Introduction - Movements to End Gender-Based Violence and Rethinking Feminist Advocacy

Summary

The book opens with the story of Mariella Batista, a woman who was unable to access essential services through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 because of her immigration status and who tragically died from intimate partner abuse. Her experiences with VAWA reveal the ways in which policy institutions are rigidly confined to one primary issue area (i.e., gendered violence) and as such these laws fail to serve women with other marginalized identities (i.e., Latinx, noncitizen, low-income women). Her story illuminates the institutional inequalities that lie within U.S. policy institutions. The remainder of this introduction chapter explains the history behind these institutions and the ways in which women have resisted them for centuries. These historical moments set the contemporary landscape for advocacy within today’s movement to address gendered violence. This chapter then introduces the concept of “intersectional advocacy” led by organizations that are reimagining and reconfiguring policies to better represent women like Mariella.