Violence against Women

For the last few months America has been having a conversation that is most often not welcome  at the dinner table or the nightly news. Multitudes of women and a few men have come forward to expose sexual abuse by powerful men. Social and corporate media have been a buzz with new accusation after another. Many of the powerful men were fired from their positions as a result–a shocking phenomena in a country where most rape victims are treated as criminals. While a movement to hold sexual abusers accountable is necessary, a movement born in the US and embraced by people with power is likely to be limited by bourgeois feminism and American exceptionalism. When movements are co-opted by the ruling class, the potential of the movement becomes limited to keep the scope within parameters that work for them. Let’s take #MeToo where it hasn’t gone: to speak for the girls, boys, women, and men raped due to US Wars—our government’s invasion of their national boundaries. War is by definition rape. It is the unwanted invasion of land, the peoples’ body.