Ardath Whynacht advocates insurgent love & indicts the carceral system that colonialism built

Ardath Whynacht is an activist and writer who works for and with survivors of state and family violence. She’s also a professor of sociology at Mount Allison University and the author of a new book called Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/insurgent-love). The radical, utopian and absolutely necessary prospect of abolition is on people’s minds. As Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth Richie argue in the new book Abolition. Feminism. Now: It would be “Inconceivable to many even ten years ago, [that] jail closure, the elimination of money bond, clemency, and ‘compassionate release’ [would be] debated in mainstream media outlets such as the Washington Post and lauded in progressive public policy forums as examples of necessary change.” But that is what is happening -– a deep quaking of the conceptual foundation upon which our carceral, punishing society has been built. And yet still, at the centre of that tremor in the social fabric is a concern over safety: how do we do the difficult work of imagining a means of keeping especially the very vulnerable in society safe, rather than using the prison and police to ossify the roots of violence? Insurgent Love is an important political statement on the meaning of this broad global shift toward adopting an abolitionist framework, and so much of the book’s critical power comes from thinking in both practical and radical ways about what abolition could mean locally. There’s no question, she says, that it is “tough” to be an “abolitionist scholar on domestic violence research in Canada.” There is not much of an “appetite,” as she puts it, “for… non-carceral” solutions. But an abolitionist answer might be the only one, despite the fact that it is a hard argument to make in a country that still, like so many others, actively “worships” and “reifies” the police and the military as the indispensable sources of our safety. Ardath makes clear that the reason we need abolition feminism now is that the level of analysis Black and Indigenous feminisms can offer right now, and the “level of prediction,” too, as she puts it, means that we don’t need to be condemned to the reactionary politics of punishment. As white settler academics, we talk about what it means to be a “permanent students” of these forms of feminist thought that radically reject the system that was constructed to directly benefit us, and how to do this without passively accepting the underacknowledged and unearned “rewards for being an opportunist.” We can move in a totally different direction if we can begin to conceptualize meaningful multiethnic, multiracial solidarity that builds that different world out of a respect and reinforcement of difference: different cosmologies, different conceptions of justice, of resistance. And if we accept that we need to divorce ourselves from a carceral system that dehumanizes people and perpetuates violence. Davis and the other co-authors of Abolition. Feminism. Now. suggest that one of the things we might need, in this context, are “movement spaces for people to learn, to be wrong and unlearn, and to be accountable and change.” This idea of “reclaiming accountability” from an unaccountable regime of state violence and punishment might be the central tenet of abolition feminism. It’s a challenging idea that I’m still wrestling with, and will be for a very long time. It’s the challenge that I think we should all be confronting, and Insurgent Love gives us a vital engagement with it, in all of its messy, historically rooted reality.