Police Brutality and the Ungendering of Black Women

• In Event: Police Brutality and Use of Deadly Force

Abstract

Citizens of the United States have become accustomed to footage and incidents of police brutality, causing police culture to be a growing topic within academia. Specifically, conflict theories like racial threat have centered race within the examination of disproportionate arrest rates of Blacks, and police-citizen encounters within Black communities. However, this theory has failed to explain the racializing effects and racial motivations behind police brutality, especially against Black women. This paper focuses on the specificity of state agents’ use of excessive force against Black women to more fully explore a notion of anti-Black violence. According to Black feminist Dr. Hortense Spillers, excessive force and brutality against Black women can be understood as the ungendering of Black women, a violent and symbolic practice initiated during slavery that aimed to remove any distinction of gender by which Black women might be said to experience violence and exclusion similar to White women. By mobilizing Spillers’ ungendering theory and psychoanalysis of race, this paper sketches the racial logic and racial tension between police culture and Black people through a close reading of police brutality against Black women to which racial objectification continues to foreclose them from the Western ontological category of women.

Author

• Afiya Browne, University of California, Irvine