Trick Mirrors: The Shape-Shifting of White CIS-Women as Survivors / Perpetrators / Comrades in the Fight for Bodily Autonomy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The editor of this special issue, focused on the sequelae of the Dobbs decision, first offers an imaginative and embodied exploration of a dream that served as an organizing theory and call to action for the issue itself. The paper explores the author’s whiteness as it relates to her own body’s trauma and her work to understand instances of sexual violence through lenses of systemic oppression; the author links the way cis white women are variable allies in the fight for bodily autonomy, noting that the specific ways cis white women take up space regarding sexual assault, as well as abortion, crowd out out voices of those who experience more direct and intersectional violence. This reflection and accountability have largely shaped her commitment to seeing psychoanalysis decouple from coloniality and embrace its revolutionary roots, working to help folks locate pathology in systemic oppression and organizing macrosystems, as opposed to individuals. The paper challenges readers to resist the seductiveness of thinking about the Dobbs decision as impacting “women,” vaguely, and instead to think about those specifically gendered, racialized, disabled, queer, fat, and foreign bodies that will be most impacted by the violence and implied potential breadth of Dobbs.