Punitive feminism (or When and Why Did We Start Dividing the World between Good and Evil, rather than between Oppressed and Oppressors?)

Abstract

This chapter discusses “punitive feminism” and the ways in which it is used by governments to launch securitarian policies affecting especially on already marginalized populations and to criminalize political dissent. Feminist criminologists have been at first occupied with the matter of the invisibility not just of women, but of gender, in criminological studies, critical criminology included. Punitive feminism may be considered at least in part an inevitable consequence of the attempt on the part of women’s movements to have harms women suffer from recognized as crimes, i.e., de-naturalized and de-privatized. Oppression was a term that much feminism of the second wave had acquired from the political vocabulary of the left. The adoption of the term “violence” had to do with the need of nominating the responsibility of single, concrete actors and at the same time to define one selves as political actors with voice.