Theories of Violence
摘要
This chapter explores the multiple structural violences operating on First Nations women in Australia, proposing that this specific population of Australian society is subject to three key trajectories of violence: interpersonal violence, structural violence, and colonial violence. Utilising Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional lens, this chapter explores the various ways in which these “trajectories of violence” operate to perpetuate intersectional disadvantage. The chapter moves through the three violences identified for the purpose of this chapter, acknowledging that these are not the only violences that affect First Nations women. Interpersonal violence, including physical and sexual violence perpetrated both by and against First Nations women, structural violence and the influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the Australian criminal justice system, and colonial violence with a focus of the banality of police violence are explored in turn. This chapter draws on Michel Foucault’s twin theories of biopolitics and anatomopolics, as well as Achille Mbembe's’s necropolitics. This chapter ultimately argues that violence underpins each of the points of disadvantage proposed in this three-point intersectional lens and must be considered in a reinterrogation of the problem.