A Survival Analytic: gender-based violence and the feminist fight against deportation

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 6: Gender, Sexuality, and Crime

Abstract

Situated in critical migration and refugee studies, alongside a lineage of anti-carceral feminist organizing, this article in progress examines the participatory defense campaign of Ny Nourn, a Cambodian-American refugee and survivor of domestic violence who was incarcerated, then detained to await deportation to country her family once fled. Ny’s life as both refugee and survivor complicates the assumption that she had been rescued via resettlement to the United States, a process which instead entangled her within the intimate violence of abuse and the structural violence of the criminal legal system. Yet in over 20 years of incarceration and detention alongside other survivors, Ny also built the organizing strategies to fight for her freedom from deportation. The article asks: how might a framework of survival—or one’s lived experiences with gender-based violence— enrich our understandings of immigrant and refugee captivity, and of carceral punishment? How can survival become a political foundation with which to challenge our punitive immigration system?

Author

• Victoria Huynh, UC Berkeley