Belonging and Otherness: The Violability and Complicity of Settler Colonial Sexual Violence

Unsettling the family sciences: Introducing settler colonial theory through a theoretical analysis of the family and racialized injustice

“…The narratives of positive and negative eugenics persist (Collins, 1999), grounding regulatory family formation policies and resultant family structures as justifications for inequality such as seen in Moynihan's cultural deficit concerns that linked poverty in Black families to unmarried births (Williams, 2020). Resulting anti and pronatalist laws promote colonial paternalism, heterosexism, and ableism (Jordan, 2021) and risk seeping into the intervention and prevention methods established by family scientists.…”

“…The family is a key mechanism of settler colonialism in dictating who has access and rights (Bermúdez et al, 2016). For settler colonial purposes, binaries of gender, race, sexual orientation, and ability were encoded in the meaning of family and weaponized as rights of belonging (Jordan, 2021; Williams, 2020). The social sciences then became a handmaiden of the settler colony to give credence to enactments of violence and distanciation, enabling the settlement and sovereignty of White settlers.…”

“If You Don’t Fight Like Hell, You’re Not Going to Have a Country”: An Intersectional Settler Colonial Analysis of Trump’s “Save America” Speech and Other Messages of (Non)belonging

“…Settlers in the United States have perpetually emptied indigeneity through policies and practices of genocide, assimilation, removal, land commodification and theft, and cultural appropriation (Veracini, 2010). As the Indigenous “disappeared,” the exogenous were transported to the colonies to do the “dirty work of nation building” (Jordan, 2021, p. 274). The term exogenous represents people of non-sovereign displacement, recognizing all non-Native people have (been) moved across time and space to settle on dispossessed Indigenous lands.…”

“…The violent rape of lands, bodies, and resources established the settler colonies. Thus, the settler came to symbolize conquest through strength and virility (Jordan, 2021). Intersections of sexuality and gender encouraged the purification of White women and the over-sexualization and savageization of racialized men and women, justifying White men’s violence (Arvin et al, 2013).…”

Unsettling colonial mentalities in family therapy: Entering negotiated spaces

“…Conversely, enslaved women's childbearing abilities were a commodity rather than a threat (Berry, 2017). US participation in the international slave trade became illegal in 1808, prompting systematic rape of enslaved women, and sale or indenturement of resulting children (Jordan, 2021). While enslaved persons could not legally marry, slavers encouraged (or forced) informal unions to pre-empt attempted escapes (Berry, 2017).…”