Ben Hancox-Lachman’s Reviews > Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race > Status Update

assassination, organised sexual violence, and banishment are part of the War on Terror too. Further, she draws attention to the way in which, when women become national symbols, the disavowed labour of social reproduction becomes momentarily visible. She insists, perhaps inadvertently, on the central role of the ordinary housewife, the citizen who turns a blind eye, as essential to state violence. For this, it seems, she must be punished again and again. Here we can see the drama of liberalism's demise played out by brown women — they provide not progressive cover, but a kind of perverse pleasure. Their association with violence serves to shift the discourse away from the shibboleth that Asian women need saving by the West to one in which it is possible to state that no one needs saving, that no one is worth saving, that migrants should drown, and groomed teenage girls should be left stateless in refugee camps. This is a twist on biopolitics - not only who is made to live or allowed to die, but who violates, deports, kills, and who watches in rapt fascination, uncertain if this violence done in their name will be done to them next.
/I know I’ve done a few long ones focusing on Patel and Begum but I think it’s one of the strongest parts of the book in which she bridges from the theory section to modern day Britain so wonderfully , and really makes her argument for the instrumentality of sexual modernity as a key lens to see seemingly disperse changes in modern day politics as part of a larger motion within capitalism