Alison Phipps

My new book will be out with Manchester University Press in early 2026. It’s called Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism.

The book contains what it says on the tin – it focuses on what sexual violence does in racial capitalism. By that, I mean: 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? (You’ll note that I didn’t say ‘produce’ or ‘reproduce’, which is one clue.) I examine how sexual violence encloses bodies and populations, supports the extraction of surplus value, facilitates the expropriation of all kinds of resources, and disposes of the unwanted. Violence is a basic means of moving from difference to division to domination, and this violence is often sexualised.

If you want a preview of the book’s content, there are various places you can look.

• Listen to a podcast interview with The International Risk Podcast, which summarises key arguments and themes of the book, here.
• Read a short piece written for Abolitionist Futures, which introduces some of the book’s arguments, here.
• Read an interview with the Reactionary Politics Research Network, based on Chapter Six, here.
• Watch a talk and discussion at California State University, based on Chapter Six, here (or listen to it on Spotify here).
• Watch a talk given at Lancaster University, based on Chapter Seven, here.

Sign up for updates from this blog to be notified when more previews are out, when the book is available for pre-order, and to get a discount code.

Table of contents

1. Sexual violence as a strategy of enclosure: an anti-origin story
2. The coloniality of sexual violence
3. Capitalism, sexual terror, and the Blackening of sexual threat
4. Sexual violence, social reproduction, surplus value: shit, bodies and flesh
5. Binding the neoliberal assemblage: super-exploitation, super-extraction, and sexual violence
6. Sexual violence as the pretext for disposal: sex exceptionalism, sexual exceptionalism, states of exception
7. Sexual violence in the Stack: cloud kings, angry serfs, and the technofeudal covenant

Summary

I set out my account in seven chapters. Since patriarchy and sexual violence both pre-date racial capitalism by a long duration, Chapter One looks back into deep time via a range of stories about the origins of gender domination and sexual abuse. I begin with sociobiological thought experiments that centre sexed bodily differences, and sociocultural theorisations that focus on the emergence of kinship systems through the exchange of women. Both types of story, I argue, are theories of oppression without exploitation, which render the reproductive body always-already gendered, always-already dominated, and always-already raped. 

I then move on to socioeconomic and sociopolitical analyses that describe a commodification of reproductive capacity with the birth of organised production, creating gender relations that were solidified by the development of sovereignty and warlike states. Based on these origin stories, I characterise sexual violence as a strategy of enclosure in which the generative body is territory to be used for political-economic ends. I also invert accepted accounts in which gender is a cause of sexual violence, and further suggest that gender may be seen as a consequence of enclosure. I conceptualise such enclosure as an ongoing and continual process: violence is necessary because patriarchal power is never absolute. This is not offered as a definitive account or alternative origin story of sexual violence, but is an attempt to consider its function within shifting and contested economic, social, and political relations. 

In the Early Modern period, (re)enclosure of the generative body was a precondition for racial capitalist development. This occurred in a context already shaped by post-1492 coloniality, which also relied on sexual violence. Chapter Two sets out the framework I call the coloniality of sexual violence, which describes how colonialism (re)shaped and racialised sexual violence as a political-economic strategy. Colonial imaginaries were profoundly sexually violent, and sexual violence was a tool of territorial expansion and primitive accumulation. Importantly, coloniality also relied on an emasculation/elevation dynamic targeting Indigenous men. This produced increased sexual violence in colonised societies and an opportunity for violent regulatory control (white men protecting brown women from brown men). It also created the sexualised ‘savage’ as a pretext for murderous repression (white men protecting white women from brown and Black men). 

Based on this analysis, I argue that a monopoly on sexual violence is constitutive of colonial/modern man. Furthermore, such colonial dynamics were co-constituted with the transition to capitalism and emergence of modern misogyny in Europe, not an export of European society and culture. This meant that while European women were subject to sexual brutality during the Early Modern witch hunts, the bourgeois white woman was subsequently recuperated into the colonial/modern system in three different ways: (1) As a ‘properly’ gendered body (while the colonised and enslaved were ‘improperly’ gendered bodies and ungendered flesh); (2) through ideas of sensibility and emotion; and (3) as property to be protected by ruthlessly violent means. 

Chapter Three explores how the imposition of capitalism required the reproductive re-enclosure of European women. The Early Modern witch hunts are described as a sexualised campaign of mass destruction, which shut women into bourgeois femininity so gender could be rearticulated to serve capitalist accumulation. Sexual torture – and especially the device of ‘confession’ – was a central subjectifying manoeuvre that rendered women culpable for their own brutalisation. Over two centuries of terror, the witch hunts bequeathed capitalism a structural separation of production and reproduction and a rampant cultural misogyny that facilitated divide and rule.

The witch hunts were executed in a dynamic relation with colonisation and slavery, although I challenge suggestions of equivalence. Importantly however, the production of colonial/modern Man through sexualised violence was never quite complete, generating a split subject in which the ‘bestial repressed’ was both invested into the commodity form and projected on to the Other. Capitalism’s birth through transnational sexual terror, I argue, therefore shapes a violent libidinal economy in which racialised imputations – as well as acts – of sexual violence are fundamental.

The site of European reproductive enclosure became the bourgeois nuclear family, which persists as an engine of racial capitalist production. Chapter Four explores how sexual violence is key to generating surplus value through free or cheap social reproduction, first in nuclear familial forms, then broadening out to describe the extraction of racialised reproductive labour in transnational formations. I argue that while the bourgeois (or embourgeoising) white woman is subject to privatised violence in the home and privatising violence on the streets, she is uplifted through the ownership of property in people and by outsourcing reproductive work. This relationship between racial capitalism, social reproduction, and sexual violence is read through the split subject of colonial modernity. 

In the enclosure of the bourgeois family, intimate violence maintains private patriarchy as a device for care extraction. In the racialised reproductive accumulation of slavery, sexual violence was a use of property that created more property, and white women were centrally implicated as both owners of enslaved people and perpetrators of violence. Contemporary transnational care chains are built on related racialised dynamics: sexual violence is an effect of racially outsourced social reproduction, and a product of the undervaluation of caring work. On a deeper level, co-analysis of all these reproductive modalities through the lens of colonial splitting suggests that while intimate violence may be a performative act of liberation from the needs of the body, bourgeois women can outsource domestic ‘shit’, and its attendant violence, down the chain in the process of climbing the colonial/modern ladder.

Transnational care chains are one of the structures that prop up contemporary precaritised labour markets in which (some) women achieve ‘empowerment’ through productive work. The movement of women from a reserve to a ‘regular’ army of labour is one of a number of strategies underpinning the value extraction at scale that characterises late capitalism. In Chapter Five, which focuses on neoliberal formations, I argue that globalised mass production (warranting docile bodies on the factory floor and docile landscapes beyond it) both creates and requires sexual violence. A case study of the garment industry suggests that as financial risks are passed down global value chains, they can devolve onto women’s bodies as sexualised abuse. I also describe how, as natural resources are re-enclosed through dams, pipelines, mines, and other violent infrastructure, extractive logics are violently written on the bodies of Indigenous and poor women. 

In these super-exploitative and super-extractive contexts, violence is enacted on the ground or shop floor but embodies logics emanating from the top; beneath the doctrines of free markets and choice, violence (much of it sexual) is a key technique through which neoliberalism is assembled. Something that is assembled, however, can also be disassembled: this is why neoliberalism requires increasing levels of violence. As the Indigenous political slogan ‘our bodies are not terra nullius’ makes clear, neoliberal sexual violence is deployed against potentially resistant subjects, to re-discipline proletariats and re-enclose marginalised communities.  

Neoliberal economic formations, in which some parts of the world both resource and care for others, sit alongside neocolonial and necropolitical ones in which whole populations are rendered surplus and defined as (often sexualised) threats. Chapter Six is focused on what might be called the neocoloniality of sexual violence, extant in War on Terror and contemporary authoritarian populist discourses, anti-trafficking campaigns, and racialised mass incarceration. I observe various combinations of sex exceptionalism (which situates sexual violence as somehow worse than other harms) and sexual exceptionalism (the idea that sexual violence enters the national body from the ‘outside’). These create states of exception that allow populations to be geographically contained, economically excluded, expelled or even exterminated, apparently in the service of tackling sexual violence. 

I argue that sexual violence functions as a bordering project: indeed, racial capitalism creates ‘edge’ spaces and neofeudal enclaves of sexually violent gore, then uses the existence of these wastelands to legitimate ferocious border violence. These dynamics are central to a racial capitalist protection racket in which sexual threat is a pretext for the disposal of surplused populations. The coloniality of sexual violence is what allows neocolonial/modern Man to take and possess women while he grabs, hoards and defends economic resources, and to weaponise ‘women’s safety’ for the same economic ends. This pincer movement between acts of sexual violence and imputations of sexual threat reaches its apex in the racial capitalist wastelands, in which necropolitans are both subjected to sexual brutality and constructed as the sexual ‘brutes’ the Global North must keep at bay. 

Neofeudalism in the Global South advances alongside increasing precarity, and a merger of exploitation and expropriation, that is also producing crushing inequality and deprivation in the Global North. Global North late capitalism additionally has tendencies towards what has been called technofeudalism, in which our dependence on electronic devices enables the (inordinately lucrative) extraction and accumulation of our personal data. Chapter Seven explores online sexual violence, a phenomenon usually situated in a cultural ‘backlash’ frame. Instead, I read this violence through a political economy of platform capitalism, drawing on arguments that we are moving into a technofeudal age. 

On one level, digital violence can be seen as a strategy of re-enclosure that excludes women from the technological spaces that are key to late capitalist economies and cultures. On another level, however, the online presence of women is fundamental to the political economy of technofeudalism. The schema of networked misogyny is one in which sexualised ressentiment requires a continual supply of targets; more importantly, such interactions generate significant revenue for the platform billionaires who are technofeudalism’s petty kings. This is what I call the technofeudal covenant, a bargain through which some gain impunity to enact violence on Others (‘freedom of speech’) in lieu of tenable social futures. It is the political economy beneath the backlash – and ultimately, the technofeudal monarchy wants us all to bend the knee.

What (and who) the book is for

Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism draws on a significant number of theoretical texts, but isn’t a book on (or of) ‘theory’. I think ‘theory’ does too much and too little: both grand narratives and angels dancing on pinheads come to mind. I’d rather not occupy that space. To borrow a phrase from Ruth Wilson Gilmore, I want to describe (and try to explain) the how and why of sexual violence in racial capitalism to support ‘complexly thoughtful action.’ I’m old enough to know that action needs to be grounded and specific, but underpinned by imaginative and expansive concepts.

Sexual violence and racial capitalism are often spoken and written of together, but either one or the other tends to be an afterthought. My aim with this book is to grant each equal attention, so people who care passionately about sexual violence (who might read, write, think, protest and/or try to tackle it) can gain a deeper understanding of racial capitalism, and those who care passionately about racial capitalism (and might read, write, think, protest and/or try to dismantle it) can gain a deeper understanding of sexual violence. I take capitalism as my starting point, rather than locating it as an addendum to the main analysis or even a chapter in a larger volume. Sexual violence, in other words, is situated as part of the fabric of racial capitalist totality.

I situate my writing practice within Elaine Castillo’s scopious definition of reading: we read books, she writes, in order to help us read the world we live in. Moreover, she reminds us, ‘if we don’t figure out a different way to read our world, we’ll be doomed to keep living in it’. We’re also constantly being taught how to ‘read’ what surrounds us, usually by those who stand to benefit from a particular text. With that in mind, and especially given the persistent political weaponisation of imputations of sexual violence (most recently in helping to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza), I offer the book as a ‘reading’ of the relationships between sexual violence and racial capitalism, that can help its readers as they create and recreate their own.

Describing what sexual violence does in racial capitalism is an ambitious task. To paraphrase Tithi Bhattacharya, my aim in the book is to sketch a general framework rather than to provide a detailed historical account or an analysis of specific countries, economies, legislation, policies, or communities. Because of the breadth of the book, it will definitely smooth or skip over nuances and localised complexities. However, I hope the general points I make will ring true, at least to provide an outline that others can colour in, amend, or erase as they like.