Reviews

Vergès analyses the State, a tool of violence that adopts a hollow puppet "feminism" to hide behind while continuing policies and practices that actively harm women. Here the author takes a stand against the reduction of sexism as being only the fault of "violent men" and instead paints a nuanced analysis of the underlying source of violence, for which harassment, rape and femicide a but a tool of control. Violent structures like racial capitalism, conservative populism, and imperial looting employ "masculinity" to serve their violent ends, resulting in the cruel reality of things like rape and femicide being possible. The author also notes that gender norms are also a tool employed by these structures and falling into the trap of painting only men as perpetrators fails the men, boys, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals that are also targets of this violence. While one person may be the perpetrator in an isolated incident, the endemic violence that allows for it is structural.

This reductive view spoon-fed by neoliberal Western governments employs racist distraction tactics and sanitised "feminism" to avoid any real responsibility and in fact uses it to further their own methods of control over women: an example of this is French laws violating Muslim women by banning their hijab and calling it liberation, when it is in fact the laws themselves that are regulating women's bodies and oppressing their rights.

Examples of appeasement tactics and respectability politics abound in Europe and America and have become so normalised that real resistance is becoming harder. Françoise Vergès advocates for restorative justice and rejection of the punitive obsession the State.