The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women
The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women
by Lee Ann S. Wang
Duke University Press, 2026
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2982-3
Paper: 978-1-4780-3327-1
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9461-6 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-6202-8 (standard)
About the Book
Celebrated as a feminist victory upon its passage as part of the Clinton Crime Bill, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a landmark piece of legislation that provides protections for survivors of gender and sexual violence. However, as Lee Ann S. Wang shows in The Violence of Protection, VAWA primarily funds law enforcement efforts to rescue women, and in doing so, creates conditions of racial violence against survivors from communities who are already policed, surveilled, and face immigration enforcement. Through ethnographic fieldwork with legal and social advocates serving Asian American survivors of gender and sexual violence in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wang shows how these advocates grapple with laws which require survivors to cooperate with policing in order to receive protection. Engaging in methodologies of feminist refusal, theories of racial assemblage, and abolition feminisms, The Violence of Protection theorizes the victim as a legal subject and exposes the racial violence enacted when State-provided legal safeguards are leveraged to expand punishment against survivors, their communities, and others.
About the Author
Lee Ann S. Wang is Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Reviews
“A work of demanding precision, one that rewards the reader with insights that shift the foundations upon which so much work on race, immigration, and feminist anti-violence politics continues to rely. With distinctive lucidity and searing analytical prose, Wang brilliantly distills how the ‘Asian Immigrant Woman’ sutures the state-sanctioned effort to end gender-based violence to anti-Black policing in the United States.”
-- Chandan Reddy, author of Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State
-- Chandan Reddy, author of Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State
“The Violence of Protection could not be timelier, unveiling the violence and policing embedded into the very core of immigration law, reaching beyond the brutality we are currently witnessing in the streets into the intimate lives of racialized survivors of gender-based violence. Not content with critique, Wang draws on legacies of abolition feminisms to invite us into the possibilities that open up when we resist the borders imposed by law and explode the conditioned meanings of ‘victim’ and ‘care’ within the logics of criminalization into a constellation of care.”
-- Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
-- Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color
Tags
Protection, Women immigrants, Gender & the Law, Policing, Asian American women, Immigration Law, Legal status laws etc, Violence, Asian American & Pacific Islander Studies, Law and legislation, Gender Studies, Women, Law, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, United States, Social Science
Open Access Information
Label: University of California Libraries
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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