Refusing Safety: The Feminist Struggle to Be Revolutionary

Our most radical feminist impulses, ideas, words, and activism—including a fundamental commitment to the safety of women—are themselves capable of being made “safe” and unchallenging. We might name this “appropriation,” as Kristin Bumiller does in her subtitle, How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement Against Sexual Violence. Or we might describe the process by which claims of victimhood necessitating redress have been contested and revised as Alyson Cole does in The True Cult of Victimhood. Or we might refer to having our radical visions and work absorbed (24), incorporated (34, 186), annexed (117), co-opted, and repackaged (205), as contributors to The Revolution Will Not be Fundedwrite. We could also call it “domestication” and “assimilation,” terms I have used when discussing how legal doctrines and norms colonize our theorizing. We could adapt Hegelian or Marxist language regarding dialectical approaches. Or we could even try to invent a new and unwieldy term such as “safety-ification.”

Whatever we name it, we recognize this process of the state’s use of feminist ideas and energies for its own ends. However, as Bumiller, Cole, and the anthology contributors would agree, a focus on state power alone is insufficient. Private power, including intellectual, cultural, and economic capital, is also at the center of these books. Most important, these analyses require each of us to compare the work that we do with our larger—and revolutionary—aspirations for that work. This essay will briefly discuss each of the three books before placing them in conversation with one another.

An Abusive State

Bumiller’s focus is the problems that have arisen in conjunction with feminist attempts to make the world safe from violence against women. In essence, her contention is that the construction of sexual violence as a social problem has resulted in the feminist movement becoming “a partner in the unforeseen growth of a criminalized society” with its deleterious effects for “minority and immigrant groups of men” as well as for “those women who are subject to scrutiny within the welfare state” (xii). Although she discusses several notorious trials, Bumiller takes as her signature event the so-called Central Park jogger case, in which five young black and Latino men were convicted of the rape and attack of a twenty-eight-year-old white woman who was jogging in New York’s Central Park in 1991. More than a decade later, the men were exculpated by the confession of another man, who had raped another jogger and who was linked to the more celebrated crime by DNA evidence. As Bumiller says, the “reversal of justice” for the originally convicted young men “raises serious doubts about the integrity of the criminal justice system”: the swift identification of the teenagers, the aggressive prosecutorial tactics, and the harsh sentences demonstrate the problems with the crime control model (57). Moreover, this crime control model is linked to the “underlying sensibilities of modern feminist campaigns against sexual violence” (57). For Bumiller, the linkage is not merely subterranean or coincidental. She highlights the “feminist movement’s insistence on aggressive sex crime prosecution and activism” as deeply implicated, and perhaps even causative, of the miscarriage of justice in the Central Park jogger case. The shortcoming of feminism, according to Bumiller, is the positing of gender animus as the central explanation of sexual violence and the concomitant privileging of gender identity over race and culture (155).

Bumiller also criticizes the human rights framework addressing violence against women internationally. She analyzes the globalization of women’s rights, including its manifestation in the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW), adopted in 1979 by the United Nations (but not ratified by the United States). For Bumiller, CEDAW...