Alison Phipps is Professor of Sociology at Newcastle University, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York. She is also a member of the Reactionary Politics Research Network. Aurelien Mondon caught up with her about her forthcoming book, Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism.
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First of all, can you tell us a little more about the book?
The book contains what it says on the tin – it focuses on what sexual violence does in racial capitalism. By that, I mean: what is the role of sexual violence as racial capitalist systems corral (or kidnap), mould (conscript, force), use (wear out, dilapidate), and discard (dispatch, destroy) the workers they require? (You’ll note that I didn’t say ‘produce’ or ‘reproduce’, which is one clue.) I examine how sexual violence encloses bodies and populations, supports the extraction of surplus value, facilitates the expropriation of all kinds of resources, and disposes of the unwanted. Violence is a basic means of moving from difference to division to domination, and this violence is often sexualised.
I draw on a lot of theoretical texts, but this isn’t a book on (or of) ‘theory.’ I think ‘theory’ does too much and too little: both grand narratives and angels dancing on pinheads come to mind. I’d rather not occupy that space. To borrow a phrase from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I want to describe (and try to explain) the how and why of sexual violence in racial capitalism to support ‘complexly thoughtful action.’ I’m old enough to know that action needs to be grounded and specific, but underpinned by imaginative and expansive concepts.
The book took its final shape in context of the Gaza genocide. As I completed the manuscript, stories about ‘Hamas rapes’ were persistently being used to justify the mass killing of Palestinians. With that in mind, one of the key things the text communicates is that the fabric of racial capitalist domination (which, at its extremes, culminates in human sacrifice) is stitched together by both acts and imputations of sexual violence. This interview relates to Chapter Six of the book, which examines sexual violence as a pretext for disposal in several different formations: the War on Terror, contemporary authoritarian populisms, anti-trafficking campaigns, and racialised mass incarceration. The chapter starts with a case study of the Gaza genocide, which could be seen as a horrific culmination of some of the dynamics I describe.
Can you say more about how the book engages with what is going on in Gaza?
The first thing to note is that like most colonial projects, Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestine has used sexual violence (especially in prisons and detention) as a technique of terror. My analysis, however, focuses on reports of sexual violence enacted by Hamas in the October 7th 2023 attack. As you’ll probably remember, when these allegations began to emerge in early 2024, they slid quickly into a colonial feminist justification for the collective punishment of Palestinians. They also gave grist to a broader construction of the Israeli people as a wronged woman and the Palestinian people as a predatory man, which was exemplified for me by Keir Starmer’s anthropomorphising comment that Israel ‘must have the right to defend herself’ (my emphasis). In the book I argue that this sense of gendered victimisation helped create the state of exception laid over what Jasbir Puar calls Israeli exceptionalism, generating a notion of extreme vulnerability and threat.
The role of the ‘Hamas rapes’ narrative in legitimating the Gaza genocide is an extreme example of what I call the coloniality of sexual violence. I’ll talk about this in general terms in a minute, but what’s relevant to Gaza is that this is a framework through which imputations of sexual violence can be used to dispose of populations rendered surplus to racial capitalist requirements. Naomi Klein sees support for Israel’s ‘right to defend herself’ as the unification of the global political classes behind a shared supremacist vision: safety/security for the few, at the expense of the multitude. This political vision is built on a socioeconomic bedrock that’s really starting to crack.
Gargi Bhattacharyya’s theorisation of racial capitalism, which I draw on heavily in the book, describes how capital operates through processes of proletarianisation, semi-proletarianisation, and de-proletarianisation. Race, class and gender are key categories by which populations are organised to be exploited, expropriated, or expelled from productive relations, to suit economic requirements. When expulsion occurs, it’s a short step to the necropole: being rendered surplus, as Bhattacharyya puts it, means being left for dead (and it’s relevant here that the Israeli economy has been replacing Palestinian with migrant labour for some time). In late capitalism, over-accumulation and stagnation, alongside ecological crisis, have swelled the ranks of ‘surplus’ humanity. In this context especially, exterminating the ‘brutes’ becomes urgently necessary, especially if there’s any sign of revolt. And as I describe fully in the book, these necropolitical formations are inextricable from the production of the sexually dangerous Other.
I want to talk more about this idea of the sexually dangerous Other – because recently, as you know, Elon Musk put the issue of ‘grooming gangs’ back on the agenda. Once again, sexual violence, which is widespread across all social groups, has been weaponised by the far right to target racialised minorities. Could you discuss why it seems so easy for bad faith actors like Musk or Tommy Robinson to set the agenda on this?
I think it’s useful at this point to briefly set out the framework I call the coloniality of sexual violence. Obviously, patriarchy and sexual violence pre-date racial capitalism, but I argue in the book that racial capitalism reshaped the patriarchal strategy of sexual violence in far-reaching ways. Most importantly, it racialised the notion of sexual threat. As a result and drawing on Lugones and other theorists (including Oyěwùmí, Spillers, and Wynter), I argue that a monopoly on sexual violence is constitutive of colonial/modern Man. I describe the processes by which this developed in some detail in the book, but I’ll try to summarise my argument here.
First, as we know, colonial imaginaries were profoundly sexually violent, and sexual violence was a key tool of territorial expansion and primitive accumulation. Secondly, coloniality both emasculated Indigenous men in general terms through the imposition of white supremacy, and elevated them in provincial terms through the imposition of heteropatriarchy. This produced increased sexual violence in colonised societies, which – thirdly – created a pretext for violent regulatory control (what Spivak calls white men protecting brown women from brown men). Fourthly, this fed the trope of the sexualised ‘savage’ as a pretext for murderous repression (what I call white men protecting white women from brown and Black men). What Fanon calls the ‘massive psychoexistential complex’ of coloniality was sexually as well as racially charged – this reached a brutal, sadistic climax in 19th century lynching, and it’s still with us today.
This racialisation of sexual threat occurred alongside the production of bourgeois white womanhood as a specific form of property. It’s important to note here that I understand colonialism as coeval with the transition to capitalism and emergence of modern misogyny in Europe, not as an export of European society and culture. I describe how, after European women were sexually brutalised and enclosed during the Early Modern witch hunts, the bourgeois white woman was recuperated into the colonial/modern system in two important ways. First, as a ‘properly’ gendered body (while the colonised and enslaved were ‘improperly’ gendered bodies and ungendered flesh); and secondly, as property to be protected by ruthlessly violent means. We also know that such ‘protection’ is offered even as colonial/modern Man reserves the right to use and abuse his property (and, indeed, all women) himself.
What I call the coloniality of sexual violence helps us understand how sexual harm is fully legible only when enacted against middle class white women (or their proxies) by racialised men. This is because some bodies are property to be protected, some are property to be transacted for political capital via protection when convenient, and some are property that’s already derelict (so can be violently used and then thrown away). The protection of the first type of property is a major pretext for racialised violence. The colonial ‘myth of the Black rapist’, as Angela Davis called it, prevails in contemporary mass incarceration. In what I call the neocoloniality of sexual violence, colonial sexual mythologies travel and mutate through War on Terror formations, late capitalist authoritarian populism, and militarised border regimes that travel under the sign of anti-trafficking. In all these examples, white supremacist men reassert their monopoly on sexual violence through using ‘women’s protection’ as a pretext for brutalising the Other.
To return to your question, bad faith actors continue to successfully weaponise allegations of sexual violence because of the racialisation of sexual threat that’s at the heart of the colonial/modern system. As I describe in the book (and I also draw on Heidi Nast’s work on racist Oedipalisation here), this is deeply embedded in culture and the racial capitalist psyche. We should also acknowledge the role of some forms of white feminism in giving legitimacy to authoritarian men. We’re all aware of the long history of colonial feminism, which is far from over. There’s also currently a strong driving force in ‘gender-critical’ feminism and its violent sexualisation of the transgender Other, which I’ve identified in the book and many previous publications as a colonial project. The willingness of gender-critical feminists to accept ‘protection’ from authoritarian men, even as these same men perpetrate individual, collective, and political violence against women, is a gift to the far right and underlines the white supremacist monopoly on sexual violence.
In the book, you make the fascinating argument that sexual violence can function as a bordering project. Could you explain to us what you mean and how it plays out?
This argument is also rooted in my analysis of coloniality. To understand the relationships between sexual violence and bordering, I read various forms of colonial splitting through Anzaldúa’s analysis of the co-production of bordering and violence. First, the Cartesian split is a rupture between colonial modernity, spirituality and nature, which encourages violence against the body (and especially the female or feminised body) alongside the violent exploitation of the earth. Secondly, the geographical splitting of dominant (global minority) from dominated (global majority) groups is underwritten by the binary between ‘civilised’ and ’savage’. Finally, coloniality splits the privileged subject in two and projects its ‘darker’ sides on to the racialised Other. This is why Anzaldúa refers to Mexico as the ‘double’ of the US: it’s the doppelgänger in the national psyche, the collective shadow at the door. Border crossings from the shadowy ‘wastelands’, as Sanyal would put it, are an existential threat in the form of racial capitalism’s repudiated violence returning to itself.
My contribution in the book is to detail how all this is sexualised. The coloniality of sexual violence tells us that white supremacy both enacts rampant sexual violence and projects it onto the Other – and bordering is a key dynamic through which this sexual violence is displaced. In other words, as the door is bolted against the rapist ‘brutes’, racial capitalism disavows its own sexualised violence. In some cases, racial capitalism produces spaces of sexually violent gore in the Global South (what Valencia calls gore capitalism), then deploys this gory spectacle in sexualised nationalisms to secure the Global North. In other cases, what McKittrick terms ‘inhuman geographies’ in the colonial core both marginalise and deplete communities while rendering them as sexual threats. This sexualised cycle of wasting, displacing, and bordering supports racial capitalist accumulation: it legitimates crushing inequality, fixes cheap labour in place, disposes of ‘surplus’ populations and feeds securitisation as profit.
The use of sexual violence as a bordering project facilitates what I call the racial capitalist protection racket, a classed and raced extension of what Griffin called the patriarchal protection racket (this is the heteronormative contract in which women exchange submission for security, and a framework in which rape within marriage is legitimated while women are encouraged to fear the stranger rapist on the streets). The racial capitalist protection racket operates at both national and geopolitical scales. At the national scale, the racialised category of ‘sex crimes’, supported by carceral feminism, both encloses white bourgeois women and authorises the prison as an enclosure for racialised/proletarian men. Geopolitically, the racket takes various forms in various states of exception, which combine sex exceptionalism (the idea that sexual violence is worse than other harms) and sexual exceptionalism (the idea that sexual violence enters the Global North from the ‘outside’, which includes the outsider within).
Sexualised states of exception, such as those attached to ‘sex trafficking’ or the War on Terror, can temporarily enlarge the sphere of legitimate victimhood – certain Others are allowed conditional subjectivity as proxies for bourgeois white women, when protecting them is a pretext for violence (e.g. Muslim women, trafficked women, and working class white girls thought to be groomed by gangs of Muslim men). But this really is conditional: the coloniality of sexual violence means that ‘women’s safety’ (white women representing the universal) can be the justification for containing, excluding or even exterminating racialised people of all genders, while white men reserve the right to abuse women themselves. The combination of sex/sexual exceptionalism can vindicate extraordinary violence – I’m sure everyone reading this will be able to name historical and contemporary examples, including the use of rape allegations to legitimise genocide in Gaza. And with the far right currently on the rampage, while (as you’ve pointed out) continuing to weaponise ‘women’s safety’, it seems crucial to understand these dynamics in as much depth as we can. That’s one of my main ambitions for the book.
Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism is out later this year, from Manchester University Press.
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Alison Phipps will be taking part in our panel on anti-gender politics in the UK on the 8th of May 2025. More details here:
https://reacpol.net/antigender-politics/
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