Under lying conditions of gender‐based violence—Decolonial feminism meets epistemic ignorance: Critical transnational conversations

Abstract

AbstractThis article engages a doubled conversation, between South Africa and the United States, about gender‐based violence and the curious epistemic silence, even in critical psychology, about gendered and racialized violence as a deep sedimentary, transnational and transhistoric, layer of (in)human(e) existence. In this article, we lift up the long history of underlying conditions of state‐sponsored and socially enacted violence, and we also problematize how social science scholarship has been designed, underlying conditions, such that anti‐Black violence and gender‐based violence are routinely (mis)represented as if idiosyncratic ruptures—microaggressions or battered women—in an otherwise smooth social fabric. Through the lens of decolonial feminism, we examine how the COVID‐19 crisis makes public the gendering of violence, especially against Black women, as if it were a spike, obscuring how pervasive and enduring it is—a constant moan in South Africa, India, the United States, among native women in Canada, and other places around the globe. We end by calling for critical scholarship that peels back the symptom of gender‐based violence, recognizes the history and ongoing structural enactment of racialized and gendered violence, and excavates the bold and relentless heartbeat of resistance narrated in quiet and loud demands for dignity, liberation, and desire.