ABSTRACT
The present chapter articulates a critical entry to the thinking of sexual violence as political violence from a decolonial feminist perspective. It argues that sexual violence should be analysed not only as a repressive but also as a productive force, which imprints on bodies a whole cosmology of power relations. From an intersectional perspective, the chapter proposes that in order to analyse sexual violence it is important to bear in mind that this form of violence is not the imposition of the masculine power over the feminised body, but the active construction of gendered and racialised distinctions that are not susceptible to universalisation under the paradigm of sexual difference. The first half of the chapter analyses the work of decolonial feminism to address how the imposition of the modern distinction between public and private as political/non-political becomes a fundamental construct for the depoliticisation of sexual violence. In the second half, Hortense Spillers’ (1987) distinction between body and flesh is presented to epitomise the historical continuities of the violences of coloniality, to ultimately attend to the “defence apparatus” (Dorlin, 2018) created around the possibility of sexual violence as a central element in the political distribution of power in modernity/coloniality.
