Overview

Professor Alison Phipps will discuss key insights from her new book ‘Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism’. Please join us – all welcome.

The coloniality of sexual violence

Professor Alison Phipps

The weaponisation of women’s rights by reactionary projects has been termed colonial feminism (Ahmed 1992), imperial feminism (Amos and Parmar 1984), and femonationalism (Farris 2017, see also Bhattacharyya 2008). Ideas of sexual threat are central to these frameworks, yet there is more to uncover about how racialised constructions of sexuality and borders intertwine across scales. This paper, taken from my forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism(Manchester University Press), describes the coloniality of sexual violence. This framework blends the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2008; Segato, 2016), the semiotics of Blackness (Spillers, 1987), and the psychosexuality of white supremacy (Fanon, 1952; Anzaldua, 1987).

I argue that the relationship between sexual terror and the construction of the sexually dangerous ‘savage’ means a monopoly on sexual violence is constitutive of colonial/modern Man. A monopoly on sexual violence continues to shape the rhetoric and political strategies of the contemporary far right, in which sex exceptionalism (Gruber 2022) is combined with sexual exceptionalism (Puar 2007) to create a multitude of states of exception. The coloniality of sexual violence is what allows marginalised populations to be vilified, geographically contained, economically excluded, expelled or even exterminated – apparently in the service of defeating sexual threat.

Alison Phipps is Professor of Political Sociology and Head of SPIRe at York St John University, and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies at York University. She has been researching and teaching on the topics of gender, feminist politics, and sexual violence for the last quarter-century. Her two most recent books are Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 2026). With Tina Sikka and Nikki Godden-Rasul, Phipps is co-founder of Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence.

This event is organised by the Education, Social Justice and Transformation research group and the Women and Gender Studies research groups, Centre for European & International Studies research at the University of Portsmouth.