Endorsements

What are the relationships between sexual violence and racial capitalism? What is the role of sexual violence as capitalist systems corral, mould, use and discard the workers they require? While most texts on sexual violence treat capitalism as a backdrop or an afterthought, political economy is the starting point for Alison Phipps' book. Sexual violence is key to the enclosure of bodies and to the extraction of productive and socially reproductive labour. Sexual violence is a technique by which resources are expropriated, and communities and peoples terrorised and dispossessed. Sexual violence is also the pretext for the disposal of unwanted populations through criminal punishment, militarised border regimes, neo-colonial wars and even genocide. Sexual violence in racial capitalism brings together historical and contemporary case studies including the Early Modern witch hunts, reproductive accumulation in transatlantic slavery, sexual harassment in drop-shipping warehouses and sweatshops, far-right Islamophobia and 'anti-gender' activism, the contemporary digital manosphere and the Gaza genocide. Throughout, the analysis explores how both sexual violence and sexual fear create social control and surplus value. In what Phipps calls the coloniality of sexual violence, acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat are situated within an analysis of gendered and raced property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. Fantasies of sexual danger, she argues, represent the violence of coloniality turned inside out: this is a fundamental reason why fear of revolution is fear of rape. This also suggests, though, that revolution is always imminent: violence is necessary because power is incomplete.