Phantom Intentions, Agency Maneuvers, and Intimate State Violence against Black Women

• In Event: Futures in Failed Survival: Punishment, Sovereignty, and Safety

Abstract

I argue that intentional action by black agents is criminalized because “blackness” and “criminality” have become conflated concepts, a phenomenon I call “racial conflation.” “Racial conflation” triggers others’ reconstruction of black action into criminal action, and conjures fictive intentions to rationalize those reconstructions. Racial conflation does not merely reflect unjust, unfair, or untrue characterizations of black people, but is instead a matter of the structure of concepts themselves. Using racial conflation as a framework, I argue that the intentions of black agents are vacated by others and replaced with “phantom intentions,” provoking efforts to attempt to rationalize these fictive criminalized intentions, efforts which I call “agency maneuvers.” This discussion explores various examples of intimate state violence against black women to illustrate how the social construction of black women’s agency is maneuvered and manipulated by others in a way that protects the premise of racial conflation and, thus, the dominant social order. Considering the representations of black women’s agency are maneuvered in the context of gender violence victimization, and in light of the relationship between the construction of intention and the complex politics of meaning, I contend that we must not only ask “how much” agency are subjects granted in conditions of oppression, but also “what kind” of agencies are projected onto subjects so that these conditions of oppression are rendered legitimate? I recommend a qualitative mapping methodology to better highlight and theorize the rich social and political context of human agency. This framework re-conceptualizes agency in pluralist terms – “heterogeneous agencies” – and advocates that agency within social encounters are evaluated in terms that are indexed to systems of relations of power and legitimacy.

Author

• Alisa Bierria, University of California-Riverside