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

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 5) Gendered Violence, Risk, and Vulnerability

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-Ann Arbor