Description
The paper connects feminist writing on resisting intimate partner violence to anticolonial writing on resisting imperialism. It focuses, in particular, on Haitian anticolonial writing published since the country's independence in 1804, and a body of practice-oriented feminist scholarship published from the 1970s. Drawing this unusual comparison and finding a number of shared conceptions across these bodies of writing, it suggests ways in which a combined approach—a sense of how ’the personal is imperial’—can help to theorise the operation of power across scales.
Such an approach must address the perils of political metaphor, especially the type that uses gendered violence as an analogy. Both exponents and opponents of colonialism have used gendered violence as a metaphor referring to imperial desire, possession and control. How can intimate and imperial scales of power be understood together without resorting to analogy? In responding to this question—which is central to understanding the interrelationship of scales more broadly—the paper will draw on, and respond to, debates in trans, queer and feminist phenomenology.
