(DePaul University/Jeff Carrion)
By: Ann Russo, Department of Women's and Gender Studies
"Feminist Accountability"offers intersectional praxes of accountability and transformative justice developed through the leadership of feminists. Rather than relying on existing punishment regimes, the book explores everyday practices that cultivate individual and collective accountability for our participation in interlocking systems of oppression that lend themselves toward collective and communal healing, intervention, accountability and solidarity. These practices seek to challenge and shift power relations that then create paths toward collective movement building and social transformation. To do this, they require us to recognize how we are also implicated, complicit, or actively engaged in systemic oppression and violence, rather than outside of them, and thus mutually accountable for the pervasive violence that shapes our interconnected realities.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?
(Image courtesy of New York University Press)
I learned taking accountability for our participation in harm can be very difficult and challenging, and yet when we do, it frees us up to join with others - to collectively take action, to resist, to challenge and to transform the everyday violence and oppression that surround us. And maybe what I learned most is that taking accountability for our participation in harm requires building relationships and communities that allow for us to be human, to make mistakes and to make amends, to realize that any of us is capable of harm and of being harmed, and that any of us can heal, can take accountability, and can participate in creating change.
Persuade someone to read your book in less than 50 words:
Interested in interrupting, challenging, disrupting oppression and violence with potential for healing and transformation? Interested in responding to racial, sexual and other forms of violence without relying on the police? Interested in building relationships and communities that can hold and address complexity, conflict, and harm without disposing of one another? Interested in alternatives to neoliberal, imperialist feminist approaches to violence in the global south? This book is for you!
About the author:
Ann Russo is an associate professor in women’s and gender studies at DePaul. Her research focuses on queer, antiracist and feminist movement building. Her scholarly and activist work engages transformative justice theories and practices that cultivate communal healing, intervention, accountability, and transformation in response to systemic interpersonal and state violence.
Publisher, publication date, length:
New York University Press, December 2018, 267 pages,
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