Legible Resistance: Feminism, Vulnerability, and Violence

• In Event: Feminism, Resistance, Violence

Abstract

Why has violence been largely disavowed in feminist theory and praxis? I approach this question by considering the prominent status of vulnerability in efforts to define, express, and to render legible feminist claims against gender-based inequities. Taking this route, the paper suggests that perceptions of violence as a political tactic are shaped by the legitimating politics of vulnerability as a condition of and for feminist resistance. More particularly, the paper explores the ways in which vulnerability can be used to produce both a resistive politics—which challenges gender-based harms and inequities, and a reinscriptive politics—which affirms patriarchal norms of femininity through the performance of gendered vulnerability itself. This dual production of resistive and reinscriptive politics is what I term ‘patriarchal feminism’: a mode of politics that enables feminist resistance while tying its efficacy to expressions of patriarchal femininity. This dual performance maps onto now-familiar hierarchies of gender-based claims – in relation to racialized, classed and heteronormative expectations about who is recognized as ‘legitimately’ vulnerable. But the performative demands of vulnerability in the context of its reinscriptive mode may also limit the forms of feminist resistance that are deemed legitimate by both activists and publics. If, for instance, the legitimate use of violence by women is understood within narrow, gendered boundaries—might feminist disavowals of violence as a tactical political practice participate in the reproduction of patriarchal feminism?

Author

• Menaka M Philips, University of Toronto