Multiplicities of Violence: Responses to September 11 from South Asian Women’s Organizations

On September 11, 2001, and the period that followed, the author was a full-time staff member at a community-based organization dedicated to ending violence against South Asian1 women. She was also involved in immigrant rights, racial justice, and queer/trans justice work. Being simultaneously positioned in these sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct, spheres produced unexpected insights into the alliances and fractures that emerged through South Asian community-based responses to September 11 and its impacts on the communities. In this paper, the author explores the limitations South Asian women’s organizations (SAWOs) experienced in holding the complexities of the myriad forms of state, institutional, and interpersonal violence that faced South Asian survivors in the post–September 11 period. These limitations were rooted in the obscurity of the role of structural violence in the everyday lives of South Asian communities, which was made possible through 1) a general emphasis on criminal legal solutions to respond to violence in the interpersonal realm; and 2) the location of SAWOs’ work in discourses of culture and the consequent advocacy for culturally specific needs of survivors.