Sexual Violence Produced the Categories “Woman” and “Man”? Reflections on Alison Phipps’ “Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism”
This article is posted with the permission of Daughters Magazine, published by Let’s Get Free: The Women and Trans Prisoners Defense Committee, where it appears this month.
In “Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism,” (2026) by Alison Phipps, explains sexual violence as “the enlargement of one’s territory at the expense of another.” Phipps is drawing a relationship between the human and earthly body as territories of war because she understands sexual violence as integral to wars intended to dispossess people of their land. Her understanding of sexual violence is two- fold: the physical assault on the body and the framing of the targeted group as sexual savages. We see this war on full display as the Zionist entity (Israel) systematically rapes Palestinian prisoners while using false atrocity propaganda to frame Palestinian men as savages and rapists while Israel murders tens of thousands to illegally enlarge their territory in the West Bank and Gaza.
Phipps draws this definition of systematic sexual violence from her read of its historical origins. The author points to Indo-Europeans’ non-birth-giving people transforming their food acquisition tools into weapons to force and coerce humans that could give birth into ceding their relatively equal social position for a subservient and dependent role. The intent of this coercion, which included systematic rape, was to change the society from one where the community was the collective steward of its land into one in which land was owned solely by non-birth-giving people. Europe’s transition from publicly held to privately owned land took place over centuries but was completed by the ending of the first Roman Empire around the fifth century AD. This period also signaled the ruling class creating a state to effectively manage its internal class conflicts as well as those with other nations.
Why in telling this brief history use these strange titles of “birth-giving” and “non-birth-giving? Well, Phipps wants to explain that it is out of this sexually violent war that the ruling class of non-birth-giving people generated categories and corresponding ideologies of “men,” and “women”; “nation,” and “tribe”; “European” and “native” “White,” and “Black.” In other words, before there were “men” and “women,” there was first sexual violence with the categories and corresponding concepts being used to validate what had already been done. Thus, the purpose of these categories is to force us to see this violence as something resembling a natural order. Think “boys will be boys,” or, to take one of the more famous statements from the psychologist Sigmund Freud: “anatomy is destiny.” If we complement Phipps’ work with research on Aryan/Greek environment and culture as contributing to models of patrilineal descent, and privately held land, then systematic sexual violence as a dominant practice of “non-ethic war” comes into view as the facilitator.
Lest we think Phipps’ work is that of a solo crank, her literature review is extensive and includes the work of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, whose examination of gender in precolonial Oyo, in what is now known as “Nigeria,” led Oyěwùmí to see gender as largely a product of English colonialism and not a characteristic endemic to the Oyo people who were much more interested in one’s age, experience and trade. To move past the categories of gender and see the role of sexual violence in creating gendered race, and “racial capitalism,” we need only look at Ida B. Wells. Wells’ research in “The Red Record” demonstrated that in the vast majority of lynchings, it was White settlers’ view of Black men and women in business or consensual sexual relationships as threats that led to their lynching. The sexual violence imposed on them was framing the Black men and women as savages, then lynching and castrating them, with the purpose of maintaining the settler colonial dominance. Here again, greed-inspired sexual violence produces the social categories, rather than being caused by them.
What to make of this history in this Daughters issue with both heartbreaking, distrustful, and hopeful stories about sexual violence? To understand that sexual violence is a central part of “non-ethical” war means understanding this settler colony built on expropriation, the enslavement, land theft, and genocide of African and Indigenous people, as well as exploitation, the oppression of the White settler working class, is to understand the U.S. as knee-deep in blood and trauma. The sexual violence that is part and parcel of these class wars is the larger history we inherit and reproduce, particularly, the non-birth-giving. It is by no means an easy question, but how important is the category “man” if we understand its lineage? What would it mean to define ourselves by essences invisible to the naked eye and not be able to rely on the shorthand of “act like a man.” Secondly, what might it mean to see the returning of this land to its Indigenous people, the delivery of reparations to African people still being harmed, the ending of imperial wars and collectively working to address the continued harm to African and Indigenous women and femmes? What kinds of relationships might we have in service of those outcomes?
