Un-Domesticating Violence

SUMMARY

This paper attempts to look at the ways in which women's struggles against domestic violence are criminalized and also how this type of racialized, classed, and gendered violence is connected to processes that fuel prison expansion-including the U.S-led war on drugs, the criminalization of immigration, the rampant policing in communities of color, and the reliance on the police and the criminal legal system to address domestic violence. It is my intent to place domestic violence and its connection to criminalization in a politicized context for two reasons: the first is to repudiate the tendency to look at women's response to abuse as individualized or unconnected to other types of marginalization and the second is to provide a more complex analysis of how women's differing social identities or positionalities, as women of color or immigrant women for example, may affect their experiences of both state and interpersonal violence.

Key Words:

• Prison industrial complex
• prison
• prison system
• criminal legal system
• policing
• law enforcement
• state violence
• criminalization
• board of prison terms
• board of parole hearings
• sentencing
• crime
• justice
• justice
• domestic violence
• incarcerated survivors
• incarcerated survivors of domestic violence
• survivors of domestic violence
• violence against women
• self-defense
• the war on drugs
• trafficking
• communities of color
• Latina
• African American women
• Black women
• women of color
• white privilege
• white supremacy
• race
• immigration
• globalization
• capitalism
• race
• gender
• class
• women's studies
• social justice
• social change
• free battered women
• habeas project
• transnational feminism