Doctoral Dissertation Research: State Violence and the Struggle for Life

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

This research addresses several significant questions in social science research and political science in particular. First, it brings a political science perspective to the issue of state and intimate violence by providing a detailed analysis of the experiences of women and women-activists from a marginalized group. Second, this research will contest the silences surrounding Black women as key actors for understanding Black Politics. Such silences help to perpetuate everyday assumptions about race, gender, violence and the public/private divide with regards to political thinking, action, and justice. The research will document new trends and demonstrate how, and why, gender and race are pivotal in addressing the issue of state violence. In particular, this research will broaden categories for data collection for state violence, which can incorporate the importance of understanding how racially marginalized women experience and understand state violence. This work can be a point of reference for creating better international, national, and local responses that hold states and institutions accountable for violence and injustice, which could therefore help to create a more democratic and just society for all. In addition, the results of this study will be shared with the two organizations with that provide the basis of the fieldwork. In addition, the results of this study can help to address the needs for distributive justice and support for Afro-descendant women as well as for continued research on the topic of gendered anti-blackness and state violence. Anti-Black state violence is a pervasive problem throughout the Americas. Emerging scholarship examining the gendered dimensions of this phenomenon revisit the links between anti-Black state violence and violence against women. This body of work draws on the long history of work thought examining the ways that the state infiltrates, violates, and controls black women's intimate spheres of the body, the home, and the family. As such, this project examines the role of intimacy in contemporary manifestations of anti-black violence and Black mobilizations. Drawing on original ethnographic insights from Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Colombian women, this dissertation posits three arguments. First, state violence invades intimate spaces: the home and relationships--and is, therefore, a form of intimate violence. Second, when Black women narrate these acts of violence, they develop a new way of understanding the state: they show how the state is [re]constituted by means of intimate violations. Thus while Black women's accounts unveil the ways in which state violence is intimate, their voices and organizing also demonstrate how these spaces are important sites for creating new forms of knowledge and resistance. Third, Black women's experiences with anti-black violence are often articulated and interpreted through a collective lens, whereby Black women not only use a language of intimacy to describe experiences with state violence, but also [re]claim domains of the intimate to empower themselves, their families, and their communities. these result in a politic of collective intimacy, which provides a way to resist state violence, hold community and family members accountable, and envision justice beyond the state. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.