“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing

This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police rac...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAntipode Vol. 51; no. 2; pp. 539 - 557
Main Author Elliott‐Cooper, Adam
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2019
Subjects
19th century
Activism
Activists
Attention
Black people
Campaigns
Colonialism
Crime
Demonstrations & protests
Discourses
Ethnography
Female roles
Fieldwork
Gender
Gender roles
Plague
Police
Police community relations
Policing
post‐colonialism
Race
Racism
Resistance
respectability
Women
United Kingdom > UK
England
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Summary:This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police racism has received scholarly attention from black feminists in North America; such attention has been less in Britain, particularly since the 1990s. While influential analyses of policing in Britain have deployed a post‐colonial lens, gender and women's resistance are rarely the primary focus. This paper significantly develops debates on gender, race and policing, by arguing that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this paper: that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post‐2011 England. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar‐activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this paper demonstrates how 18th and 19th century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.
ISSN:0066-4812
1467-8330
DOI:10.1111/anti.12497