Criminal Punishment Quotes

“White women have a right to be angry about sexual violence. Survivors have a right to spaces without abusers. All survivors fantasise about revenge. But whose bodies are forfeit when white women mobilise punitive state and institutional power to achieve it? Who are the real casualties of the white feminist war machine?”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“We want Harvey Weinstein in prison. We want Brock Turner to have a longer sentence. We want Judge Aquilina to sign Nassar’s death warrant. We rely on a third party to take these ‘bad men’ away, usually in the form of an institution or the state. And this White Knight or Angry Dad is patriarchy personified. This is how our outraged activism fails to dismantle the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism that produce sexual violence – and strengthens them instead.”
― Alison Phipps

“Mainstream white feminism, which uses the corporate media and state/institutional discipline to redress individual injuries, cannot tackle the intersections of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism that produce sexual violence. At the thicker end of this wedge, reactionary feminism is complicit with the far-right politics also produced by this intersectionality of systems. The necropolitics of reactionary feminism is where the political whiteness of the mainstream ends up.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“For white feminists, criminal punishment represents protection, not oppression. It is the colonial master’s intervention, the ‘empathy’ of Angry Dad. It is also the indirect demonstration of our own will to power.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The feminist ‘war machine’ is white. And white rage is necropolitical rage: political whiteness is characterised by a desire for power and punishment. When righteous anger about sexual violence is channelled through race and class supremacy, it can produce a need for infliction.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“The infliction that comes with white feminist anger, with its willingness to create collateral damage, perhaps makes it less of an ‘outlaw’ emotion than we might wish. In the symbolic and material game of ‘cops and robbers’, we are often identified with the cops.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“Our anger at heteropatriarchy demands criminal and institutional punishment. But saying ‘fuck the patriarchy’ is hardly radical when this is followed by calling on patriarchal disciplinary power.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“At a very basic level, anti-rape activism is about survival. Many of us are survivors trying to survive, and spectacles of mass wounding such as #MeToo evoke a gendered state of siege. Being raped often involves a visceral fear of death, whether the rape is physically violent or not – it is what makes us freeze, instead of fighting back. And if we freeze, perhaps we need our ‘kill’ after the experience is over. Unlike Arya Stark, we do not do our own killing. Instead, we ask the ‘Angry Dad’ or ‘White Knight’ of the state or institution to do it for us. And the destruction of bodily boundaries involved in criminal punishment mirrors the experience of rape.”
― Alison Phipps, Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

“A government that doesn't put criminals in jail is a jail.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Not to punish the criminal is to punish his victim.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov