ABSTRACT
Tracing the long and arduous road over the past 50 years of feminist struggles against gender based violence to the #MeToo movement, Angela Davis identifies the ideological and cultural struggle as one that will determine the battle against GBV, even if economic and political rights for women and minorities are won. Calling for ways to think about violence that do not unintentionally affirm its presence, Davis points to the underpinning of racist, gender, family, and community violences and the violence of the state’s repressive apparatuses, such as structures of policing, institutions of punishment and machineries of intelligence and war. She analyses the given genealogies of histories of feminist struggles in America to point to its racial biases and erasures, especially of women of colour and in the ways in which carceral feminism has not worked for them; and the implications of women of colour not being acknowledged as subjects of freedom in the private sphere in the same way as White women have been. Warning against the expectation of instant solutions, Davis asks for an urgency and conviction in our research and activism, in the knowledge that we need not assume that we need to live with these violences forever.
