Violent Exposures, Exposing Violence: Gender, Anti-Blackness and the Strip-Searching of Black Women and Girls in Canada
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Published:2023-04
Issue:1
Volume:13
Page:23-41
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ISSN:2044-0138
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Container-title:Somatechnics
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language:en
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Short-container-title:Somatechnics
Abstract
In recent years, more media attention has been given to the routinisation of police strip-searches in Canada. As with many violent policing practices, the routine use of strip-searching disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and racialised women. This article investigates the legal archives of two cases of the strip-searching of Black women and girls in Canada – the case of S.B. who was violently strip-searched by four Ottawa police officers in 2008 and the case of three 12-year-old girls who were strip-searched in a Halifax public school in 1995. This article demonstrates that the exposure of Black women’s and girls’ bodies that occurs in the strip-search encounter is part of the matrix of gendered anti-Blackness. In tracing the moves that the state makes to erase the sexualised violence of the strip-search, this paper suggests that the strip search be understood as a form of gendered anti-Black terror – a technology of violence that functions to evict Black women and girls from personhood. The disciplinary technology of the strip-search is one way in which the state exercises its sovereign power and marks Black women’s and girls’ bodies as violable bodies. I argue that the weaponisation of bodily exposure has a long legacy, and as a highly visual and spectacular encounter, the strip-search cases point to a particular kind of persistent corporeal violence.
Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Subject
Law,Human-Computer Interaction,Sociology and Political Science,Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Human Factors and Ergonomics,Anatomy