The big ongoing questions for my work are around the relationships between heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and gender-based violence, and how mainstream feminist theory and activism can divest from racial capitalism and become truly transformative.  

My 2014 book The Politics of the Body (Polity Press) covered several issues - sexual violence, sex work and reproductive justice - and argued that mainstream feminism around these was caught in a dialectic between neoconservative and neoliberal frameworks.  

My latest book Me, Not You (Manchester University Press) explores how mainstream feminism around sexual violence tends to pull the levers of oppressive systems rather than building alternatives. In addressing this, I’ve grounded established critiques of how class-privileged white women dominate feminism, in the social and cultural history of white womanhood. I argue, drawing on Black and abolitionist feminist theory, that mainstream feminism, in its focus on criminal punishment, effectively treats Black and other marginalised people as disposable.

The book also looks at some other Others of mainstream feminism – sex workers and trans people. I argue that branches of mainstream feminism can become reactionary, turning a focus on the wounded body into deep defensiveness. This positions other liberation politics as threatening, especially when it’s challenging, and trans women especially are constructed as a threat. In contrast, I argue that a truly transformative feminism requires what Angela Davis calls an ‘intersectionality of struggles’ in which we’re comrades and not competitors.

This analysis was shaped by my experience of being a scholar-activist in the movement around sexual violence against students since 2006. With NUS, I was involved in the first national survey of sexual violence against students and I led the report on ‘lad culture’ that helped catalyse a movement in this country. I’ve focused particularly on how this violence is framed by the neoliberal institution.

I’ve theorised how marketised, competitive cultures create the conditions for violence by giving certain individuals a lot of power and value, and tend to prioritise reputation over staff and student wellbeing. I have introduced the concept of ‘institutional airbrushing’, which takes two main forms: concealment and erasure. Either issues are minimised, denied or hidden, or when this isn’t possible, the perpetrator is ‘airbrushed’ from the institution and it’s made to appear as if they were never there. This stabilises the system - all the institution needs to do to preserve itself is remove the blemish. The malaise remains, and the blemish tends to reappear elsewhere.

I’ve consistently challenged approaches to violence that treat the institution as neutral. I draw from abolitionist university studies, which positions the university as key to the capitalist, colonial world-making project. As Audre Lorde famously said, ‘the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house’.

I’m now working on a new book called Personal Business (again with Manchester University Press). This explores in depth what sexual violence does in the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. I argue that sexual violence enters the world along four vectors – threats, acts, allegations, and punishment – and these must be considered together if we want to understand why sexual violence occurs and how to stop it.

All this work, which tries to move towards a world without sexual violence, means thinking and rethinking the role of care in all its complexity. This means engaging with the double-sided nature of care - critiques of privatised, individualised and consumerist models alongside recognition of our inter-relatedness and responsibilities to each other. In racial capitalism, care can be violence because it is compelled, forced, outsourced and unevenly distributed, and withheld from those who need it most. But, as I argue in my work, care is also at the heart of the alternatives we need. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition means making the conditions for a better world.