Identity Politics & Violence Against Women

• Women have organized against routine violence and recognize that collective demands speak more powerfully than isolated voices over the last two decades.
• The politicization has transformed the understanding of violence against women, with battering and rape now deemed part of a broad system of domination of women as a class.

Identity Politics

• The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, but that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.
• Violence that women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class.
• Ignoring difference within groups leads to tension among groups, which affects efforts to politicize violence against women.
• Feminist and antiracist efforts have often proceeded as though the issues and experiences they detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains.
• Racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, but seldom do in practices of feminism and antiracism.
• When practices expound identity as a woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, the identity of women of color is relegated to a location that resists telling.
• Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have not considered intersectional identities such as women of color
• There is a focus on how the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism.

Intersectional Marginalization

• Due to their intersectional identity as women and of color within discourses shaped by either or, women of color are marginalized within both feminism and antiracism.
• Intersectionality denotes the ways race and gender interact to shape dimensions of Black women's employment experiences.
• Many experiences Black women face are not captured within traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination.
• The intersection of racism and sexism affects Black women's lives in ways that cannot be entirely captured by looking at race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.
• I trace the categories to their intersections and suggest a methodology that will ultimately disrupt the tendencies to see race and gender as exclusive or separable.
• Intersectionality will be further expanded by factoring in issues such as class, sexual orientation, age, and color.

Structural Intersectionality

• Structural intersectionality refers to the ways in which the location of women of color at the intersection of race and gender makes the actual experience of domestic violence, rape, and remedial reform qualitatively different than that of white women.
• Physical assault that leads women to shelters is often the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience
• Shelters serving abused women must also confront other multilayered and routinized forms of domination, hindering their ability to create alternatives to abusive relationships.
• Many women of color are burdened by poverty, child care responsibilities, and the lack of job skills
• These burdens, largely a consequence of gender and class oppression, are compounded by the racially discriminatory employment and housing practices women of color often face.
• Systems of race, gender, and class converge and intervention strategies, based solely on the experiences of women, are of limited help to women who face different obstacles.

The Immigration and Nationality Act

• In 1990, Congress amended the marriage fraud provisions to protect immigrant women battered or exposed to extreme cruelty by United States citizens or permanent residents.
• Under the marriage fraud provisions of the Act, a person who immigrated to the United States to marry a United States citizen or permanent resident remained married for two years before even applying for permanent resident status
• Applications for the immigrant's permanent status required both spouses
• Under these circumstances, many immigrant women were reluctant to leave even abusive partners for fear of being deported.
• Immigrant women chose between protection from batterers and protection against deportation.
• Reports of tragic consequences of this double subordination put pressure on Congress to include an explicit waiver for hardship caused by domestic violence in the Immigration Act of 1990

Vulnerabilities of Immigrant Women of Color:

• Immigrant women of color remain vulnerable to battering when unable to meet the conditions established for a waiver under the Act
• Limited access to resources can make it difficult for immigrant women to obtain the evidence needed for a waiver
• Cultural barriers discourage immigrant women from reporting or escaping battering situations
• Many are wholly dependent on their husbands, their link to the world outside their homes
• Many women now have permanent residence and continue to suffer abuse under threats of deportation by their husbands
• Women who have no independent access to information will be intimidated by such threats, even if unfounded.
• Language barriers limit opportunities for non-English-speaking women to take advantage of existing support services. Such barriers not only limit access to information about shelters, but also limit access to the security shelters provide

Political Intersectionality

• Political intersectionality analyzes how feminist and antiracist politics have paradoxically helped to marginalize the issue of violence against women of color
• The political interests of women of color are obscured and sometimes jeopardized by political strategies that ignore or suppress intersectional issues is illustrated when statistics are gathered or by visiting various shelters
• It is a dimension of disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront when at least two subordinated groups are pursuing conflicting political agendas.
• The "Politization of Domestic Violence" requires, in part, reviewing Los Angeles Police Department statistics reflecting the rate of domestic violence interventions by precinct because to provide a rough picture of arrests by racial group.
• Both activists within and those external to the police department feared that statistics reflecting domestic violence in minority communities might be selectively interpreted and publicized so as to undermine long-term efforts to force the Department to address domestic violence as a serious problem

Domestic Violence & Antiracist Politics

• Efforts to stem the politicization of domestic violence are often grounded in attempts to maintain the integrity of the community within communities of color
• Feminism is said to have no place within communities of color, with issues thought to be internally divisive and represent the migration of white women's concerns
• Some rhetoric denies that gender violence is a problem in the community and characterizes any effort to politicize gender subordination as a community problem. The is position taken by Shahrazad Ali in The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman
• The tendency of political or cultural interests in communities is interpreted in a way that precludes full public recognition of the problem of domestic violence. People of color weigh their interests in avoiding issues that might reinforce distorted public perceptions against the need to acknowledge and address intracom-munity problems.

Race and the Domestic Violence Lobby.

• In order to increase awareness of domestic violence, strategies tend to begin by stating the commonly shared assumption that battering is a minority problem.
• The strategy emphasizes spousal abuse also occurs in the white community
• There is a need to challenge beliefs that violence occurs only in homes of "others" and those who adopt this rhetorical strategy likely intend to exclude or ignore the needs of poor and colored women
• Efforts to politicize violence against women challenge beliefs that violence occurs where, instead the sensibilities of dominant social groups are to be kept

Tokenistic Objectification

• "Other" women are silenced as much by being relegated to the margin of experience as by total exclusion. Objectifying, voyeuristic inclusion is at least as disempowering as complete exclusion
• In order to address Black and other minority women, the effort to politicize violence against women will do little if their images are retained simply to magnify the problem rather than to humanize their experiences
• Efforts to discredit 2 Live Crew by pointing out the misogynistic aspect of their music was problematic because their accusers failed to recognize the significance of the cultural expression in the music to which listeners of the genre may relate

Domestic Violence Support Services

• Policies, priorities, or empowerment strategies sometimes reproduces the subordination of colored women
• The problem is starkly illustrated by the inaccessibility of domestic vio-lence support services to many non-English-speaking women
• The women unable to communicate because of the language barrier as well as that the lack of resources.
• A feminist approach would make the ability to attend a support group without a translator a more significant consideration
• To address needs of women, it also meant to not match the client and the kind of shelter’s administrators imagined and have it be limited to getting women out of danger

Intersectional Identities in Rape Cases

• Racism and sexism exist, as the social construction of a rape is to also link sexual violence with racial oppression therefore it continues to determine the response a society will have. The incident was reviewed of a jogger in Central Park for instance
• The claim that sexual violence has a power that will cause control, is in devestation of the Black women.
• All of this then relates to women who are not white from help to get, while the society creates a situation where that has to involve violence upon one to stop it for good

Racism and Sexism

• Dominant rules and expectaitons tightly regulate the sexuality of women during the rape trail that will use evidentiary rules
• It has been expressed that in order to get the charges to go through that the Black women would have to stand or face the case by making herself better. There are changes to this idea.
• Some had trouble with the moral character. All that has happened has then not done justice to rape on women

Anti-Racism and Rape

• Anti-Racist and Rape that focuses on how law was able to condemn mostly the rape of white women by Black men. A new light has to still not be used, therefore, the effects have never occurred. So to get it is to be done on Black women by helping.

Violence Against Women

• The representation is what has not been shown or spoken, while it makes the Black women at that moment is the lack of support for the trials of those rape victims
• To make the women more able to be who and what all women may be, is the new way. There just can’t be women set out to side.

Understanding of Anti-Intersectionality

• A result can give power to one part, making sure not to have the racism to be set. Yet the best has happened and must to be. All are at what cost that must be that women did not give up their own right

Conclusion of Intersectionality

• To note all the cases, the high court of law in 1990 is more than that. It was so sad. All were then to be treated in the light of all is done