Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality, and Community

By Roberta Villalón
NYU Press

I generally do not start reviews with blanket statements, but I simply cannot say enough positive comments about this book. As a student of Gender & Sexuality studies, as well as community activism and Hispanic studies, I was greatly interested and inspired by this thoughtful, critical, theory-meets-activism approach to the difficult and devastating reality of violence against Latina immigrants.

The author, Roberta Villalón, is a professor of Sociology at St. John’s University in New York City, where she is active with both the Committee for Latin American and Caribbean studies and the Women and Gender Studies Program. According to her author biography, Villalón was inspired by the corrupt, and often deadly, political regime of her childhood in Argentina, and has since dedicated her professional career to studying the harms and realities of inequality on multiple levels from institutionalized corruption to domestic abuse. With her academic grounding in political science, international relations, and sociology, as well as her Latin American/Latina focus and affiliation with various immigrants and women’s rights organizations, Villalón brings a fresh, critical perspective to the discussions of resistance in social movements, particularly activist feminist grassroots discourse and efforts.

In Violence Against Latina Immigrants: Citizenship, Inequality, and Community, Villalón’s writing/research process was mainly based on her work on the ground as an activist researcher with a legal nonprofit organization that offers free services to individuals who have suffered from domestic abuse. The clients were typically female, undocumented immigrants, a population she notes as particularly vulnerable to violence: domestic, structural, cultural, and symbolic. In her book Violence Against Latina Immigrants, Villalón combines her observations and struggles with individual clients and their processes with the complicated bureaucracy of our national immigration system, with personal interviews with staff. Even though well intentioned, the staff and general organization were often limited by funding and legal restrictions. They were therefore, as Villalón claims, forced to work within and, unfortunately often perpetuated, the oppressive cycles and systems of structural inequality, specifically in their construction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ clients. Although the organization started from a radical, revolutionary grassroots project, many of the employees seem to be jaded, and accepted the limitations, an unfortunate although (arguably) sometimes necessary common ideological shift for non-profits when the practical issues such as funding, staff, and helping people in the immediate present are realistically addressed.

Villalón notes these frustrating contradictions and dilemmas that further the cycle and reproduction of inequality, and calls for more advocacy, networking between community organizations and policy changes that would aid this particularly vulnerable population. She calls for people, especially those with the desire and power to change policy, to “focus on the ways in which (these women) experience exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence” in order to make the “invisible, visible," while also avoiding the equally oppressive victimization narrative that would further deny their agency.

Overall, the text proves to be a critical study into the complex intersection between immigration, citizenship and violence, particularly in regards to race, gender, heterosexuality, and nationality, and I would recommend to all interested in women’s, immigrant, Hispanic, or general sociopolitical studies.

Review by Abigail Chance

Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement

By Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune
Zed Books

What happened to the feminist movement that meant so much to all of us in the 1970s? Is it dead and gone for good? The answer is no, and UK authors Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune are on a mission to spread the word. “Article after article proclaimed that feminism was dead,” they write, “and stated that young people in particular are uninterested in this once vital movement. This simply didn’t tally with what we had seen through our research and involvement with the feminist community.”

One of the most interesting things that Redfern and Aune do in Reclaiming the F Word is to compare the objectives of the previous movement with the objectives of the current one. According to their research, the demands of the 1970s’ women’s liberation movement were not all that different from our desires today. In chapters devoted to each of the seven issues they deem to be relevant in the past and today, they explore both issues as well as solutions.

For example, “Liberated Bodies” highlights a number of issues, from eating disorders to female genital mutilation to abortion to “jumping off the beauty treadmill.” The “Sexual Freedom and Choice” chapter opens with a discussion of what prevents women from making free choices. This can range from being forced to have sex with her husband to agreeing to an uncomfortable sexual practice in order to maintain a relationship. The authors go on to highlight specific sexual issues that women face today, including sexual double standards, objectification, sex education (or lack thereof), and homophobia. Redfern and Aune also analyze violence against women—including sexual assault, physical abuse, and harassment—and draw attention to the ways in which patriarchal attitudes impact violence, and how violence against prostitutes has its own specific concerns. They offer practical solutions such as organizing public awareness campaigns, better laws, and education programs.

Many of us know all too well that the fight is not over for equal opportunities in the workplace, while working women still struggle with being expected to take on the lion’s share of the housework and child-rearing. A chapter devoted to this issue once again illustrates the strengths of the book: providing statistics and stories from real women to back up claims, and then providing real solutions. Redfern and Aune suggest that expanding women’s career choices, challenging global poverty and working conditions, fighting for pay equality, challenging discrimination at work, and promoting equality in the home will make a huge difference for women. This is not just a book of “feminist complaining;” it is a call to arms against injustice and a blueprint for how to get there.

Chapter five tackles a sticky subject, one that people are not supposed to broach in polite conversation: politics and religion. Today, women are still fighting barriers when it comes to running for office and even getting to the polls. On the religion side, Redfern and Aune offer insight into how women perceive religion as well as how some feminists have tried to account for their faith.

Many feminists believe that sexism is so ingrained into popular culture today that it will require a major overhaul of media in all forms to fix the problem. In a chapter devoted to freeing popular culture from sexism, the authors tackle hip hop and its lyrical messages, sexism in advertising, gender stereotyping, and celebrity culture as it pertains to women like Paris Hilton or Miley Cyrus.

The final demand of feminists today is “Feminism Reclaimed,” as many of the women interviewed by the authors felt that feminism itself needs a revival. The backlash against it, leading many women to fear self-identifying as feminists, is not helpful. Neither is misrepresenting feminism or trying to typecast all feminists.

Reclaiming the F Word provides an excellent overview of all of the issues currently faced by women not only in the UK, but also around the globe. By highlighting the concerns women have today and offering powerful suggestions on how to eradicate sexism, readers feel empowered that they too can change the world.

Review by April D. Boland

The Killer Inside Me

Directed by Michael Winterbottom
IFC Films



The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes (in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me) is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.

In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.

I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.

As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.

There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.

There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.

Review by James Tatham

Cross-posted at Movie Waffle

King Kong Theory: A Manifesto For Women Who Can’t Or Won’t Obey The Rules

By Virginie Despentes
Translated by Stephanie Benson
The Feminist Press

King Kong Theory is most easily my favourite read so far this year; it packs a punch and voices everything I feel about our oppressive patriarchal society. This work is completely free of any hesitation to say what is really going on in the Western world today. Virginie Despentes blew me away with her fresh and honest analysis of what women (and men) struggle within their half-baked, destructive gender roles. She uses research combined with her own gritty experiences to prove her points (of which there are many): silence rots and speaking heals, men exist and women are the negative to the male positive, and what we (both men and women) really feel and need have been smothered by glossy mainstream duct tape.

Yes, this slim tome covers the King Kong story. Despentes points out that the beast has no sex/gender, and is in fact, asexual. He gets along with the beauty, but in the end, he is killed off (nothing but heterosexual relationships here, so bye-bye King Kong!). Poor beauty, like so many other women out there, she is forced to leave the security of King Kong and go back to the dissatisfying and unsafe patriarchal realm.

Currently stuck in a broken system that benefits nobody (do rich white men count?) is angering. I’d forgotten how angry I am that I’m a sole supporting parent (the result of forced sex) without family support (the male predator is always right, so they, like society, stand by him), but King Kong furiously reminded me of how I’ve buried it over the years as yet another maladaptive coping mechanism. Violence against women and children today remains mainly unspoken.

King Kong Theory is not for those in denial or the fainthearted or the apologists; it’s for real men and women who want to change the landscape of power or who simply want to be included, validated as self-actualising individuals with agency. There are many people out there who have been silenced and have similar stories. Unfortunately, as Despentes notes, feminism represents more than just women; it represents a whole system of injustice that rests on gender differences.

This is a book I believe every woman and man should read, even if it means buying, borrowing, or begging for it. If Despentes' provocative films are anything to go by, a prospective reader can expect a powerful polemic that intends to shake up the female and male consciousness, and forces one to recast a blade-sharp view on the continuum of gendered violence permeating in society.

Review by Nicolette Westfall