Black Women’s Lives Matter: Social Movements and Storytelling against Sexual and Gender-based Violence in the US

Abstract

According to the US Department of Justice, women (33 per cent) are more likely than men (19 per cent) to experience violent victimisation (Morgan and Kena, 2018). Black women students are especially at risk of experiencing rape or sexual assault (Planty et al., 2013). A special report on sexual violence among college-age women found that between 1995 and 2013, the rate of sexual violence victimisation for Black females was 2.5 times higher than for white females (Sinozich and Langton, 2014). Furthermore, unlike other groups, Black women students were more likely to experience sexual victimisation than Black women non-students (ibid.). While Black women students experience higher rates of sexual violence, they remain on the periphery in discussions about sexual violence in higher education and violence against Black women (Wooten, 2017). Black women's violent victimisation in higher education and the marginal attention to the problem reveal the persistence of the US' historical legacy of racist and sexual violence.In this piece, I analyse the primary stories or narratives used and invoked by two popular movements against gender-based violence to ascertain their potential to address Black women students' experience of campus sexual violence. I examine the In My Words movement, the latest rendition of the national fight against campus sexual violence, and the Say Her Name movement, the leading movement for Black women's lives in the US. Together, these movements symbolise different attempts to deal with the issue of gender-based violence on campus and racist and gender-based violence against Black women. Subsequently, I employ a decolonial feminist framework for understanding Black women's experiences of sexual violence on university campuses and in other institutions. decolonial feminist praxisDecolonial feminist theory explains how women of colour are not included in the category of woman, a designation for white women that includes protection and bodily sanctity (Lugones, 2010). Black

The Social Psychology of Trauma

“…This reflects the relative privilege and protection white women have that is often not available to women of colour, which Jordan alludes to in her poem. Not only are the deaths of women of colour less remarkable (MacDorman et al, 2021), but women and girls of colour are more likely to be trafficked for sex work, raped and sexually assaulted than their white counterparts (Keys, 2021). Constructions of women of colour as sexually compliant are frequently used to dismiss women of colour when they come forward.…”

Anti-Asian Violence and Abolition Feminism as Asian American Feminist Praxis

“…Similar to abolition feminism, decolonial feminist strategies move us away from punitive responses that underly settler colonial and carceral logics and reject the reliance on the carceral state by the mainstream antiviolence movement (Heiner and Tyson 2017). For instance, Keys (2021) argues that a decolonial feminist praxis contextualizes violence through a colonial lens and challenge the ways the coloniality of race and gender construct Black women of color experiences of sexual and gender-based violence in the US. Mendez (2020) shows how dependency on state imposed policy such as Title IX that enforce "safety" and "protection" to address gender-based violence works to silence and deny survivors of color, queer, trans, and gender nonbinary of resources for healing.…”

Coloniality and Feminist Collusion: Breaking Free, Thinking Anew

“…In the making of faces, Brenda and Renata are shown to create a sense of collectivity and autonomy that allows them to thrive, regaining a sense of humanity and dignity against institutional oppression. The power of narrating our own stories is reflected in ‘Black women’s lives matter: social movements and storytelling against sexual and gender-based violence in the US’ (2021, this issue), an Open Space piece by Domale Dube Keys. Through investigation of the narratives utilised by two popular movements against gender-based violence—the In My Words movement focused on campus sexual violence and the Say Her Name movement, the leading US movement for Black women’s lives—Keys presents the use of storytelling as a significant decolonial feminist method, focused here to analyse Black women students’ experiences of sexual violence in higher education.…”