Carceral and Intersectional Feminism in Congress

Authors

Nancy Whittier, Smith CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-22-2016

Publication Title

Gender & Society

Abstract

This paper uses a materialist feminist discourse analysis to examine how women’s movement organizations, liberal Democrats, and conservative Republican legislators shaped the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the consequences for intersectional and carceral feminism. Drawing on qualitative analysis of Congressional hearings, published feminist and conservative discussion of VAWA, and accounts of feminist mobilization around VAWA, I first show how a multi-issue coalition led by feminists shaped VAWA. Second, I show how discourses of crime intermixed with feminism into a polysemic gendered crime frame that facilitated cross-ideological support. Third, I show how, in contrast, intersectional issues that activists understood as central to violence against women were discursively and structurally separated from gendered crime in Congress. Although a multi-issue movement coalition advocated for expansions in VAWA dealing with immigrants, unmarried partners, same-sex partners, transgender people, and Native Americans, these issues were understood in Congress through more controversial single-issue discourses and often considered in administratively separate Congressional committees. Fourth, I show how VAWA’s outcomes played out in terms of carceral and intersectional feminist goals.

Keywords

violence against women, women’s movements, intersectional feminism, carceral feminism, Violence Against Women Act

Volume

30

Issue

5

First Page

791

Last Page

818

DOI

doi.org/10.1177/0891243216653381

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rights

Licensed to Smith College and distributed CC-BY under the Smith College Faculty Open Access Policy

Comments

Peer reviewed accepted manuscript.

Recommended Citation

Whittier, Nancy, "Carceral and Intersectional Feminism in Congress" (2016). Sociology: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/soc_facpubs/4