Gabrielle Goliath, Beloved (Françoise), 2023, oil stick & chalk pastel on paper, 80 x 71cm
. . .
Françoise Vergès, philosopher, historian, activist and educator
“A decolonial feminism cannot conceivably separate “violence against women” or against “minorities” from a global state of violence: the children who commit suicide in refugee camps, the police and military’s massive recourse to rape in armed conflict, systemic racism, the exile of millions of people due to the multiplication of war zones and to economic and climatic conditions that have rendered zones of living uninhabitable, femicide, and the relentless increase in precarity. Can we imagine addressing only one part of this violence without considering the rest? Can we continue to feign not to see that all of these forms of violence mutually reinforce one another, and that those which more directly affect women are the result of an extremely violent society? The recent mobilisation against gender-based and sexual violence offers a theoretical and practical opportunity: that of making this violence the very terrain on which to challenge patriarchal capitalism.”
A Feminist Theory of Violence, 2022