For most American audiences, the female fighter exists in a land far, far away. To consider female militancy in this country, in our movements, requires a reckoning: the need to see police brutality against Black women as state violence, checkpoints in school cafeterias as militarization, and the death rates from domestic and mass violence as mimicking the figures of a war zone. Each of these realities disrupts self-satisfied notions of America, and all are hinged on the positioning of women denied political power and forbidden violence. In response to an essay I co-authored—a piece highlighting the politics of women who kill their abusers—an editor critiqued the argument as "deeply problematic," claiming it created a "homology between women who take up political violence, such as the Kurdish women of the Peshmerga (PKK), and women who use criminal violence." The real root of his concern, however, is the idea that civilized nations were mentioned alongside the behavior of women in darker nations—"it erases a vital distinction between armed struggle where the state has lost the legitimacy of its monopoly on the use of force, and a vigilante-style revenge attack in a rule-of-law democratic society." In his imagined America, an indiscriminate law will protect women from violence.
