ABSTRACT
The battered women’s movement in the United States gained lively momentum and received recognition and accolades from the public and the government by the 1980s. However, while government and public policies placed domestic violence (DV) as a priority issue on their agendas since the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, this attention has not been focused equally on all communities. The programs, services, projects, legal interventions, evaluations, and theories did not and do not adequately support researchers, advocates, and communities to grapple with different aspects, interventions, and DV prevention strategies as it impacts Women of Color (WoC) and im/migrant women. This chapter engages with transnational intersectional feminist discourse to display the narrowness of normative feminism in the United States, demonstrating that WoC and im/migrant women are a marginalized, invisible, and erased category in contemporary American battered women’s movement. The author calls out the troublesome cultural imaginations of feminism and representations of im/migrant and WoC—restricting definitions of marginalization and suffocating visions of what oppression looks like—and the desperate unschooling of Orientalism that is needed to answer a haunting question: What does vulnerability really look like?
