Slow and Fast Violence
A Feminist Critique of Binaries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i5.1692Keywords:
slow violence, gender, violence, feminist gepoliticsAbstract
Rob Nixon’s recent theorization of slow violence deliberates on specific forms of violence that unfold gradually and in unspectacular ways. However, discussions about the phenomenon that fall under slow violence are not new to the academy and echo the labor of feminist scholars who have for many years written about how violence is experienced in banal, everyday, intimate, and routinized ways. We argue that these Feminist traditions of analyzing violence are vital to touch on, because these contributions are largely overlooked in Nixon’s thesis. Further, this robust scholarship demonstrates how the invisibility of slow violence is shaped not only by its everyday nature, but also by larger gendered and raced epistemologies that privilege the public, the rapid, the hot, and the spectacular. We argue that a feminist epistemological approach to denaturalizing binaries can offer a deeper understanding of how the invisible nature of slow violence is shaped by ongoing gendered and raced epistemologies. Specifically, we believe that a feminist geopolitical framework aids in recognizing the co-constitution of fast and slow violence and engages new pathways that challenge impunity.
References
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Oswin, Natalie and Olund Eric. 2010. Governing intimacy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, 60–7.
Oswin, Natalie. 2008. Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography 32(1), 89-103.
Pain, Rachel. 2009. Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography 33(4), 466-486.
Pain, Rachel. 2014. Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism Progress in Human Geography.
Pain, Rachel. 2015. Intimate war. Political Geography 44, 64-73.
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Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner. 2006. The global and the intimate: feminism across our time. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Ross, Amy. 2011. Geographies of war and the putative peace. Political Geography 30, 197-199.
Smith, Christen A. 2016. Slow Death: Is the trauma of police violence killing black women? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264.
Wright, Melissa. 2008. Gender and geography: knowledge and activism across the intimately global. Progress in Human Geography 33(3), 379-386.
Bhungalia, Lisa. 2015. Managing violence: aid, counterinsurgency, and the humanitarian present in Palestine. Environment and Planning 47, 2308-2323.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Brickell, Katherine. 2014. Towards intimate geographies of peace? Local reconciliation of domestic violence in Cambodia . Transactions of the Institute of British Geographer (40)3 321-333.
Browne, Katherine. 2006. Challenging Queer Geographies. Antipode, 38(5) 885-893.
Christian, J., Dowler, L., and Cuomo, D., “Fear, feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal,” Political Geography, 54, 64-72, 2016.
Collins, Patricia Hill. (1998). It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation. Hypatia. 13(3): 62-82.
Collins, Patricia. (2004). Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge.
Cuomo, Dana. 2013. Security and fear: the geopolitics of intimate partner violence policing Geopolitics 18, 856–74.
Davies, Thom, Arshad Isakjee, and Surindar Dhesi. 2017. Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe. Antipode 49(5), 1263-1284.
Davis, Angela. 1972. Interview from California State Prison. Accessed at: https://mic.com/articles/116724/angela-davis-s-1972-prison-interview-perfectly-explains-the-violence-in-baltimore#.Rt00qc0y2.
De Leeuw, Sarah. 2016. Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia’s colonial geographies. Political Geography 52, 14-23.
Dillon, Lindsey. 2015. War’s Remains: Slow Violence and the Urbanization of Military Bases in California. Environmental Justice 8(1), 1-5.
Dillon, Lindsey. 2012. [Book Review]. Slow Violence and the Environmental of the Poor. Progress in Human Geography 36(6), 830-831.
Dillon, Stephen. 2012. Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery. Radical History Review 112, 113-125.
Dowler, L. and J. Sharp. 2001. A feminist geopolitics? Space & Polity 5(3), 165-176.
Faria, Caroline. (2017). Towards a countertopography of intimate war: contouring violence and resistance in a South Sudanese diaspora. Gender, Place & Culture. 24(4): 575-593.
Galtung, Johan. 1969. Violence, Peace, and Peace Research. Journal of Peace Research 6(3), 167-191.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gorostiza, Santiago and David Sauri. 2017. Dangerous assemblages: Salts, trihalomethanes and endocrine disruptors in the water palimpsest of the Llobregat River, Catalonia. Geoforum 81, 153-162.
Gregory, Derek. 2016. The Natures of War. Antipode 48(1), 3-56.
Harding, S. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hardy, R. Dean, Richard A. Milligan, and Nik Heynen. 2017. Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea-level rise. Geoforum 87, 62-72.
Hyndman, J. 2001. Towards a feminist geopolitics. Canadian Geographer 45(2), 210-222.
Jones, Rhys and Peter Merriman. 2009. Hot, banal and everyday nationalism: bilingual road signs in Wales. Political Geography 28(3), 164-173.
Kern, Leslie. 2016. Rhythms of gentrification: eventfulness and slow violence in a happening neighborhood. cultural geographies 23(3), 441-457.
Koopman, Sara. 2011. Let’s take peace to pieces Political Geography 30, 193–94.
Laliberte, Nicole. 2014. Building peaceful geographies in and through systems of violence in McConnell F, Megoran N and Williams P (eds) Geographies of peace, IB Tauris, London, 47–65.
Lorde, Audre. 1997. The cancer journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Loyd, Jenna M. 2012. Geographies of peace and antiviolence. Geography Compass 6/8, 477–89.
Mahtani, Minelle. 2014. Toxic geographies: absences in critical race thought and practice in social and cultural geography. Social & Cultural Geography 15(4), 359-367.
McClintock, Anne. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
McKittrick, Katherine. (2011). On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place. Social & Cultural Geography. 12(8): 947-963.
Mitchell, Katharyne, Sallie Marston, and Cindi Katz. 2003. Life’s work: An introduction, review and critique. Antipode 35(3), 415-442.
Mountz, Alison. (2018). Political geography III: Bodies. Progress in Human Geography. 42(5): 759-769.
Mountz, Alison and Jennifer Hyndman. 2006. Feminist approaches to the global intimate. Women’s Studies Quarterly 34(1/2), 446-463.
Murry, Amber. 2015. Invisible power, visible dispossession: The witchcraft of a subterranean pipeline. Political Geography 47, 64-76.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
O’Lear, Shannon. 2016. Climate science and slow violence: A view from political geography and STS on mobilizing technoscientific ontologies of climate change. Political Geography 52, 4-13.
Oswin, Natalie and Olund Eric. 2010. Governing intimacy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, 60–7.
Oswin, Natalie. 2008. Critical geographies and the uses of sexuality: deconstructing queer space. Progress in Human Geography 32(1), 89-103.
Pain, Rachel. 2009. Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography 33(4), 466-486.
Pain, Rachel. 2014. Everyday terrorism: connecting domestic violence and global terrorism Progress in Human Geography.
Pain, Rachel. 2015. Intimate war. Political Geography 44, 64-73.
Pain, Rachel and Lynn Staeheli. 2014. Introduction: Intimacy, geopolitics and violence. Area 46(4), 344-347.
Pratt, Geraldine and Victoria Rosner. 2006. The global and the intimate: feminism across our time. New York: Columbia University Press.
Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books.
Ross, Amy. 2011. Geographies of war and the putative peace. Political Geography 30, 197-199.
Smith, Christen A. 2016. Slow Death: Is the trauma of police violence killing black women? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/slow-death-is-the-trauma-of-police-violence-killing-black-women-62264.
Wright, Melissa. 2008. Gender and geography: knowledge and activism across the intimately global. Progress in Human Geography 33(3), 379-386.
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Published
2019-10-03
How to Cite
Christian, J. M., & Dowler, L. (2019). Slow and Fast Violence: A Feminist Critique of Binaries. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 18(5), 1066–1075. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v18i5.1692
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Special Issue - Slow Violence (Guest Eds. Caitlin Cahill & Rachel Pain)
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Authors agree to publish their articles in ACME under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
