The general category of ‘women’s rage’…trains our sights on gender, and away from race and class. It positions bourgeois white women as victims, and erases our complicity in racial capitalist exploitation and white supremacy.

Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.

How might mainstream feminist activism help or hinder other social justice projects, for instance around class inequality, race discrimination, migrants’ rights and transgender inclusion? When violent men and governments profess their concern for ‘women’s safety’, how should feminists respond?

Instead of interrogating intersecting systems, politically white feminism roots violence either in aberrant or all male bodies. The mainstream focus on ‘bad men’, and the reactionary focus on male biology, do not account for how capitalist economic predation and misogynist sexual predation go hand in hand. They do not account for how this interplay is racialised, domestically and geopolitically.

Despite the scraps of socialism in its history, [trans- and sex worker-hostile feminism] is bourgeois feminism rooted in disdain for those who think and live differently, whose bodies are not easily assimilated to capitalist production and reproduction.

Violence against women is a pivot for the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. It results from the tussle for material and emotional resources, between commodity production and the reproduction of human life.

Right-wing attacks on feminism and Gender Studies are a defence of the heterosexual nuclear family. This is also a defence of capital and nation: protecting ‘our’ economy and ‘our’ way of life. It is impossible to disentangle the war against ‘gender ideology’ from the widespread racism and anti-immigrant sentiment directed at other Others also seen as threats.

The Western history of sexual violence is also capitalism’s history: it is linked to women’s historical status as property and ongoing status as reproducers of nation and life. It is also a device of the hierarchical and adversarial relations which characterise the greedy market economy.