war during long-lasting, unofficial, armed conflict; the intergenerational damage done to survivors and their children as the legacy of war; and how gun violence harms children and young people who find themselves living in a war zone.
* * *
Writing this book was extremely difficult. Everything looked and felt different through this process of studying intersectional violence in the social world in which I was living. Each day brought new cases of intersectional violence, often more horrific than the ones that I had already selected. And they all seemed unfinished and ongoing – because they are. Through this process, my decision to focus on cases of resistance to lethal intersections was crucial because it was hopeful. Developing a better understanding of what people who resist violence are up against enabled me to cultivate a deeper appreciation for what they actually did. Resisting violence may appear to be heroic but it is also profoundly risky. Many people lose their lives because of their antiviolence activism. With hindsight, I was not prepared for my emotional reaction to the magnitude of the harm done to people by violence, especially to children and young people. Yet I was reassured and inspired by how much resistance to violence I found, once I figured out how to look for it. Finding a resting place that allowed me to stop gathering information on cases, to analyze what I had, and to finish the book was a challenge. Regardless of the cases I selected, each of which represents just one moment in time, the sobering overriding theme is that intersectional violence will persist, as will people’s resistance to it.
The narrative presented in Lethal Intersections is far from finished, and, perhaps, is impossible for any one person to finish. And this reiterates a fundamental premise of this book – grappling with the complexities of intersectional violence requires collective effort. This book constitutes a beginning point not an endpoint of analysis. One can always go deeper into each case by bringing additional analytical and political lenses to it and by putting cases of lethal intersections in dialogue with one another. I came to understand how each case of violence can only yield, at best, a partial perspective on violence and, as a result, a partial perspective on what to do about it. But focusing on one case at a time enabled me to see that what I initially envisioned through the lens of one system of power was connected to others. In other words, when I entered a case through the door of race, I came to see gender differently; or when I began with sexuality and researched a case, I came to see race differently. The cases presented here come from different people, practices, places, and analytical perspectives. Digging deeper into each case shed light on how class, sexuality, nation, age, and similar systems of power place different groups in a differential relationship to violence.
None of the cases that I include in this text initially seemed to go together. But using violence as a navigational tool allowed me to see connections within a particular lethal intersection. Taking a step back from the cases revealed how those that I originally saw as discrete were actually interconnected. What could the death of an Aboriginal woman in custody in Australia, the murder of a trans woman of color in New York City, the death of a Māori child in New Zealand, the unregistered deaths of babies born to unmarried mothers in Ireland, and rape as part of undeclared war in the Democratic Republic of Congo possibly have in common? These cases all occurred in different places, to different people, and during different historical eras. The puzzle for me was figuring out how specific cases of violence and resistance to it, which, on first glance, appeared to be unrelated, provided clues for seeing them as interconnected. I invite you to think with me in piecing together this broader puzzle.
As you read the examples presented in this book, ask yourself, “What does the case reveal about intersectional violence and resistance?” “What more could this particular case say?” “What does the case need to deepen its analysis?” And, more importantly, “What’s missing?” Even if the vocabulary and analyses in this book are unfamiliar, you bring unique experiences and perspectives to the common project of understanding and countering intersectional violence. Just as I have tried to make my ideas clear to you, how might the cases of lethal intersections that touch your life contribute to the broader conversation of what to do about violence? Perhaps the arguments presented here will spark new ways of viewing some aspect of your world. It may unsettle familiar assumptions, and that may make you uncomfortable. Studying other people’s suffering can have that effect. Conversely, you may gain greater clarity about how intersectional violence is present in your everyday life. Lethal Intersections invites active reading of this sort, whereby what you bring to this text shapes its meaning.
Beyond the four core questions that guide my analysis, I ask you to consider one additional question: How does violence touch your life? This book invites you to identify, analyze, and perhaps take action about the forms of violence that affect you, your loved ones, your family, your colleagues, your community, your nation, and your generation. I invite you to draw from the conversations in this book as you investigate cases of lethal intersections in your everyday life and to share with others concerns that you may have about intersectional violence. Lethal Intersections aims to provide the information and tools of critical thinking so that you can begin to clarify your own position on intersectional violence, perhaps alone, but ideally in coalition with others. As a way of countering the assumption that resisting violence is futile, in this book I show multiple ways in which resistance to intersectional violence is open-ended, malleable, essential, passionate, and ongoing. As long as intersectional violence persists, people will find ways to resist, often in unexpected and unconventional ways. I aim to offer a useful analysis for people who are working for a more socially just, global society. Hopefully, this book will help you join them.
Notes
1
Western theorists offer a wide array of theories and perspectives on violence. For an introduction to this literature, see Lawrence et al. (2007); see also Arendt (1970). Arendt (1968) analyzes anti-Semitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism as political systems in order to offer expansive analysis of violence and political power. For a poststructuralist analysis, see Žižek (2008). For a decolonial analysis of violence, see Fanon (1963).
2
Here I introduce intersectionality through one site of its emergence in the work of women of color in the United States. There is a solid literature on intersectionality that reflects distinctive national and disciplinary concerns. For classic work in intersectionality, see Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1992). For varying treatments of the field, see May (2015); Hancock (2016); Carastathis (2016) and Tomlinson (2019).
3
Gendered violence affects both women and men. For an extended analysis of gender and sexuality within African American politics, see Collins (2005).
4
As the term
intersectionality
traveled, its meaning changed. Contemporary readings of Crenshaw’s signature articles within academia routinely underemphasize her efforts to address violence as a social problem as well as her focus on the experiences of women of color. This leaves a decontextualized intersectionality that speaks of race, class, gender, and nation, while ignoring intersectional violence as a social problem (Collins 2019, 121–6).
5
See, e.g., Mohanty and Carty (2018); Davis et al. (2022); and Kaba and Ritchie (2022).
6
This book is part of my broader project to map the contours of intersectionality. In
Intersectionality
(2016[2020]), Sirma Bilge and I survey intersectionality’s emergence in academic and activist contexts. In
Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory
(2019), I examine the intellectual architecture of intersectionality, examining how it serves as a problem-solving tool for a variety of academic and activist projects.
Lethal Intersections
is my third book in this trilogy. Here I use the case study method to model what it’s like to do intersectional work. Together, this trilogy of books places varying degrees of emphasis on intersectionality’s content, theory, and methodology.
7
I have used variations of this basic framework throughout my work. For different emphases in distinctive projects, see Collins (2022 [1990], Ch. 12); an analysis of color-blind racism in Collins (2009, 52–81); and as a framework for intersectionality, Collins and Bilge (2020 [2016]). For this book, social institutions and the structural domain of power are coterminous. When appropriate, I examine police, health, education, the media, and the state as specific social institutions that comprise the structural domain of power. I use the terms “institutional power” and “structural power” interchangeably.
8
I use the term “view from below” to discuss “standpoint epistemology.” See Collins (1998a, 211–19) and Collins (2019, 136–42).
9
Because violence constitutes a major preoccupation for local communities and contemporary global geopolitics alike, to select cases for
Lethal Intersections
