The State of (Intersectional Critique of) State Violence

As I write this review in April 2018, the U.S. just dropped bombs over Syria, Israel used lethal force in countering protests in Gaza resulting in the death of thirty Palestinians and hundreds wounded, and a young black man was shot at by a white man in Michigan while knocking on the door asking for directions. This is just the last twenty-four hours. How do feminists of color understand these global and local forms of violence? Andrea J. Ritchie's Invisible No More and Jasbir K. Puar's The Right to Maim offer us nuanced analytical frames, correctives to organizing as usual while also critiquing lacunas in movements and fields of study that refuse to see state violence as emanating from multiple axes and forms of oppression.

Both books offer important and timely analyses of state violence as well as collective responses to it. In addition, both authors pose challenges to contemporary activism and social movements (anti-policing, feminist, disability, and even anti-violence) that fail to ground their analysis in intersectionality or in assemblages based on configurations and gradations of raced, gendered, and debilitation dynamics. How would our analysis and praxis for liberation shift if we were to theorize and mobilize from the intersections of race/gender/sexuality (in Ritchie) and sexuality/disability/race/empire/nation (in Puar)?

Ritchie's book tells the many stories of women (women is used there to encompass trans women and any gender-nonconforming [GNC] people), particularly those who are black and of color, as they encounter policing and counter it through movements for racial justice within which women have played such a key role. I use the term policing here (Ritchie often uses police violence) as I find the term police brutality to be redundant, as policing is inherently a mechanism of brutalization and, as Puar shows, a biopolitical tool of debilitation. Ritchie begins by discussing colonial violence and continues through slavery and the birth of modern policing, through Jim Crow to border policing. She offers a vast critique of broken-windows policing, zero-tolerance policies that push girls of color out of school and criminalize them, sexual assault by police, and policing gender norms, sex, and motherhood.

Ritchie's intersectional analysis and storytelling approach show that if we were to center the experiences of these women of color, we would also be talking about and resisting on behalf of those "living while elderly, disabled, Black, female, and poor and the role that controlling narratives of 'deranged' Black women of inhumane or superhuman strength" play out in relation to racial profiling and police violence (2017, 89). She quotes Mia Mingus (as does Puar) as pointing out that women of color are already understood as mentally unstable. This trope has a long history from eugenics, to resistance to slavery being diagnosed as drapetomania, to projecting the trope onto Indigenous people—particularly women who resisted the state when it wanted to take their children to Indian residential schools. As Ritchie illustrates, race and gender/sexuality encase perceptions of disability and, accordingly, police responses to so-called disorder. For example, Ritchie highlights parallels between police officers' public rationales of their murder of Aura Rosser and Michael Brown: both are described by their killers not just as inhuman/superhuman but as crazy, pathological, abnormal. Race is coded here in disability and vice versa.

It is here in analyses of Aura Rosser and countless others that Ritchie offers such a necessary corrective to recent cultural critiques such as 13th (2016) or The New Jim Crow (2010), which not only center black men's experiences and oppressions but also completely render invisible any gender analysis (as men are gendered, too). Ritchie's book is anchored in calls for politics of recognition: Where are women and GNC people in discussions of policing and state violence? What would happen if our discussions were grounded in their...