ABSTRACT
This article uses African-American women’s experiences with violence as a particular lens to explore the relationships among (1) social constructions of violence; (2) how violence operates to link power relations of race and gender; and (3) potential contributions of transversal politics in anti-violence work. Since definitions of violence have little meaning in the abstract, the article first analyses how hierarchical power relations in the United States influence what counts as violence. Definitions of violence depend not only on the specifics of any given situation, but generally on who has the power to define both group identity and social context. The article then examines how intersectional approaches to African-American women’s experiences with violence provide new insights for reconceptualizing the significance of group histories for constructing American violence. Finally, the article explores the potential implications of definitional shifts of violence for a transversal politics that might resist violence.
