I’m a political sociologist and gender scholar with interests in feminist theory and politics, the body and violence, and racial capitalism. My key focus is sexual violence and I have been working on this subject for twenty years. I have approached it from many angles: theoretical, empirical, and as an activist. I work with an expansive concept of violence that spans interpersonal, community and state violence, as well as the violence of war and occupation and violence against the planet. This means that I do not believe in ending one harm by enacting others; I want an end to borders, prisons, and police and an end to sexual violence.
Follow the links below to find out more about my work, and visit this Padlet for recent press.
Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism
What is the role of sexual violence as racial capitalist systems corral (or kidnap), mould (conscript, force), use (wear out, dilapidate), and discard (dispatch, destroy) the workers they require?
How do both sexual violence and sexual fear produce social control and surplus value?
My new book is called Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism, and is out with Manchester University Press in May 2026. This puts forward a detailed account of the role of sexual violence in racial capitalist economic formations. Through a framework called the coloniality of sexual violence, I conjoin acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat in an analysis of gendered and raced property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. I argue that fantasies of sexual danger represent the infolded violence of racial capitalism, which is why fear of revolution is often fear of rape. Revolution, however, is always imminent: violence is necessary because power is incomplete.
Sexual violence, neoliberalism, and higher education
How do neoliberal universities (and other institutions) create and exacerbate sexual violence?
Why, then, do we look to violent institutions to keep us safe from sexual harm?
How might sexual violence in institutions be tackled in ways that dismantle, rather than bolstering, institutional power?
Since 2006, I have produced a body of reports, papers and other material on sexual violence and ‘lad culture’ in higher education in the UK and overseas. These have been based on both research and activism in this area, and are situated within a critical engagement with the university as a carceral-colonial institution.
The trouble with mainstream feminism
How and why do mainstream feminist movements end up upholding, rather than upsetting, the status quo?
How and why do these movements treat marginalised people as disposable?
How can mainstream feminism understand its own harmful dynamics and become more transformative?
Since 2008 I have written three books and a series of papers on the contemporary mainstream feminist movement in the UK, US and other countries in the Global North. My work is particularly focused on the complexities, challenges and limitations of mainstream feminist movements against sexual violence, such as #MeToo.
Alison Phipps 