Dispossessing Bodies: Resisting the Violence of Property  

In my dissertation I look at property’s violence, i.e. how property forcefully structures our (gendered, sexualised, and racialised) relationships with others, ourselves, and our bodies, – and try to excavate (imagined) alternatives. Therefore, I look at the continuities of historical regimes of property. Colonial capitalism has appropriated indigenous lands and turned enslaved bodies into property to be bought, sold, and used for profit until annihilation. Family and marriage property laws and traditions as well as state control over sexuality and reproductive capabilities have bred oppressive gender binaries and possessive relationships. Ultimately, property relations of “western modernity” have worked – and continue to work – to produce subjects and bodies along class lines and racial and gender markers. 

Inspired by growing feminist movements that stress the connection between different forms of violence, particularly here the connection between economic violence and gender and sexualised violence, the initial intuition of this paper is as follows: Struggles against this violence need to strike at what I call “cultures of property”, i.e. both the material and structural logic of property and its embodied twin possessiveness. Crucially, this includes the concept of self-ownership and the self-possessive individual so central to the functioning of neoliberal capitalism and its subjects. The aim is to build a theoretical framework around the struggles of dispossessed – and dispossessing – bodies, whilst drawing insights from the archive of existing resistant practices, desires, and imaginations of collective activism and art. 

“Precarious Borders: Frames of Migration and the Potentiality of Affect”, Raisons Politiques, 2019/4, 76, 121-143. 

 “Responsibility for Vulnerability: Towards a Political Account of Responsibility”, Special issue, Dimensions of Vulnerability, edited by Martin Huth and Gerhard Thonhauser. Philosophy Today (Forthcoming).