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Abstract
This dissertation explores how feminists redefined the concept of violence in the mid-twentieth century. I ask: What is violence? What does violence do? When, if ever, is the use of violence justified? And how can we come to see violence that is rendered invisible? I show that second-wave feminists reconceptualized rape, pornography, and even consensual heterosexual intercourse as violence that turns women into things. Self-defense, as a collective feminist project, combats this objectification by allowing women to act freely in public without fear of patriarchal violence. Returning to the practice and imagination of feminist violence brings into view the utopic possibility of a world without men, and without sexual violence. Through a refusal of compulsory reproduction, feminist violence also threatens to deny the conditions for political futurity, effectively ending the world. Violence thus has the capacity to objectify and subjectify, and to create and destroy worlds. As a tactic of disclosure, feminist violence reveals violence against women that we often fail to see because it is so ordinary. Contextualized within the broader anti-rape and anti-pornography, self-defense, radical feminist, and reproductive justice movements, I read the works of Andrea Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir, Valerie Solanas, and Toni Morrison, among others. Contemporary feminists have begun to canonize second-wave thinkers, I contend, in part because of the centrality of violence in their thought, and the novelty of the often-overlooked call for feminist violence.