Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism

This book explores the relationships between sexual violence and racial capitalism. Sexual violence, Alison Phipps argues, facilitates the enclosure of bodies, the extraction of labour, the expropriation of land and resources, and the disposal of unwanted populations. What are the relationships between sexual violence and racial capitalism? What is the role of sexual violence as capitalist systems corral, mould, use and discard the workers they require? While most texts on sexual violence treat capitalism as a backdrop or an afterthought, political economy is the starting point for Alison Phipps’ book. Sexual violence is key to the enclosure of bodies and to the extraction of productive and socially reproductive labour. Sexual violence is a technique by which resources are expropriated, and communities and peoples terrorised and dispossessed. Sexual violence is also the pretext for the disposal of unwanted populations through criminal punishment, militarised border regimes, neo-colonial wars and even genocide.Sexual violence in racial capitalism brings together historical and contemporary case studies including the Early Modern witch hunts, reproductive accumulation in transatlantic slavery, sexual harassment in drop-shipping warehouses and sweatshops, far-right Islamophobia and ‘anti-gender’ activism, the contemporary digital manosphere and the Gaza genocide. Throughout, the analysis explores how both sexual violence and sexual fear create social control and surplus value. In what Phipps calls the coloniality of sexual violence, acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat are situated within an analysis of gendered and raced property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. Fantasies of sexual danger, she argues, represent the violence of coloniality turned inside out: this is a fundamental reason why fear of revolution is fear of rape. This also suggests, though, that revolution is always imminent: violence is necessary because power is incomplete. Most texts on sexual violence treat capitalism as backdrop or afterthought. In contrast, political economy is the core of this book. Phipps explores the centrality of sexual violence to racial capitalist processes: the enclosure of bodies, the extraction of labour, the expropriation of land and resources, and the disposal of unwanted populations. Importantly, she argues that both sexual violence and sexual fear create social control and surplus value. Through a framework called the coloniality of sexual violence, Phipps conjoins acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat in an analysis of gendered and raced property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. She argues that fantasies of sexual danger represent the infolded violence of racial capitalism, which is why fear of revolution is often fear of rape. Revolution, however, is always imminent: violence is necessary because power is incomplete.

Pagina's: 264, Hardcover, Manchester University Press