An astonishingly original, powerfully honest vision for true survivor justice.
A comprehensive analysis of how American systems deny survivors of gender-based violence justice, comfort, and power.
According to Jezebel staff writer Cheung, a survivor of sexual assault, domestic violence has long been considered a “private” and “apolitical” matter created and perpetuated by violent individuals. However, the author argues convincingly that the opposite is true. In reality, every aspect of America’s political system—from the Senate, which grants disproportionate power to states with the highest rates of domestic abuse, to direct and indirect suppression of survivors’ attempts to vote and the rampant criminalization and subsequent incarceration of survivors—imbues abusers with power and denies survivors the ability to participate in the most basic aspects of democracy. The silencing of these critical voices has serious consequences for the safety of all survivors. Cheung documents how survivors are forced to co-parent with their rapists or lose custody of their children to their abuser, enforced in the courts of judges often appointed by presidents with their own histories as abusers. She also discusses how economic insecurity often keeps survivors in abusive relationships, a pattern reinforced by gendered wage gaps that particularly affect women of color. “Domestic violence, in fact, is not just political,” writes the author, “but quite literally a feature and consequence of greater systems of state violence: State and interpersonal violence are inseparable from each other, feeding each other in an endless cycle. Capitalist policies allow domestic abuse to thrive. Denied living wages and universal health care, many women are entrapped in abusive relationships because their abuser provides them health insurance, shelter, or money in general, and the state does not.” Cheung’s potent analysis, deep research, and compulsively readable prose coalesce into a refreshingly new, significant approach to ending domestic abuse. She is incredibly adept at blending anecdotal and statistical evidence into a clear global picture of a shockingly disturbing reality.
An astonishingly original, powerfully honest vision for true survivor justice.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781623179083
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Atlantic
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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