The event has been postponed.
Chair: Raf Benato
Speaker: Dr Sahra Taylor (International Politics, City, University of London)
This paper traces the tactics of the deliberate construction, and propagation, of white women vulnerability in the historical construction of the black man "rapist", the 2nd wave lesbian woman "deviant", the gay man "paedophile", and the (relatively new) muslim man "terrorist", and trans woman "rapist".
I argue that all of these vulnerability tropes can be seen in the philosophical and anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant - his particular brand of a gender binary of eternal antagonistic opposition that draws on the language of morality and desire in the perpetual struggle for domination in the family home.
These waves of white women tears, understood through this Kantian idea of the 'traditional' and necessary gender hierarchy of submission and domination, is itself an example of the kink concept of Topping from the bottom.
In essence, this paper argues that the weaponisation of white women tears draws on and requires the pre-eminence of a traditional binary gender and race hierarchy of antagonistic-yet-essential opposition in order to justify its vulnerability.
Recourse to this vulnerability in turn serves to re-secure white women in a position of social and moral power, through vulnerability, in white western states.
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