Feminist Accountability: Disrupting Violence and Transforming Power

by Ann Russo

Explores accountability as a framework for building movements to transform systemic oppression and violence

What does it take to build communities to stand up to injustice and create social change? How do we work together to transform, without reproducing, systems of violence and oppression?

In an age when feminism has become increasingly mainstream, noted feminist scholar and activist Ann Russo asks feminists to consider the ways that our own behavior might contribute to the interlocking systems of oppression that we aim to dismantle.

Feminist Accountability offers an intersectional analysis of three main areas of feminism in practice: anti-racist work, community accountability and transformative justice, and US-based work in and about violence in the global south. Russo explores accountability as a set of frameworks and practices for community- and movement-building against oppression and violence. Rather than evading the ways that we are implicated, complicit, or actively engaged in harm, Russo shows us how we might cultivate accountability so that we can contribute to the feminist work of transforming oppression and violence.

Among many others, Russo brings up the example of the most prominent and funded feminist and LGBT antiviolence organizations, which have become mainstream in social service, advocacy, and policy reform projects. This means they often approach violence through a social service and criminal legal lens that understands violence as an individual and interpersonal issue, rather than a social and political one. As a result, they ally with, rather than significantly challenge, the state institutions, policies, and systems that underlie and contribute to endemic violence.

Grounded in theories, analyses, and politics developed by feminists of color and transnational feminists of the global south, with her own thirty plus years of participation in community building, organizing, and activism, Russo provides insider expertise and critical reflection on leveraging frameworks of accountability to upend inequitable divides and the culture that supports them.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Activism, Politics, Race, Justice

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Ann Russo is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Director of the Women's Center at DePaul University. She is the author of Taking Back Our Lives: A Call to Action for the Feminist Movement and co-editor of Talking Back, Acting Out: Women Negotiating the Media Across Cultures.

Reviews

[Quin Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant, inspiring, timely, and urgently needed.

Russo theorizes a model of feminist accountability for solidarity and coalition across power relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, religion, and geopolitical location. She does this through three case studies that approach the issue in slightly different ways: anti-racist/anti-oppressive pedagogy; community accountability and transformative justice in the aftermath of violence; and transnational feminist anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist solidarity. The first two sections flow nicely into one another, while the third seems somewhat distant. Yet all are compelling, incisive, and helpful in thinking though the complex issues they address.

Of particular interest are the chapters on transformative justice and community accountability. Little academic writing has been published so far on these issues, and still less on what such processes for addressing (gender and sexual) violence outside of the criminal justice system actually look like in practice. Russo’s arguments are inspiring and hopeful, and they unite theory and practical experience to compelling effect.

Indeed, the clear imprint of Russo’s active and longterm activist engagement with the issues, communities, and practices about which she expertly writes is this text’s greatest strength. After having been burnt out from reading so much “feminist” scholarship that is so far aloof from actually efforts to change the world, I was relieved and inspired to finally find a clear example of a feminist who holds to together her activist and intellectual commitments with such skill.

This text is a must-read for all feminists, social justice activists, and especially those interested in the urgent issue of how to end gender-based violence without strengthening the racist and coercive prison-industrial complex.

[Emily Warfield · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had been looking forward to reading this for some time, eager to encounter new intersectional analysis of transformative justice. Page after page, chapter after chapter, I kept waiting, until I realized that, ultimately, there's not a single new insight in this book. I came in with so much good will and it was ground down ever-so-slowly until by the end I felt I had been tricked into reading. I don’t remember the last time I was this irritated by a book I actually mostly agreed with!

The only reason I can think of for this book’s existence is the imperative to 'publish or perish.' Russo is a professor, which is surprising because her writing is riddled with the kind of sins that professors will reprimand undergraduates for: quoting extensively from the same few sources without offering any original analysis, synthesis, or criticism, and using very many words to make the same few points again and again, as if trying to meet the minimum word count. It’s more of a slog to read than it has any right to be. For some reason— I guess because I did mostly agree with it— I kept waiting for it to get better. It didn’t.

What finally struck me was that this work on anti-racism by a white woman consists almost entirely of repackaged work by better-known and more accomplished Women of Color and that Russo could have invited their participation in an anthology but didn’t. Or, Russo could have written a survey text on transformative justice and transnational feminisms and kept her own viewpoint out of it. Instead, she collects a series of her own lackluster reflective essays that offer no real reflection on the same small handful of well-known writers and thinkers that most readers on the topic will already be familiar with: members of INCITE! and Generation Five, Beth Richie and Mariame Kaba, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, etc. The book digs up few lesser-known authors and adds nothing to their greatest insights, all while uncritically repeating the most troubling flaws of transformative justice. For example, Russo does not draw a distinction between violence and abuse— either in cause or response— but she draws a clear distinction between the potential reformability of private fascists like the average domestic abuser and the unquestionable disposability of public fascists like Milo Y.

What might have been Russo’s greatest contribution to the text, an application of TJ to transnational feminism, becomes a hollow repetition for white US feminists to ‘take accountability’— by which she merely means to ‘act in solidarity going forward’ rather than to ‘make reparations for past harms.’ The most interesting chapter ends up being the final one on Nicholas Kristof's "Half the Sky," if only because it's something no one has thought about in years (it was clearly sitting in a drawer since 2010)— and even that chapter is just a repackaging of work by Sherene Razack that fails to incorporate any other salient critiques of Kristof. In the West, his most consistent critics have been sex workers, but no sex workers are cited here, even as Russo makes repeated references to their criminalization and abuse. It’s an eerie repetition of the exact behavior of which she (rightly) accuses Kristof.

This might be the thing that got under my skin the most: how long it took me to pick up on the fact that Russo was purposefully avoiding ever saying ‘sex work.’ Sex workers have been leaders in creating and implementing alternative responses to violence worldwide, and so this cannot be an oversight. She does explain the work of Shira Hassan and YWEP— and seems to take away the wrong lesson from their terminology, which is not a claim that ‘sex work’ does not exist but that it does not apply to their particular experiences. In retrospect this inclusion of YWEP strikes me as a curious choice for someone who otherwise cites no work by ‘people impacted by the sex trades’ and makes no comment on Kristof’s use of ‘prostitute/d’. It’s as if acknowledging any wider spectrum of agency than underage youth trading sex for survival might be distasteful to her, sex worker contributions to her field be damned. When she quotes Emi Koyama, who is best known for their work as a sex worker and survivor advocate organizing for and with other people in the sex trades on these very topics, she neglects to mention anything about who they are or what they do! I finished the book still unclear about Russo’s sex work politics. Maybe she means well and is still learning, or maybe she’s just learned how to downplay her SWERFism.

The fact that I can’t tell Russo’s stance on sex work wouldn’t be as big a deal if this woman publishing about accountability and positionality and justice wasn’t also the Director of the Women’s Center at a university where students can be expelled for doing sex work. Is this bringing up some of my own trauma as a sex working women’s studies major at a Catholic university that I never received accountability for? Oohhhh baby you bet. And when I realized that, I wanted to throw the book in the recycling bin— but it was too late: I had just finished it.

When I consider what Russo might have contributed to a project like this, if she was so insistent on it, I wonder why she didn’t draw on her academic training and resources to examine the evidence for some of these understudied interventions. She shares a few of her attempts at using TJ in the classroom, but none of them involve an academic rigor, and most are underwhelming even as anecdotes. There’s almost nothing evidence-based here, little that’s empirical— it's all regurgitated theory. A lot of what’s here IS valuable, hence the stars I did give it, but none of that value comes from the author. Overall, a huge disappointment.

[thalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

What devotion to love. This is a politics of hope- That our alignments with one another, and the process of community building can build the non violent society we all deserve. This book is a must read for all people interested in transformative justice, community accountability, anti racist, anti imperialist, transnational feminism. I loved all the specific case studies Russo incorporates, and the celebration of the work and words of radical women of color throughout the text. Chapters 8 and 9 offer important insight into how we might challenge US imperialism through communal, feminist accountability.
Truly a political meditation on peace, love, and community.

[Victoria Law · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing. The first section is directed more towards white readers and, as a reader of color, I found my attention wandering as I read that part. But the second section, 70+ pages about community accountability and transformative justice, is eye-opening, informative and inspiring.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Profound ways to address violence, build community, and transform the way we respond to injustice. I aspire to be so full of love and accountability that I can locate myself and others in the structures/systems at play in order to address issues in such a way that everyone can heal and overcome.

[Ava K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredibly well written and will challenge you in all the ways you need to be challenged.

[Dan Parker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I marked Feminist Accountability down to two stars because sometimes a book with a completely inoffensive and basically correct perspective just isn’t worth the time. This book reads like a “greatest hits” of mid-2010s intersectional feminist rhetorical patterns, tied to a commitment to anti-carceral forms of community accountability, without the depth of analytical insight or originality in more foundational works. The language of “interlocking forms of oppression” and “centering/decentering whiteness,” and “locating how we are implicated” start to feel like jargony bromides when efforts to concretize these concepts fall flat. The book also is mostly aimed at a white radical-curious audience as a curative to a simplistic white liberal feminism, a fine goal but boring for those steeped in these kinds of arguments for years.

Russo’s book is particularly disappointing given some of the important problems it seems positioned to address. Russo opens her introduction noting that radical organizations too often reproduce the very structures of violence they are committed to disrupting. Addressing the way oppressive systems come to live and work through our subjective responses to the world and sabotage our conscious efforts to build new, just relations is a great concern of mine. But the book focuses more on the obvious failures of institutionalized forms of social service and advocacy that individualize sexual and other types of violence, rather than provide more practical analysis of or ways to address violence that can be reproduced within the left’s own organizations. Russo’s call for a greater awareness of our interconnectedness between one another and implicated locations within systems of domination is a sound starting place, but these abstractions fail to take flight under Russo’s pen.

The first section of the book “Accountability as Intersectional Praxis” uses prior theorists to draw a loose definition of accountability as “making visible” the relationships between different forms of oppression and how naturalized responses to violence produce further violence. Accountability, here, becomes a consciousness-raising process that then leads to “taking responsibility” for violence. I find this framework produces something of a tautology since Russo fails to identify in clearer terms what to do after excavating the anatomy of social structure, fails to tell us what taking responsibility actually looks like. The rest of this section concerns ways whiteness gets in the way of crucial solidarity in feminist spaces. Russo discusses questions concerning speech, listening, and silence, arguing against white academic feminist assumptions of expertise and authority as displays of epistemological mastery that can undermine the interventions of women of color. She discusses ways that the pedagogical force of whiteness teaches people to repress or deny feelings of compassion, of indignation against injustice and to obscure how white people themselves are corralled by the demands of white relational propriety. Though these arguments may orient white readers to think of their connections to the broader social systems, a politics of deferral (to “those most affected”) has been compellingly critiqued by Olufemi Taiwo in his book Eilte Capture.

The strongest part of the book is the middle section, “Community Accountability and Transformative Justice,” which provides a taste of practical case studies related to accountability processes in Russo’s experiences in activist spaces and the classroom. The problem is that the examples she provides are usually much too thin to answer questions about the difficulty of developing and navigating processes of accountability that are totally alien to our instincts to punitive forms of justice. She does, however, powerfully dispel the paternalistic and top-down forms of state punishment that mold complex subjects into simple “victims” and “perpetrators” through her vision of the power of communal storytelling. Her most impactful case study tells the story of Take Back the Night at Russo’s university, where speak-out sessions that encouraged women to bear their trauma to large silent audiences felt depressing, atomizing the individual experiences of survivors. Russo and her colleague transformed the events into small circles of support that facilitated communal and interactive engagements between participants and their stories of violence, creating a much more supportive experience geared toward creating relationships. The book would have been stronger if she cut her first and third sections and expanded this one, allowing her to develop more complicated definitions of “community accountability” and the distinctions between restorative and transformative justice.

Russo’s final section concerns constructing a transnational feminism divested of imperialist logics that use the oppression of women in the global south to demonize “other” cultures to bolster projects of neocolonial economic and cultural control. These chapters take down the U.S. response to women’s struggles in Afghanistan as a pretext for war and occupation and a famous liberal book called Half the Sky, that reduces women’s in the global south to the misogyny of men in their cultures rather than the conditions of poverty and violence produced by the demands of global capitalism. These are fine essays but feel like they belong in another volume, supported by most robust theoretical and historical analysis.

The problem with Feminist Accountability is not its core argument or its political commitment. It’s that the book is simply unremarkable–that a reader can be better engaged and challenged with similar, more developed insights and more memorable writing elsewhere.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an amazing and ground-breaking read - very little has been written about transformative justice and community accountability. Russo writes from years of experience doing this work in the community and at her university, providing invaluable examples and lived experiences to support her theorizing about conflict, harm, and restorative/transformative approaches.

[LeeRay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific discussion, though I wish there were more concrete examples in chapters 8 and 9 for concrete action. Taught this in a grad course, but it would be an excellent text for an upper level undergraduate course.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was life-changing for me!!!! I recommend it to all of my friends. I learned so much from reading this book!!

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent analysis of all forms of violence along with discussion of practical solutions. Frames the issue as accountability. Makes connections among women and violence all over the world.

[Noah Chartier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Russo's framework of Feminist Accountability is incredibly useful for conceptualizing how show up and she makes it very understandable by consistently showing it in praxis

[Naomi Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

I soaked up this book slowly and know that I will be returning to it time and time again.

[Vileana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not bad for a book on my same research topic.