“I took the risk, I had the courage to try”: Gendered Vulnerability, Agency, and Slow Violence

• In Event: 21061 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Rethinking Safety, Violence, and Embodiment

Abstract

Much necessary attention has been given to the confluence of political, social, and economic factors that have produced the intertwined crises of gendered and sexualized violence and immigration between Central and Latin America and the United States. This paper leverages Nixon's slow violence framework to examine the life stories of three Latinx immigrants to the U.S. to understand how violence shaped their stories in gendered and classed ways. I argue that the consequences of these experiences are temporally extended in their understanding of their own vulnerabilities and agency, with this slow violence pooling around their experiences of family and kinship.

Author

• Samantha Leonard, University of Michigan