The Center for Race & Gender Thursday Forum Series presents...

Disappearing Acts: Domestic Violence & Black Legal Subjects
 
The Racial Origins of U.S. Domestic Violence Law
Margo Mahan, Sociology
 
My dissertation investigates the historical emergence of wife-beating laws in the United States. I argue that southern wife-beating laws emerged from a white-supremacist post-Civil War project to control the labor and degrade the social status of black families. In contrast to the long-standing narrative of feminist activism, I demonstrate how these laws were a postbellum response to the racialized and gendered convergence of the antebellum Master-slave and Husband-wife relationships. Antebellum socio-legal norms simultaneously advanced marital cruelty protections for wives on the one hand and encouraged the physical chastisement of slaves on the other. This ensured that the authority to beat slave women – to include de facto slave wives – was a specifically white male prerogative; and, it added physical chastisement to a long list of naturalized distinctions between blackness and whiteness. Emancipation exposed the fragility of ‘domestic relations’ – and thus the southern way of life – by highlighting its dependence on racialized gender hierarchies. Wife-beating laws that threatened to punish black men, in the midst of socio-legal norms that kept black women vulnerable to white male violence, helped to restore a southern way of life that simultaneously controlled black labor and degraded the status of blackness.
 
Space is the Case: Mapping Domestic Violence, Race, & Stand Your Ground
Alisa Bierria, Center for Race & Gender
 
Feminist critiques of domestic violence have created lucid explanations of how gendered power relations drive patterns of violence in abusive heterosexual relationships. Public debates about the racialized and gendered discrepancies of the application of “Stand Your Ground” laws have created an opportunity for stronger spatialized analyses of domestic violence, particularly in the context of the criminalization of battered women who are disproportionately black women and other women of color. Can a geopolitical analysis of domestic violence create a richer understanding of the criminalization of domestic violence survivors who act in self-defense? In this talk, I will consider the prosecution of Marissa Alexander as a case study to begin a discussion about black women's self-defense in the context of spatialized and racialized dimensions of domestic and state violence.

Disappearing Acts: Domestic Violence & Black Legal Subjects

On this episode James talks with Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of 'Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements.' They discuss Erica’s book, which explores how Brazil’s sex tourism industry affects Afro-Brazilian women’s lives in the Brazilian state of Bahia. They also look more broadly at how Afro-Brazilian women have been impacted by the election of president Jair Balsanaro, and the ways they have organized to resist this current regime.

You can learn more about Erica's book here: [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/67nsg8gz9780252037931.html]

How Black Feminists Activists Are Resisting Brazil’s Conservative Turn

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley that fosters explorations of race, gender, and their intersections.

Disappearing Acts: Domestic Violence & Black Legal Subjects

Center for Race & Gender

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