Vulnerability and Violence: Transgressing the Gender Binary

Beata Stawarska, in “Vulnerability and Violence: Transgressing the Gender Binary,” discusses how the Black Lives Matter movement provided an opportunity for racial reckoning and spurred a timely debate about police abolition and/or reform. The feminist movement against gender-based violence and the feminist ethics of vulnerability are to be critically assessed from this perspective. The goal is not a dismissal of feminism tout court, nor does it underestimate the pandemic of interpersonal gender, sexual, and other forms of violence against women, accompanied by the potential or real threat of feminicide. Rather, the goal is a continued rapprochement between feminism and antiracism, Black empowerment, and de-policing; this integrated approach avoids the twin dangers of criminalization and carcerality and it confronts the pandemic of gender-based violence more effectively than the classical feminist approach. Stawarska follows the lead of contemporary Black feminist theory and practice, especially Beth Richie and Angela Davis, that better serve the intertwined emancipatory goals of empowering women and gender nonbinary individuals and of de-policing.