Hating Women: A Constitution of Hate in Plain Sight

Abstract

In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime stating that this “may prove more harmful than helpful.” This article argues that before and beyond hate crime, misogyny, understood as the hatred of women (from the Greek misein [hate] gynae [women]), is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women’s bodies by the institution of white men through making women the object of the “colonization of the everyday.” This exhausting hatred is enacted through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained through violence against women. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society but rather is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight. Misogyny ensures the precarity of women’s bodies and women’s status as trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately always already misogynistic. Given the foundational nature of misogyny, did the government have a point in excluding endemic violence against women from hate crime as “more harmful than helpful?” Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny? This paper enacts a decolonial feminist prism to disrupt the cultural condition of misogyny by thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. The paper explores violence against women set against the historical emergence of misogyny from Greek dehumanization, to medieval persecution of “witches,” the muzzling and banning of women from public spaces, Shakespeare’s “Taming,” to contemporary femicide rates. Interrogating hate crime through this prism offers nuanced routes for how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new. Misogyny is enduring.

Introduction

How is misogyny? Misogyny is enduring, and so is hate. Misogyny is not new. Misogyny is a specific form of hatred toward women that this paper argues is the foundational logic of our legal, social, and political order in the west. This hatred toward women is embedded linguistically in the etymological roots of the word misogyny, which is derived from the Greek to hate misein and women gynae. Misogyny, like coloniality, is cyclical and transcends time to structure the temporality of the past, present, and future to shape and condition women’s lives and ways of being (Posocco, 2016, p. 250). Misogyny and coloniality are co-constitutive and create a kaleidoscopic landscape of violence where misogyny is always racialized and coloniality is always gendered. Women are thus the object of what Lefebvre (2014) termed “the colonization of everyday life” in western democratic states. Misogyny constructs public and private space creating mental and real maps of exclusion, exploitation, and violence. Misogyny is enacted and embedded through law and law is simultaneously produced through the lens of misogyny. As such, this paper argues that hatred and violence against and toward women must be thought through the lens of both subjective interpersonal violence and the violence embedded in our structural-legal-political constitution. Hating women is, therefore, not a pathology of society, but rather it is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight.

This paper writes both with and against the imperatives of this special issue to uncover hidden challenges in seeking to address the causes, effects, and prevention of violence against women. On the one hand, the violence of misogyny is everywhere, obvious, and accepted. It is not hidden. Misogyny is hyper-normalized, and it is everywhere. However, the way in which misogyny is the logic, normative condition and method of exploitation of western democratic states is hidden by constitutional laws that present themselves as neutral and applying equally to all. Focus in the case of violence toward women and sexual violence is most often directed toward criminal law when seeking redress, where violence is individualized and located in an individual male perpetrator. Less often considered when thinking how to tackle sexual violence and misogyny is the constitutional and administrative law of the state and the misogynistic, racialized colonial complex from which public constitutional law emerged. Constitutional law emerged precisely to justify, legitimize, and inscribe through law violence against women, colonial dispossession, and violence against racialized bodies as the material exploitations necessary for the establishment and survival of the colonial-capitalist democratic state.

Constitutional and administrative laws too often escape analysis and critique because we view them as “procedural” with no role in the prevention of sexual violence and misogyny. This paper makes the claim that the very administration and procedure of our legal-social-political orders in the west is deeply misogynistic and racist and enacts a political goal of gender and racial differentiation; it creates a constitution of hate. This constitution of hate is hidden in plain sight by neutrally worded laws and processes that masquerade as objective while circulating and functioning on misogynistic logic, disclosing “assumptions, attitudes, aspirations and antipathies” (Legrand, 1996, p. 52 referring to Levi-Strauss) of powerful “elites” (Vergès, 2021) who write law and in whose interests law and society is made. Law is thus always subjective from the point of view of white, male power (MacKinnon, 2007, p. 46). This article claims that the structures and processes of constitutional and administrative law set the stage for misogynistic interpersonal violence; calls for misogyny as a hate crime cannot and should not be thought apart from reform of the very law through which society is constituted. Constitutional and administrative law often conjures images of state making or laws of war. But what I mean here is the very basic administration of the society in which we live: planning and housing laws, local council administration, health and safety, school regulation, and healthcare. These not obviously gendered or misogynistic laws and rules are the administrative rules and procedures that circulate misogyny in everything that we do. Seemingly mundane laws that regulate the everyday objects and spaces around us are hiding in plain sight and yet are potent in their misogyny because they move undetected. The description and minutiae of such legal rules is not the project of this paper. Indeed, the preoccupation of legal scholarship with describing instead of critiquing rules is what allows the colonial misogyny of capitalist democracy to circulate unquestioned. This may invite the critique of “Darling, you’re not thinking like a lawyer” (Conaghan, 2013, p. 199). But this is precisely the point: in order to uncover hidden barriers of law, we have to think differently about law.

This constitution of hate relies on the active dehumanization, exploitation, and ownership of women’s bodies by what Ahmed (2017) refers to as “the institution of white men” (pp. 152–153). The institution of white men is the normative quality of patriarchal whiteness that sustains the privilege of a white male view of the world. Simply put, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist democracy is only sustained by and relies upon violence against women. Misogyny is an inevitable, comfortable part of everyday life, and deliberately so. Misogyny straddles disciplinary boundaries, social interactions, geographical borders, and the physical/online world. This is why misogyny is so difficult to locate and theorize. Misogyny is deliberately messy. So how will this paper attempt to do this? It begins by exploring decolonial feminist thinking as a way to frame misogyny; it positions violence toward women before and beyond hate crime; it explores how to locate misogyny and how to locate women; it introduces the notion that misogyny moves and the concept of micro-misogyny; it historicizes how moving iterations of misogyny are built into and legitimized by a legal-political-cultural constitution of hate. The paper concludes by exploring how to do radical, better, and non-violent futures with the trouble of misogyny.

Decolonial Feminist Ethics

This paper brings the lens of decolonial feminism-in-law to this special issue to think through the complexities of what I will refer to as colonial misogyny. I employ this term to reflect the always already co-constitution of misogyny, race, and the violence of the colonial matrix. As decolonial feminist Françoise Vergès tells us “a feminist cannot claim to possess ‘the’ theory and ‘the’ method” (Vergès, 2021, p.19). Theorizing misogyny is, therefore, not desirable and is not the aim of this paper. The aim of this paper is to “trace” (Legrand, 2022, pp. 144, 161) misogyny and show how misogyny moves through and beyond institutions, law, hate crime, and bodies such that misogyny does not belong to “us” or “them,” to left or right politics, to men or women, but rather it is an attitude, it is atmosphere (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015) that is always already there, the scene (Barthes, 1978, p. 208) against which social relations and interpersonal violence against women is set. As part of this tracing process, the paper shows how misogyny moves and is spectral and shifting. Misogyny oscillates between the interpersonal and structural in inconsistent ways. In order to capture this movement, our thinking must be similarly shifting and oscillate between bodies of knowledge bringing divergent and even traditionally conflicting literatures into conversation. Violence against and hatred toward women is the driving force of this paper, not allegiance to one particular philosophical tradition or making violence and hate toward women “fit” into a predetermined theoretical category. Violence and hatred toward women are beyond the scope of one theoretical tradition and necessitate a kaleidoscopic approach, which skips across temporalities and theories as tools to locate material hatred toward women that is everywhere. In this way, we can take responsibility as academics for developing a genuinely issue-based approach through listening to each other and the voices of lived violence through epistemologies of generosity. Misogyny, like racism, is not the exclusive reserve of the extreme right; misogyny and racism were disseminated as the core fundamental pillars of colonial-capitalist democracy and the nation state, always enabled and legitimized through law. Building on French anti-racist scholar Bouamama (2004), law makes colonial misogyny and violence against women respectable. Misogyny is respectable.

This is active, activist writing that enacts Sara Ahmed’s Feminist Manifesto Principle 5 “I am not willing to get over histories that are not over” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 262). Misogyny is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, neither is it a historical period that has ended. Misogyny is an enduring history and method of violence against women that has shaped colonial-capitalist democratic society and continues to do so. Histories of misogyny shape bodies in the present. The violence of misogyny travels in bodies; the inherited trauma of sexual violence shapes social interactions such that “don’t tell me to smile” is not a lack of sense of humor on behalf of women (Ahmed, 2017, pp. 261–262) but rather is a resistance to misogyny rooted in histories of unceasing violence that live in women’s bodies. In understanding how to disrupt the legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new, the paper claims that it matters how we write and think about misogyny in order to imagine and enact what I introduce as non-misogyny in the face of a pervasive micro-misogyny. The paper draws on and skips between divergent bodies of literature and experiences to enact Spivak’s (1999) self-reflection “I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules” (p. xiii).

Misogyny relies on the binary of man/woman, male/female. To disrupt this logic requires thinking across misogyny, beyond, and together. This is why Flavia Dzozan’s “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” is how we must do feminism. More than this, my feminism will be intersectional or it will be insufficient, fascist, and acting in the interests of a white, patriarchal capitalist democracy. As Vergès (2022) explains building on Mona Eltahawy’s “Fuck you feminism,” the “civility” and “respectability” enacted by white, bourgeois feminists does not provide a real, energetic, and necessary challenge to domination and instead works in the interests of misogyny and racism (p. 54). This language may be received as violent but as Tuitt (2021) has argued, decolonial action necessitates violence of some kind. Asking and campaigning and lobbying for the safety of women’s bodies and the value of knowledge produced through women’s bodies has not been an effective strategy. This paper advocates embodied epistemological violence for active dissolution of the violent structures of misogyny that are legitimized through law and enable everyday violence against women.

In April 2023, the U.K. government announced that misogyny would not be categorized as a hate crime. The rationale for this decision followed the reasoning of the Law Commission that such a change “may prove more harmful than helpful” to the hate crime agenda and to women and girls more generally because it would result in a hierarchy of crimes. Duggan and Mason-Bish (2022) have skillfully elaborated how feminist theorizing in relation to hate crime can amplify the way that misogyny shapes hate crime and how fundamental gender dynamics are erased from hate crime agendas (p. 25). They, therefore, make the simultaneous case for misogyny as hate crime while developing a critique of hate crime as gendered. Perry has articulated the role of hate crimes in maintaining differentiation and hierarchy between groups and communities within society where dominance and power are exerted over those who do not adhere to western norms of White, middle-class, Christian, heterosexual, cisgender, and able-bodied men. This dominance model echoes Catherine MacKinnon’s body of radical feminist scholarship in law where a global state of dominance of men over women is identified. In these configurations, individual victims are interchangeable within structures of dominance (MacKinnon, 1989; Perry, 2001) and have thus been subject to critiques of essentialism. In articulating the everyday nature and the importance of individual lived experiences of violence and harm in understandings of hate crime, Chakraborti et al. (2014) emphasize the “mundane” or “ordinary” aspect of hate crimes as acts of violence, hostility, and intimidation directed toward people because of their identity or perceived “difference.” Hate crime highlights through law the economy of difference upon which colonial-capitalist democracy relies whether the focus is on differentiation through structural dominance or differentiation through mundane, ordinary acts of harm. Hate crime makes violence based on difference visible. It makes it real through language. It makes hate justiciable, although violence enacted through hate will not always meet the criminal threshold and thus suffers from the same at once inclusionary and exclusionary effects of legal instruments such as human rights that seek to redress harm but in instances of non-recognition of harm, compound that harm. Making difference visible by law through hate crime makes this difference comfortable and acceptable; hate crime makes the exploitative difference that capitalist-colonial-patriarchal democracy relies upon respectable precisely by giving it a language of resistance through law. The danger with this is that the structures that enable violence are not altered and those on the receiving end of repetitive violence continue to suffer. So, did the government have a point not making misogyny a hate crime? Is hate crime merely constitutive of a cultural matrix of misogyny?

The instrumental use of law for social justice and social change through hate crime has been conceptualized by Walters (2022) as “law as social justice liberalism.” This return to law has been a strategy successfully employed by feminist legal scholars in pursuit of social justice, to name violence against women as a politics of resistance internal to law. MacKinnon’s (2019) work to name domestic violence is a prime example of this feminist politics through law. The work of hate crime scholars and feminist scholars of sexual violence and law has been to concretize experiences of harm and violence precisely through the language of oppression and of the oppressor which is law. In translating the harms of hate to the language of law, there is no denying the “extraordinary political purchase” (Brown, 1995, p. 76) of hate crime. As MacKinnon (2019) has pointed out in reflecting on the difficulties of her feminist activist work, working with the law and the language of the oppressor always treads the “very thin line between the inevitable and the hopeless” (p. 325), of being too early or too late, too radical and at once passé and reimprinting the harms of liberal legal arrangements in an attempt to impact on the lives of women while being sensitive to theory (MacKinnon, 2019, p. 279). This is also the downfall of human rights instruments. It is for this reason that Spivak (1993) has described political liberalism as “that which we cannot not want” (pp. 45–46). Brown (1993) has built on this to articulate a wounded attachment, whereby we always seek recognition from the hegemonic discourse that is the source of our harm and oppression (p. 390).

The work of this paper is then as an interloper in the community of hate crime scholars contributing to this special issue and beyond, to take the flashpoints of violence that are brought to law and to life through hate crime and to collaborate with this thinking to push beyond and before hate crime. Hate crime as legislation is not the focus of this article. The focus is to take the conceptual category of hate as one that transcends and mediates between law and lived experience. On this understanding, hate crime is an enactment of what I have termed elsewhere an embodied epistemology, knowledge that is generated through lived experiences of violence, exclusion, erasure, and exploitation as a more loving way of making law with and for each other for better futures in and beyond law (Brayson, 2021b). Bringing decolonial feminist research in law into conversation with hate crime forms part of the collective endeavor of this special issue for reconfiguration and nuance in understanding how to enact a resistance and response to all forms of violence. Liberatory projects must be thought together, collectively and multifariously as the only way to disrupt the violence of colonial-capital-patriarchal democracy. The words of Lorde (2018) are oft cited to eloquently articulate that “the masters tools can never dismantle the masters house.” As a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” she invites new ways of imagining beyond the “European-mode” through “places of possibility. . .emotion and feeling” that are deeply within us already (Lorde, 2018, pp. 1–2). This necessitates coalitions of thinkers working both with and against colonial misogyny, a broad kaleidoscopic transdisciplinary lens that enacts a politics of generosity as opposed to a politics of parsimony. This commitment to multiplicity realizes “no single theory or method. . .can save us all. The domination we face is multiple and our responses. . .must be as well,” making everyday links to avoid a hierarchy of struggles (Bohrer, in Vergès, 2022, pp. xvi–xvii).

This paper makes the link between the multiple, kaleidoscopic, and duplicitous forms of violence that are experienced situatedly and uniquely by heterogeneous women. These distinct forms of interpersonal violence are linked by the reality that violence against and exploitation of women is fundamental to the functioning of capitalist democracy in the west. Violence against women is not an effect of colonial-capitalist democracy and liberal legal systems but rather it is the necessary exploitation, exclusion, and violence at the heart of that system which maintains, ensures, and enables the continued primacy and privilege of “elites.” Misogyny is not an identity category or marker of difference. It is a deep-seated programming and violent way of being that creates difference. Misogyny is active. So while it would be politically useful to name misogyny as hate crime, doing so may simultaneously foreclose multivalent and complex understandings of lived material experiences of hatred toward women. As Conaghan (2013) explains in relation to gender equality, just because we have gender equality law, does not mean we have gender equality. Understanding misogyny through the lens of identity or equality underestimates the fundamental nature of misogynistic violence as the very method of capitalist democracy. Misogyny is more than a conciliatory and objective case of equality and inequality. It is more than hierarchy of identity. Misogyny is exploitation and sexual violence as a necessary condition of patriarchal-colonial-capitalist democracy.

Before and Beyond Hate Crime

In order to do this disruptive work, our thinking as feminists and trans and race and queer and non-ableist allies must provide an alternative to the inevitable return to the post-violence arms of private law for redress in all cases of sexual violence as inevitably lying in criminal law as the only source of justice. Recourse for justice through the individualized criminal justice system obscures the state as the very source of violence toward women. As Dorlin (2007) argues “the passage to violence” is “the logical consequence of an analysis of women’s oppression and their minoritization as a structural feature of the state”; in this reality, why would women turn to the state to protect them? (Vergès, 2022, p. 53)

It is a myth that violence against women can be reduced in a society that relies on this very violence to sustain the privilege and primacy of the institution of white men. The never to be realized promise of violence reduction, redress, and justice through criminal law are the perpetuating and legitimizing myths that misogyny lives by Midgely (2004). Russell (2023) has shown how the ontological force of law, specifically the lived experience of the criminal rape trial, is experienced as the “second rape of law,” which far from redressing harm compounds that harm as law exerts its misogynistic impulse on victims of sexual violence. This extends to police investigations, the police force, and violence reduction units.

On this understanding not only does criminal law fail to provide justice, it compounds the harms of sexual violence. And vitally it does not address the architecture of misogyny that is imprinted in constitutional state made and state making public law that enables sexual violence. As members of Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis matter of factly articulated “It’s the cops, the judges, the State, the President/The oppressive state is a macho rapist” (Sprimont, 2019); it is the state that arms sexual violence (Dorlin, 2019). It is law specifically that institutionalizes the misogynistic violence of the state by embedding normative inequality and an economy of sexual violence. It is law that makes respectable, legitimizes, and foments “hatred against minorities, trans people, queer people, sex workers, racialized people, migrants, and Muslims” (Vergès, 2022, p. 3). This hatred is embedded in public constitutional law and the law of human rights while simultaneously deriving its legitimacy from the exploitation and violence against minoritized humans and women as fundamental to its functioning. Constitutional law is the respectable infrastructure of the patriarchal-colonial-capitalist democratic state, where violence is its currency.

Sara Ahmed explains phenomenologically how institutions are exposed as white by highlighting how “institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather and cohere to form the edges of such spaces” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 132). In this way, the institution of law is exposed as white but also as misogynistic as male, misogynistic bodies cohere to form the edges of law, legal institutions, and the society that law regulates. Violence against women is the method of a society and legal order constituted through hate toward women. Hate and misogyny is the epistemic lens through which knowledge about women is produced. This hate is enacted through sexual violence, everyday exploitation, everyday sexism, everyday assault, everyday rape, and the devaluing of women’s labor, care, knowledge. As Vergès asks “How to respond to this multifaceted sexist and sexual violence when ‘racialized bodies, female bodies, poor bodies, or young bodies have less value in this phase of necro-liberal reactivation’ when they are sacrificable?” (Vergès, 2022, p. 3); and I would add here deliberately sacrificable. This is why law will always fail in its attempts for redress. Colonial misogyny through law and outside of law is a process of active reduction as erasure (Lugones, 2010, p. 745) characterized by the material sexual exploitation and political instrumentalization of women’s and colonial bodies for sexual pleasure and democratic political management. Women and racialized minorities serve(d) the purpose of setting the race/gender/class hierarchies that are essential to the functioning of western democratic states. This differentiation is enacted through a misogyny and coloniality that is enduring and legitimized through law (Brayson, 2019).

Hate crime makes embodied and enacted difference and hate visible and legible in law. But as a pacifier in private criminal law. It does not get to the colonial misogynistic roots of capitalist democracy and acts as a diversion to leave these roots intact as attention, efforts, and labor are directed toward post-violence interventions and violence reduction. This paper extends the reach of the logic of hate to think hate as the constitutive logic of the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal democratic state. This exhausting hatred is the method of the exploitative state. As the exasperated protagonist confides in the final scenes of the stage play Cabaret “All this hatred is exhausting.” Exhaustion is precisely the strategy of colonial misogyny, which deliberately engenders an exhausting hatred by stoking a divisive politics based on identity differences of race, gender, ability, religion all explored in this special issue, and institutionalizes the divisive logics of racism, coloniality, patriarchy, heteronormativity through law. So, while law claims to work for victims of violence, the “between-lines” of colonial misogyny are always at work to ensure differentiation, exploitation, and violence through law. This deliberate strategy of law and state actors is compounded in current political climates marked by incredible, visceral misogyny.

The hate encapsulated in the word misogyny is not mere semantics or an abstract theory of knowledge. Hate travels in theory, language, bodies, and law. Misogyny is embodied, enacted, and visceral. This exhausting hatred is lived through repetitive, unceasing, and everyday violence toward women whose bodies know hate as a way of being because there is no alternative when existing in what Vergès (2022) has termed a “global state of violence” (p. 4). This misogynistic landscape precedes sexual violence through language and legal structures that stigmatize women, make them vulnerable, and set the scene for sexual violence. Thinking interpersonal violence against women without a “reflection on violence as a structural element of patriarchy and capitalism, rather than specifically male” (Vergès, 2022, p. 4) excuses from interrogation and accountability the structures that hold this violence up over time. That violence should be considered structurally as well as the actions of specific men as aberrations, monsters, and pathologies of an otherwise non-violent society is illustrated by the harrowing events of Sarah Everard’s murder by a man, a Metropolitan Police officer, in March 2021.

In solidarity with Sarah Everard, women shared their experiences of normalized sexual violence in public. This garnered a response on twitter (as was) of #notallmen. But this individualization of violence toward women misses the point. It misses the point that this is not about individual men who are a pathology in society. Rather this is about the normative dehumanization and silencing of women in public spaces that is foundational and constitutive of capitalist democratic society and the public law that regulates modern constitutional arrangements. This is the exploitation of women that is the necessary condition of capitalist democracy and creates a cultural norm of ownership of women’s bodies, on the bus, on the tube. Wherever, whenever. As Medina explains:

The structural and the subjective also go hand in hand: structural processes that cause or facilitate harms work through patterns of interaction and people’s entrenched habits and attitudes, which in turn are mediated by social structures. Assuming shared responsibility for epistemic harms brings together the subjective and the structural in a particularly perspicuous way (Medina, 2013, p. 251)

Structural and subjective misogyny are thus one and the same in moving iterations. We cannot understand interpersonal iterations of misogyny as sexual violence without understanding the epistemological frame and legal constitution from which this violence emerges. These misogynies are co-constitutive and kaleidoscopic and must be treated as such in order that we can take collective responsibility for the way in which misogyny is embedded and enacted through law. In this way, misogyny is spectral. It is in the between-lines, the language and the structures of law without necessarily being visible. The hatred toward women enacted by misogyny does not act alone. Misogyny works in the service of colonial capitalism, racism, ableism, and social class; it reinforces the exploitations of these fascist impulses and structures. It pits working class women against elite women; it pits gender critical women against trans women; it pits black women against white women. It creates hierarchies of women which are then in turn enacted by women. This is not just about the actions of individual men toward women, but also about the legal structures and social behaviors and habits of misogyny that enable interpersonal violence perpetrated by men toward women. This is why our responses as oppressed groups must be collective: in order to meet the collective of fascist impulses marked by colonial capitalism, racism, ableism, gender criticality, and social class in a way which understands and resists the institution of white men.

Locating Misogyny, Locating Women

Society is performatively outraged by the material and epistemological violence inflicted upon women. Yet nothing changes. Misogyny is repetitive. The reality of misogyny is not male or female. Misogyny is messy and deliberately so. But it derives its power from the maintenance of the binary hierarchy of man and woman. Misogyny cannot be located to a single source, time, and place. It is kaleidoscopic. So, we need to shift the question from what is misogyny to where is misogyny? Since starting this paper the daily news cycle has been reliably punctuated with unceasing instances of violence against women, rape, femicide, and shootings. At the time of writing, a man has killed five women and a security man at a shopping center in Sydney, Australia (Murdoch & Pal, 2024). The police stated that the attack was not driven by “any particular motivation, ideology or otherwise.” However, the attack clearly targeted women. The attack was, therefore, motivated by ideology, the ideology of misogyny and hatred of women. Yet so embedded and normative is misogyny in our cultural and legal-political psyche, it is not named or spoken or identified as an ideological motivation. Hatred toward women is not a fact; colonial misogyny is the deliberate organizing method of colonial-capitalist democracy.

Over the last 10 years, in the United Kingdom, a woman was killed by a man every 3 days and a woman is killed by a partner (former or current) every 4 days. This week four boys aged 12 to 14 have been arrested on suspicion of rape in Rochdale (Jones & Burnell, 2024). Last week a former Metropolitan Police officer was charged with 13 counts of rape (BBC Editorial, 2024). The week before a Muslim woman and two young girls were attacked in London with alkaline by a man known to them (Dugan & Dodd, 2024). In that same week two teenagers were sentenced over the “exceptionally brutal” murder of Brianna Ghey, a trans teenage girl (Pidd, 2024). In October 2023, men entered the house of Ashley Dale in Liverpool and shot her as retribution for an ongoing feud between the perpetrator and Ashley’s boyfriend, such that her body was the site of aggression between two men (Vinter, 2023). Sabina Nessa was murdered in a park on her walk home and left lying on a park bench (BBC Editorial, 2022). Every day women are killed by their partner or someone known to them. In the year following Sarah Everard’s kidnap, rape, and murder, at least another 125 women were murdered (Oppenheim, 2022). This figure is according to the website Counting Dead Women, which purposefully omits the murders of trans women. The creator of this website has indicated her reasons for excluding trans women promoting an anti-trans position that denies the personhood of trans women. This paper is written in alliance with trans women and on the basis of a trans inclusive understanding of who a woman is such that as Rachel House has enacted through art, “queer joy is an act of resistance.”

Trans women reject masculinity; this is a deeply subversive act which undermines the hegemony and ideology of misogyny. The number of trans women who attack women is far outnumbered by the number of men who kill women and the number of trans women who are killed. However for the minority of trans women who sexually violate cis women, this is an act reflective of misogynistic masculinity, particularly if the sexual violation strongly resembles heterosexual rape. Trans women who engage in such behaviors may be struggling to shake off some aspects of violent masculinity. Misogynistic programming is thus so pervasive that violence against women permeates all sexes and genders including a small number of women who sexually violate women. The point here is that misogyny exists beyond the binary of men as violent and women as victims; it is misogyny that simultaneously creates this binary and transcends it in violent, complex ways that are deliberately difficult to discern and dismantle. Misogyny is not an effect of biology or social relations. Misogyny is the ideology that creates these patterns of social relations and violence. Misogyny interpellates (Althusser, 2008) women as victims and men as aggressors with no room for more nuanced analyses. Gender critical views are constitutive of and complicate this binary because they explicitly seek to reinforce the binary of man/woman, the source of misogyny’s power, by denying the personhood of trans women. Gender critical views enact a logic of misogyny, oppression and fascism (Butler, 2023) through hate toward trans women, a trans misogyny. However this is a misogyny cloaked in the language and performance of anti-misogyny. Gender critical scholars present views very specifically as coming from an anti-misogynistic position; these views are targeted at cisgender trans allies who support the personhood of trans women. The violence of gender critical views thus works in two aspects: first, to deny the existence of trans women and secondly, to target cisgender trans allies. As Gill-Peterson (2024) shows trans misogyny and femininity emerged historically under, and I would add as an effect of, colonial governments and binary management systems, through the sex work industry, the policing of urban public spaces, and between the formal and informal capitalist economy.

This paper acknowledges the privilege and preference afforded to white women in police responses, media reporting, and the public imaginary in violence against women:

The media categorically does not give Black women and domestic abuse enough attention. For example, media coverage of the Sarah Everard case was on every news source for a period of time. Can you name any Black women who have had the same amount of coverage or outcry? (Sistah Space)

Uguru (2023) has identified a “black femicide crisis.” The clear absence of intersectional reporting on violence against women and femicide is a symptom of the continued and deliberate erasure of Black, Asian, and minority ethnic women’s bodies and lives in western society. Decolonial and Black feminist critiques of feminism have highlighted this primacy of white women in civilizational feminisms (Vergès, 2022) and western feminisms in discourses around violence against women, which enact Eurocentric bourgeois and essentialist constructions of respectable womanhood (Phipps, 2020). This primacy of the “white woman” as the “mythological celebrity” (Moudileno, 2019) of discourses around violence against women is founded in enduring colonial-capitalist racialized notions of sexuality and gender that set colonial women and white women respectively as “who can bed and who can wed” (Stoler, 1989, pp. 636–637). This is the construction of the white, clean marriageable woman of colonial capitalism; this is she who is the proper woman of western democracies who embodies discourses of racial hygiene and an enduring colonialism that sets the bodies of colonial women in a “degenerate” register (Stoler, 1989).

Misogyny enacts this divide and conquer strategy through the “social creation of the marriageable (White) woman,” a creation that is only possible through the “social creation of the animalistic, morally lax, dirty, diseased, poor woman of color.” (Benard, 2016, p. 2). This oppositional thinking and policing extends to working-class women, trans women, and sex workers and forecloses nuanced intersectional analyses between gender, race, and class (Phipps, 2020). This leads to the mythical celebrity of the white woman as the site of the harms of misogyny, “uniquely and maximally oppressed” and the binary concomitant is the source of violence in the essentialized male body (Phipps, 2020). This “white feminism” does not have to be enacted by white bodies but rather “reaffirms a white vision of the world” (Vergès, 2021, p. xiii). The racialized roots of misogyny have been articulated by Bailey (2021) in her concept of misogynoir, which builds on Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality.

Misogyny is so ordinary that the violence encapsulated in it is commonplace and derided. The criminal law has been woefully inadequate at curbing the cultural politics of governance (Cooper, 2019), which celebrates and gives misogyny a renewed fervor through deification and the apotheosis of misogynistic influencers such as Andrew Tate who glorify violence against women, female subordination, and anti-feminist rhetoric (Stewart, 2024). This is a brazen misogyny that equates the success of men with the exploitation of women and speaks to generations of always already disenfranchised boys and men. It presents a disturbingly violent vision of what an ideal man is in a transnational online world. But this is not new or an exception. This is a hyper-misogyny that makes misogyny’s core aims, strategies, and methods so hyper-visible that they are invisible and beyond critique. This is a misogyny, which uses technology to humiliate through upskirting, mobile phones, and social media. As Medina (2013) argues in order to do the preventive work to stop violence against all women, we must “direct our critical gaze not only toward actions and practices, but also toward language and the imagination” (p. 250); how do we speak about women and violence against women? How do we imagine a truly disruptive effort to stop violence against women beyond the platitudes of violence reduction units and post-violence carceral interventions?

Misogyny Moves: Micro-Misogyny

Where is misogyny? Misogyny is not a static logic. The foundational moment of the dynamic of misogyny situates men and women as antitheses to one another and embeds a binary hierarchy, which favors the male as normative and the female as “other.” Brown (1995) has articulated this gendered constitution of political liberalism through identifying “liberalism’s family values” (pp. 135–165), which is a prioritization of male logic and language embedded through binary hierarchies in all spheres of life. Misogyny derives its power from the binary of man/woman. But to borrow the language of Povinelli (2002), the real “cunning” of misogyny is that it moves. Phenomenologically, misogyny is in the objects around us. It is in our law; it is in our institutions. It is in and on our roads, buildings, schools, and clothes. The infrastructure of everyday life enables misogyny and misogyny travels within our bodies, shaping all encounters. Misogyny leaves no space or body untouched.

Public space is not neutral. Online space is not neutral (Watson, 2023). Private space is not neutral. Women are trespassers in everyday spaces that are deliberately male, where the cost of being a woman is violence. Misogyny interpellates women as trespassers; it experiences them as a nuisance. Misogyny is, therefore, the normative quality and condition of public, private, and online space. The legal-normative institutionalization of misogyny through constitutional law enables it to move freely in and between spaces controlling women’s bodies through violence. This makes spaces inaccessible to women for fear of violence, affecting mobility, and the use of space by creating mental maps of exclusion (Itaoui, 2016, p. 264).

Postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon has described his own experience as the object of the hostile white gaze whereby “the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by the racial epidermal schema” (Fanon, 1986, p. 112). For Fanon, following Jaspers, this experience is contingent on existing concrete “legends, stories, history and above all historicity” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 110). To be an object of the white gaze is for Fanon a specific moment where body is displaced by color (Brayson, 2019, p. 79). Extrapolating from Fanon’s embodied experience of racism, this moment of corporeal displacement is present for women upon entering public, private, and online spaces where to be an object of the misogynistic gaze means that the body is displaced by the binary logic of male/female, man/woman. The effect of this moment is that the body in question is “stopped” in its tracks or negated (Ahmed, 2006, p. 110). Misogyny interpellates women’s bodies as moving borders (El-Enany, 2020, pp. 25–26) of constitutionally legislated maps of exclusion (Brayson, 2019a, p. 80) which delineate the misogynistic, gendered, colonial politics of governance, and differentiation at the heart of western democracies.

Urban architecture is not designed to facilitate a peaceful social life: “it is hostile to women and in particular to racialized women, homeless people, refugees, the elderly, migrants, poor people, disabled people, Arabs” whereby space is structured to prevent movement and to create “invisible walls” (Vergès, 2022, pp. 56–57). Women and other oppressed bodies are controlled through this urban infrastructure as they must take responsibility for their own safety; they must embody and enact ways of being to simultaneously obey and protect themselves within a normative colonial misogynistic infrastructure. The material infrastructure of misogyny is legitimized and facilitated through law, through planning laws, through constitutional and administrative laws which create walls and borders in a stealth fashion. As such the call from feminist activists to “reclaim our streets” is a more fundamental demand and disruption of normative misogyny that it at first sounds.

Misogyny is deliberately inconsistent. Misogyny disorientates (Ahmed, 2006, p. 111) women’s bodies because they cannot plan for an inconsistent moving misogyny, which can manifest anywhere. This is what it means to claim that misogyny is not only interpersonal or structural, it is atmosphere; misogyny curates space in plural and shifting geological, political, esthetic, legal, and biological dimensions (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015). Thinking of misogyny as atmosphere, as a constant yet always moving, adapting to new situations and political and personal manifestations collapses the binaries of male/female and interpersonal/structural and allows us to come closer to comprehending the kaleidoscopic harms enacted by misogyny across all spheres of life and to take responsibility for them in ways that cannot easily be reduced to hate crime legislation, or human rights legislation or any form of legislation. This material and political-legal-social constitution of colonial misogyny determines the way we navigate the world in ways that will be familiar to the reader, absorbed into women’s bodies as borders and walls, preventing women’s bodies from flourishing:

But even though I was encouraged to be curious about the world, I learned to remain vigilant on deserted station platforms after dark; I bought whistles; I learned to spot from afar the open and lit places. . .when coming home late at night; I learned to grip a key between two fingers and to aim for the neck; I took judo lessons; I learned not to catch someone’s eye, or on the contrary to do so, to barricade doors and windows, to walk down empty corridors with assurance; I waited for my women friends to safely enter their houses, their doors shut, before pulling off; I spent money I did not have on taxis to get home from parties. . . And I more than once dreamed of acquiring tremendous physical strength and spent hours imagining scenarios to avenge humiliation or abuse to make fear change sides. (Vergès, 2022, p. 55)

The constant threat of violence posed by misogyny can be meaningfully articulated by building on Natasha Lennard’s identification of micro-fascism: “everyday fascisms—micro-fascisms with and by which we live” (Lennard, 2019, p. 15). Lennard demonstrates how this “fascist habit,” the fascist modes by which we live, complicates the dichotomy of fascist/anti-fascist, by highlighting as Deleuze and Guatarri have done “that it is too easy to be anti-fascist on the molar level and not even see the fascist inside of you” (pp. 14–15). The point Lennard (2019) makes is that claims to anti-fascism are always already mollified and to a certain extent counteracted because on some level fascism exists in all of us, “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (p. 15 citing Foucault). I argue here that micro-misogyny and misogynistic habits function in the same way such that we cannot be anti-misogyny. Living in a global state of misogyny, we are complicit in the logic, movement and ends of misogyny whether consciously or not. All bodies enact misogyny and misogyny shapes all actions and interactions. It is in everything we do. On this understanding, it is imperative to adopt a way of being driven by non-misogyny. It is from this position of non-misogyny that this paper speaks, while acknowledging that not all have the power to resist and subvert misogyny and act without impunity.

A Constitution of Hate

This constitution of hate makes women’s bodies precarious. As Butler (2016) explains, precarity, in its different permutations, cuts across identity categories and forms the starting-point for political alliances against a logic of protection and security for some at the cost of many others (pp. 32–33). These others are those whose lives are not grievable, not conceivable as lives through particular epistemological frames (Butler, 2006). The epistemological frame of colonial misogyny does not conceive the lives of women as lives and conceives them as lesser humans, making them precarious. The bodies of women threaten the white misogynistic norm of western states and for this are precarized (Lorey, 2015, pp. 36–37) through law and inequality as othering where they are made “abnormal, foreign or poor” (Mitropoulos, 2005, pp. 12–18).

How to show this constitution of hate? We must as Conaghan and Russell (2023) have urged “plumb[e]d the murky depths of misogynistic culture” (p. 2). Violence against women is in the foundational myths that we tell about our society. Indeed, feminist critique has taken the allegory of myth to its epistemological limit in examining how myth in relation to “law’s logos” has over the years enshrined, and relies upon for its coherence, what Russell terms “law’s original matricide” (Russell, 2017, p. 287). Russell refers to Irigaray’s identification in Greek mythology of Aeschylus Oresteia as the seminal patriarchal myth among a pattern of matricide in Greek mythology (Irigaray, 1991, pp. 37–38, in Russell, 2017, p. 285) Similarly, Russell highlights Drakopoulou’s identification of the story of Lucretia’s suicide and the founding of law and jurisdiction of the Roman Republic as revealing the necessity of excluding the female from politics (Drakopoulou, 2007, p. 33, cited in Russell, 2017, p. 286). These myths reveal a truth about law’s constitutional and administrative arm. The very constitution and process of law is gendered and racialized. The myth about process is that it is objective. The feminist truth that Russell’s (2017) analysis brings to light is that this feminine erasure takes place and is relied upon to “ensure and protect law’s systematicity and its unity” (p. 286). This necessary erasure was the reality of the Greek polis and Athenian democracy, which erased not only women, but also slaves and foreigners from citizenship and political participation. Greek democracy functioned on, and was only possible because of the economies of patriarchy, slavery, class, and xenophobia. These exclusions were incubated and passed on from the Greek model to the Roman Republic and the legal frames of the Institutes of Gaius and Justinian’s Digest. The re-emergence of Roman law during the Enlightenment period as a model for Europe translated the economy of exploitation of women, slaves, and foreigners from Greek and Roman societies as a blueprint for nation state building and empire in Europe.

Federici (2004) shows how the shift from a feudal economy to capitalism in Europe relied on the exploitation of women. The shift to private ownership of land was carried out through geographical colonization and slavery and through land privatization within Europe which started in the late 15th century simultaneous to and only enabled by colonial expansion; they are the same project. This “land expropriation” took different forms but was the removal of land against will usually through force at the sites of war and religion (Federici, 2004, p. 68). This had the effect of poverization (the process of embedding poverty), the immiseration of the working classes and a new patriarchal order: “patriarchy of the wage” (Federici, 2004, p. 98), whereby property gave men power over women in the upper classes and women’s exclusion from the wage was the site of power of men over women in the working classes. The devaluation of women’s labor and social status in Europe circulated in literature of the time. Women were considered the “savages of Europe,” subject to “witch hunts” for perceived sexual deviance, regarded as “legal imbeciles” and subject to legal “infantilization.” This was not only a legal disenfranchisement but spatial segregation; women were expelled from waged jobs and the streets and advised not to go out unaccompanied and not to meet with female friends: “gossips” (Federici, 2004, p. 100).

During a period of intense disagreement in Europe characterized by the Thirty Years War (1618–1638), Reformation and Counter Reformation a consensus emerged between Renaissance humanists, Protestant reformers, Counter reformation Catholics who all cooperated in the vilification of women (Federici, 2004, p. 101). Literature referred to women as the “scold” the “witch” the “whore” and new laws and torture controlled women’s behavior as a political project. In the age of emerging discourses of rights, women were muzzled like dogs and paraded in the streets as were slaves in the colonies, prostitutes were whipped, caged, subjected to fake drownings and capital punishment was established for women found to be guilty of adultery (Underdown, 1985). Seventeenth-century satire derided the possibility of women’s political agency or status as rights holder (Federici, 2004, p. 101). Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew is the explicit breaking down of a woman, Katerina, into submission through starvation and violence. This is part of a cultural psyche and the cultural matrix of misogyny that teaches humiliation and violence toward women are normal, or even a “comedy.” Juxtaposing Katerina to the ideal Bianca (from the Latin white or fair) also posits the ideal woman as white and compliant weaving a long history of women as white and compliant echoing through the years to the contemporary cultural power of white tears (Phipps, 2020) and the ideal white women victim.

When human rights instruments evolved in 17th-century Europe, “men’s voices were in the vanguard for political rights” (O’Hare, 1999, p. 366). As Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe De Gouges argued at the time, women were excluded from the terms of human rights. Indeed, De Gouges was sent to the guillotine for arguing that the so-called universal rights of the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and the Citizen applied equally between men and women (de Gouges, 2018 [1791]). As Federici (2004) observes, “always the price of resistance was extermination” (p. 102). Contemporary happenings echo this extermination, the murder of MP Jo Cox in the United Kingdom, the murder of feminist academic MJ Frug in the United States, the excessive number of death threats sent to women MPs, more to women of color, who dare to speak not only in public but on behalf of the public. At the time of writing the racism and misogyny of a U.K. Conservative Party donor has been exposed through comments on black woman MP Diane Abbott:

It’s like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and you’re just like. . . you just want to hate all black women because she’s there. And I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.

These abhorrent comments have been excused by those in power, with the current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak excusing the comments by leveraging his own brownness and stating that the party will not return a £10 million donation. These snapshots of colonial misogyny demonstrate the enduring and repetitive consistency of misogyny since the establishment of capitalist democratic states. Misogyny moves and adapts but the logic and the violence of misogyny, the way it locates in women’s bodies as what Lugones (2010) has referred to in the decolonial feminist context as the “fractured locus” (p. 747) of differentiation remains consistent. The at once inclusionary and exclusionary nature of rights for women has led Wendy Brown to suggest that it may be all we can do to “suffer rights as paradoxes” (Brown, 2000, p. 231); this may be the best we can hope for misogyny as hate crime.

The process of 19th-century nation state building in the metropole was only possible because of colonialism which used constitutional law as a method for instantiating power; law was and remains the justificatory language of settler colonialism. Rights were thus for those of the metropole, not of the colonies, and as such are implicated in racial exclusions and complex matrices where white women of the metropole, although exploited and vilified as the method of capitalist democracy, were given the role of policing brown and black women of the colonies and the racial hygiene of European nation states resulting in femonationalist discourses, which perpetuate today (Brayson, 2021a); black and brown women are “the women who clean the world” (Vergès, 2021, p. 2) whose ongoing exploitation is the legitimating economy of western societies and legal systems: these systems only work upon the exploitation of these women’s bodies, through labor exploitation and sexual exploitation (Brayson, 2024). The rebuilding of European nations post-WWII was achieved on the renewed subordination of women and women’s bodies (Kelly, 2004, pp. 106–109) as post-war capitalist acceleration doubled down on narratives of returning women to the home after a war push into the public sphere while men were away. Post-war national sexual purity was policed by men through examples such as les femmes tondues in France where women’s heads were shaved and they were paraded naked for perceived sexual dissidence and treachery during WWII (Brayson, 2021a). Women’s bodies are thus the site of colonialism and nation state building, racial purity, racial hygiene and cleansing, and national loyalty. A strict normative understanding of what it meant to be a woman in post-war Europe as keeper of morals but also sexually available, white, clean, of the home was circulated and endures in “gossip” magazines which ensured that women’s time was spent doing non-political activity: weight loss and slimming, fashion, hair, make-up such that women and their invisibilized labor became and remain an object among objects in the patriarchal home (Ross, 1996, p. 26); in this arrangement, white women were also charged with maintaining racial purity (Brayson, 2021a).

This cultural politics of governance (Cooper, 2019) was reinforced through legal constitutions and the human rights of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention on Human Rights, which do not confer a freestanding right to equality and instead focus on the political and civil rights of the public sphere which speak to and from the “institution of white men.” This constitution of human rights results in more than inequality on the basis of gender and race; it is a dehumanization, which does not recognize women’s, queer, and racialized bodies as human. An abundance of feminist literature has shown how human rights do not reflect the interests of women and how domestic violence and rape have been shoehorned into a human rights discourse. Sexual violence against women has always been a case of private criminal law and interpersonal violence precisely because women were not considered to be citizens of the state. However, post-violence criminal/legal/carceral interventions performatively demonstrate a commitment to eradicating sexual violence while allowing and enabling the constitution of hate toward women to perpetuate, unchallenged.

It may be uncommon today to hear of “witch hunts” as punishment for women’s sexual autonomy perceived as sexual deviance, but the everyday language of “slag” performs the similar function of labeling sexual deviance and “putting women back in their place.” The term slag emerged in the late 16th century; it is born of industrialization. It is the waste left over from smelting ore, or the waste left over from coal mining. In the 18th century as a discourse of ostensibly equal rights was taking hold the term became used to describe a woman who has casual sex with different people. The term emerges as foundational in a capitalist-colonial-patriarchal democratic complex to describe women who rebutted sexual norms and the dominium of men over women as “waste products” and sexually deviant. The culturally embedded slag is thus not only a part of “lad culture” but denotes a political constitution that sets the hierarchy of men as the proper person of politics, law, and everyday public life, over women as intruders or trespassers in public life, the waste products, and treats them as such. This linguistic epistemic violence of misogyny permeates in criminal law as it shapes responses to sexual violence. Conaghan and Russell (2023) have recently traced the use of sexual history evidence in the rape trial. Sexual history evidence enacts the discourse of “slag” and sexual deviance to mitigate sentencing for rape and punishes women’s desire as perceived sexual deviance through law.

Conclusion: Radical Futures

Misogyny interpellates women, queer, and racialized bodies as trespassers in a world that is always already misogynistic and white. The normative qualities of misogyny and whiteness shape public space and knowledge production in society and are embedded through law. The ownership of public space and law by the institution of white men produces ownership and entitlement over women’s bodies, the cost of which is a legitimized violence against women where women exist in an atmosphere of the constant threat of violence. I have conceptualized this as a constitution of hate in an attempt to capture the everywhere, everyhow, ubiquitous nature of misogyny. Hating women is not a pathology of society but rather it is the necessary existence condition of our legal-political constitution, clear to see yet hiding in plain sight.

Misogyny and racism permeate and glide between the lines of neutrally worded constitutional laws and legal constitutions and cling to bodies and spaces that are unable to shake them off. Bodies remember the physical and epistemological violence of misogyny which travels in legal constitutional frames to shape the past, present, and the future. This is the violence that lives in the bodies of both the wounded and the perpetrator; it is cyclical and echoes across time to embed a repetitive and shifting dynamic of violence, violence reduction, violence. Constitutional and administrative laws and procedures are accepted as part of the common sense of society, as objective and neutral. This acceptance of “neutral rules” obscures the reality that constitutional laws and procedures are deeply misogynistic and racialized. These laws are highly visible and often celebrated, but the colonial misogyny that these laws structure and enact and that travels within these laws is hidden in plain sight. This article has made the ubiquitous, cunning, and constitutive nature of misogyny visible by employing a decolonial feminist lens as plural and complex to offer original ways to understand and respond to the way that misogyny moves and imbues every aspect of society, framing interpersonal relations whereby subjective and structural misogyny are co-constitutive and legitimized through law. The unresolvable, inconsistent, and repetitive trouble of individualized misogyny and violence against women is the representational logic of patriarchal colonial capitalism. Disrupting the societal condition of misogyny requires thinking hate crime together with legal-political constitutional and cultural change. This cannot be done alone.

So how to disrupt this enduring legal-political constitution of misogyny that is neither hidden nor new? This is a call to think and act together to form coalitions between communities of scholars, activists, civil society and those with lived experience of the violence of misogyny to think constitutional law and criminal law together as a mode of legal reform to address not only subjective acts of violence but also the structural conditions that enable and justify misogynistic violence. This approach must push against law’s dominant logic of abstract objective knowledge to know that knowledge can be and always is generated through experience, through bodies who know and live violence everyday and everywhere. This is a call for embodied epistemologies, a more loving digestion of embodied knowledge produced through experience for transformation. Embodied epistemologies foreground the bodies experiencing violence to imagine, think and live-before-we-get-there better futures outside and beyond the current dominant mode of colonial misogyny as the method of capitalist democracy. In this way we can collectively take responsibility for law’s constitutional exploitation, to subvert it through a coalition of shared skills and experience. This political act of imagining non-violent, non-misogynistic worlds can be pursued through various and intersecting approaches developed by feminist scholars and activists. Davina Cooper’s evolution of the prefigurative—to act as if something already is—has been tested in The Future of Legal Gender project which proceeded on the basis that legal gender has been abolished. Elsewhere and in clear subversion of the Cartesian je pense donc je suis separation of reason and feeling, Cooper (2019) encourages us into Feeling Like a State, where one tactic of doing the state differently is through withdrawal. As such we could think of non-misogyny as withdrawal. This approach was recently enacted by Camden and Islington United Football Club in London who refused to play their opponents the Munter Hunters because of the clearly misogynistic framing of the club’s name and “horrific examples of misogyny” on the teams’ social media accounts (Wrack, 2024).

Away from the sharp separation of mind (male) and body (female), which relegates women as irrational, the solipsistic I think therefore I am is reframed as: I am because my body and my thought are embedded, indebted, and accountable. In this way we can take responsibility for misogyny in all its forms, legal and non-legal, by acknowledging the collective way in which micro-misogyny reproduces and as such requires a collective, micro, and non-binary response. Embodied epistemologies as collective knowledge through experience, a knowledge informed and generated by others, filtered through body and experience collapse the binary framing of mind (male) and body (female) to locate subjectivity and consciousness in the lived body, thereby jeopardizing dualistic metaphysics altogether. By locating the source of knowledge for how to live in society in every part of every body, embodied epistemologies subvert binary framings of reality, including the gender binary of male/female upon which misogyny relies for its power. This paper contributes to this coalition by exposing a political-legal constitution of hate. Law regulates all spheres of life. It is everywhere. Law is the legitimizing discourse of the state. Law is framed through a colonial misogyny, which means that it enacts this logic in everything that it does. Rethinking law for non-misogynistic futures requires exposing constitutional law’s misogyny in setting the scene for violence as part of a project for better, different futures. This includes making law with each other for more ethical and honest futures; making law with the trouble of misogyny, racism, and class; making different ways of living and knowing law and justice; and acknowledging law’s colonial misogynistic subjectivity to take responsibility for law’s violence as a route to epistemic justice, and more liveable lives.

The micro-misogyny outlined in this paper, the claim that misogyny is everywhere requires not just anti-misogyny but non-misogynistic thinking, and doing non-racist, non-transphobic thinking that must manifest in everything that we do in our public and private lives. This slow and committed thinking as action is a resistance to the immediacy of misogyny; it is a commitment to an inter-generational project, which will not be realized in our lifetimes and is not visible through REF impact or quantifiable through metrics or rewarded through grant funding in the ways that the neoliberal academy demands. Instead, this is a call for meaningful change through slow scholarship to change how we think about women, race, and society enacted through embodied epistemologies, which is not theory for the sake of theory but instead is grounded theory, thinking about and through experience to understand how to do society better outside of the lens and violence of misogyny. A starting place for this is micro-resistance to misogyny in everything we do, building experience as knowledge and knowledge as experience.

This is an ethic of non-misogyny that enacts radical solidarity across liberatory projects, what Davis and Barat (2016) have termed “movement intersectionality.” This ethic of non-misogyny is enacted with radical care (Segal, 2023) in a spirit of “relational solidarity” (Bohrer, 2019). Exhausting micro-misogyny must be met with micro-resistance in everything we do. This is a call to deliberately, actively, and consciously think and do differently. To imagine new forms of everyday justice. To think: how? To be wrong. To learn. To take breaks. And to do it together.