In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence by Kristin Bumiller (review)

One clear piece of advice is that it no longer makes sense to single out violence against women as a specific issue for policymaking because there are advantages to seeing it as part of a larger project of enabling women to be more effectual citizens. It is critical to “protect” women by removing the economic and social obstacles they regularly encounter rather than by expanding the capacity of the state to reproduce violence.

—Kristin Bumiller, In an Abusive State

Six years after its publication, Kristin Bumiller’s In an Abusive State remains a timely and highly relevant intervention. Given recent debates about the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism (Fraser 2009) as well as critiques of “carceral feminism” (Bernstein 2012; Davis 2003; Incite! 2006; Spade 2011), Bumiller’s genealogy is necessary and vital reading for these discussions. Of central value is her analysis of how sexual violence was theorized by feminists in the 1970s and later instrumentalized by the state in the 1980s and 1990s. While Bumiller is careful not to blame feminists for the violence perpetrated by the state in the name of “protecting women,” she argues that the mainstream feminist movement against sexual violence prioritized a universal female victim that displaced racialized and classed vectors of violence in the United States. This claim goes beyond a strictly historical argument about the rise of the neoliberal state to invoke a much more profound critique of how society—and feminists—define sexual violence as a social problem.

In chapters 1 and 2, Bumiller details the evolution of the feminist campaign against sexual violence to explain its core philosophy and the context in which it emerged. For example, the battered women’s movement was motivated by a desire to expose violence protected by the patriarchal family and flagrantly denied by the state. An essential part of that movement was the creation of shelters, which provided a refuge for women and nourished consciousness-raising. The first shelters were run by feminist volunteers who sought to create less hierarchal and more democratic spaces. Bumiller clearly points out that the core philosophy of the shelter movement was “anti-state” (3). That is, shelters and rape crisis centers were spaces where women collectively worked to help each other. This core tenet slowly transformed as shelters and other volunteer organizations became instruments for state services. The success of feminist demands for sex crime prosecutions and special services for rape victims entangled the activist organizations with the workings of the state. As these organizations became professionalized and instrumentalized by the therapeutic state, women who sought help from shelters ultimately became dependents of the state and thus vulnerable to its forms of violence (5).

Bumiller argues that feminist calls to publicize violence and make demands of the state allowed for the appropriation of feminist agendas. As the title of the book declares, neoliberalism appropriated the feminist movement against sexual violence. She states, “[F]eminists have not been in total command of the ‘sexual violence’ agenda” (2). This part of her analysis speaks to recent debates regarding the relationship between feminism and neoliberalism. In particular, Nancy Fraser has argued that feminists have privileged a politics of recognition over a politics of redistribution (Fraser 1997, 2009). She claims that the move away from a socialist political imaginary, in which the central problem of justice is redistribution, is a constitutive feature of the “postsocialist” condition (Fraser 1997, 2). Fraser argues that redistribution and recognition need not be opposed, but that they are politically configured as distinct and even opposed. In more stark language, she claims that second-wave feminism has inadvertently legitimized neoliberalism by trumpeting identity rather than class politics (Fraser 2009).

Many scholars have critiqued Fraser’s formulation from a variety of viewpoints (Aslan and Gambetti 2011; Funk 2012). While Bumiller does not take up Fraser’s argument directly, her work provides an important specific example of...