The Perils and Privileges of Vulnerability: intersectionality, relationality, and the injustices of the US prison nation

The social injustices associated with mass incarceration and the carceral state

have found ample critical theoretical and activist expression in recent years. Fur-

ther, many critics have sought to expose the depths of these injustices through

intersectional analysis inclusive of race, gender, and socio-economic class and

other dimensions of social identity and position (Crenshaw 2012; Richie 2012; Du-

razo, Bierria and Kim 2011-2012). My aim is to bring the concept of vulnerability

to bear on these analyses. Vulnerability is a crucial concept given its normative

salience: it points us to wrongs done but also to the basis for justice. Any ade-

quate consideration of vulnerability, however, demands attentiveness to how

complex social identities and positions mediate experiences of vulnerability.1 If

we are concerned with the way state power produces and exacerbates harmful

vulnerability in institutions such as prisons, jails, detention centers, courtrooms,

and public spaces under police surveillance, then we must reckon with how the

workings of the carceral state presumes (and produces) discrete identities. An in-

tersectional framework allows both this consideration and an analysis of how the

subject positions marked out by such institutions reinforce inequality and gener-

ate precarity. Yet, vulnerability makes possible an analysis in excess of identity

categories: an experience of vulnerability cannot be reduced to a location in a

grid of intersecting identity categories. To be located in a disadvantaged social

position is perhaps a necessary but insufficient condition for unjust exacerbation

of one's vulnerability; put otherwise, one's social position is never insurance that

one's life and living conditions will or will not be rendered precarious. In this way,

vulnerability extends beyond intersectionality, suggesting an experience rather

than a social position. The two concepts overlap fruitfully but are not cotermi-

nous.2

The aim of this essay is to assess the extent to which the concept of vulner-

ability may be of use in understanding and responding to the injustices of the

carceral state and prison society. Given this aim and the range of vulnerabilities

at issue, I adopt a broad understanding of mass incarceration as referring “not

only to the criminal justice system but also to the larger web of laws, rules, poli-

cies, and customs that control those labeled criminals both in and out of prison[,]”

effectively creating an underclass (Alexander 2012, 13). Beth Richie’s term “pri-

son nation” captures even better the wide scope of such techniques of social con-

trol, which include punitive responses to “norm violations,” “institutional regula-

tions designed to intimidate people without power into conforming with dominant

cultural expectations,” culturally imperialist legislation, and conservative “ideologi-

cal schemes” that pathological those who do not adhere to them (2012, 3). As

scholars like Richie and Jonathan Simon emphasize, the ethos of a prison nation is

developed by inciting fear, identifying scapegoats, and “reclassify[ing] people as

enemies of a stable society (such as prisoners, activists, hip-hop artists)” (Richie

2012, 3; cf. Simon 2007b). Thus, as I explicate, the material and discursive tech-

niques that constitute a prison nation and its most dominant practice, mass incar-

ceration, presuppose a certain image of vulnerability, namely one that can be mo-

bilized in the service of inciting fear.3

In the first two sections, I explore how vulnerability is both a privilege and a

peril. It is deployed politically in highly variable ways by being ascribed unevenly

to people who are situated differently in light of their race, gender, sexuality, and

other socially salient identity determinants, alternately imperiling or privileging

them. Central to this inequitable distribution of vulnerability is the sense that it is

a quasi-natural state, which thus functions to privilege some and the denial of

which can imperil others. This view of vulnerability depends upon a dualist frame-

work that opposes vulnerability and invulnerability as mutually incompatible, and

involves an idealized image of the “vulnerable victim.” This particular image of

vulnerability makes possible the politics of fear that Richie and Simon have sub-

stantively linked to the conservative, violent mechanisms of a prison nation. Thus,

broadening how we understand vulnerability is necessary for a variety of reasons:

to undercut the dualist vulnerability/invulnerability dichotomy that mobilizes fear

and prevents recognition of the very real vulnerabilities of those classified as per-

petrators or otherwise deemed suspect and villainized, and to recognize how vul-

nerability can be the basis for transformation. Therefore, in brief conclusion, I

suggest that activists’ work seeking racial justice in response to the dynamics of

the prison nation can be interpreted as involving strategic assertions and perfor-

mances of vulnerability. If the common, retributive justification and model for

criminal justice entrenches dichotomous thinking, activists pursuing racial justice

jettison such simplistic, dualist frameworks. In these contexts, vulnerability can-

not be reduced to the mere susceptibility to harm that can justify defensive ac-

tion. It means far more than that, coming closer to what Stacy Alaimo calls “insur-

gent vulnerability” (2009).

I. Vulnerability as privilege and peril

Many philosophical conceptions and invocations of vulnerability have focused on

how vulnerability amounts to harm and violation. Often, feminist perspectives on

vulnerability center on women’s vulnerability and how it may be exploited, some-

times mapping vulnerability onto binary gender in a way that reinforces the sexist

thinking they aim to contest and endorses the state sanctioned violence of incar-

ceration in the name of justice for women. What the term vulnerability names –

for instance, whether it denotes a condition of heightened susceptibility to harm

or rather refers to a pervasive, unavoidable ontological condition – has also been

subject to debate (Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds 2014). In my and others’ view

vulnerability refers to both (Scully 2014; Gilson 2014). A more inclusive definition

holds that vulnerability is a fundamental, shared condition of openness to being

affected and affecting, which manifests in diverse ways; it is a condition of poten-

tial that can be analyzed only in terms of the specific ways it is manifest; and it is

ambivalent insofar vulnerability means being open to being affected in both posi-

tive and negative ways, and ambiguous insofar as sometimes experiences of vul-

nerability involve the intertwining of the positive and negative (Gilson 2014). Vul-

nerability is an intersubjective condition, both corporeal and social in ways that

are fundamentally interconnected. In light of recognition of the complexity of vul-

nerability, more critical recent accounts seek to understand the complex differen-

tial allocation of vulnerability, for instance, the way vulnerability itself is distrib-

uted unevenly because of legacies of oppression, past and present policy choices,

and the obdurancy of institutional structures to change, among other things (e.g.,

Butler 2009).4

On these accounts, the starting point for analysis is recognition that vulner-

ability is politically mediated: it is politically framed and differentially distributed.

There are at least two interconnected dimensions to the political mediation of vul-

nerability. First, it is produced and exacerbated through social, political, and eco-

nomic conditions and policies: e.g., unavoidable, “inherent vulnerability” to hunger

is exacerbated by corrupt governments, agricultural policy, trade embargos,

and/or the rising price of oil (Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds 2014, 7).5 Second, vul-

nerability is perceived in and attributed to different persons and groups of per-

sons in widely varying ways, which affects how they experience their vulnerability

since lack of recognition of a form of vulnerability makes it more likely to precipi-

tate harm. The vulnerabilities of some are recognized and subject to response

while the vulnerabilities of others are exploited. Overall, the idea that vulnerabil-

ity is politically mediated, “framed” as Judith Butler puts it, refers to the way the

interpretive lenses through which vulnerability is perceived and understood in-

volve implicit, uninterrogated normative schemas, typically ones that judge the

value of different kinds of lives (2009, 3-4).

The category of vulnerability is often applied to those deemed victims, an-

other politically mediated category (Simon 2007b). Underlying this usual applica-

tion of vulnerability is a dualist understanding that fragments it: given a victim/

perpetrator dichotomy, only victims can be vulnerable. This dichotomy renders

unintelligible the vulnerabilities of those labeled perpetrators, stereotyped as po-

tential perpetrators or as otherwise marginal, pathological, and expendable. Vul-

nerability is, for the most part, deemed incompatible with criminality and, thus,

the vulnerability of prisoners in particular is disregarded. Accordingly, the harms

done through practices like solitary confinement and the general brutality of

prison life are not recognized as the exploitation of vulnerability that they are or

the exploitation of their vulnerability is perceived as warranted. In this way, domi-

nant social norms condition who is recognizable as vulnerable and as a victim,

and whose vulnerabilities are obscured, disregarded, or sanctioned. In particular,

patriarchal, heteronormative and homophobic, racist/white supremacist, and capi-

talist norms generate a social understanding of “ideal” or “true” vulnerability and

victimhood as comprised of purity, weakness, innocence, propriety, etc. (Lamb

1999; Phillips 2000), which is generally premised on femaleness, gender-conform-

ity, whiteness, and upper-middle class status as well as a dualist framework for

understanding vulnerability, violence, and justice. Accordingly, conventional attri-

butions of vulnerability will distribute the privilege and peril associated with it in

line with the status quo.6

Thus, it is necessary to analyze how exactly the use of the concept of vul-

nerability distributes privilege and peril in relation to dominant social values. How

vulnerability can imperil is clear in the sense that it can be a precondition for

harm. How vulnerability privileges only makes sense given the relational or recip-

rocal attribution of vulnerability. In systems of oppression, the structures and sys-

tems of meaning that privilege some often simultaneously disempower and disad-

vantage others. In this sense, vulnerability is relationally defined.7 It is not the

case that in recognizing the vulnerabilities of some, the vulnerabilities of others

must necessarily be disregarded. Rather, my argument is that given a certain un-

derstanding of vulnerability and social identities, attributing vulnerability to some

entails barring recognition of others’ vulnerability and securing the continued priv-

ilege of some requires making others vulnerable.8 The political deployment of vul-

nerability to the advantage of some often requires disadvantaging and imperiling

of others. For instance, the vulnerability of suburban, white homeowners is readily

publicly intelligible and is constituted in necessary relation to stereotyped images

of urban, nonwhite criminals (Simon 2007b, 76; 2007a, 497). As a consequence,

people of color are subjected to biopolitical control that renders them more vul-

nerable to harm (e.g., via racialized police surveillance and detention) but pur-

portedly secures the safety of the ‘public.’ Thus, the status of some as vulnerable,

potential victims is relational because it depends on how they are defined in rela-

tion to those who are labeled or perceived as perpetrators. Accordingly, we can

understand the more complex ways attribution and nonattribution of vulnerability

imperils only when we take stock of how it privileges others at the same time.

II. Privilege

The sense of privilege I utilize is that developed in critical race theory to theorize

whiteness. As initially formulated by Peggy McIntosh, the concept of privilege is

defined as an unearned advantage that is systematically conferred on members

of dominant groups. Such “unearned advantages” include the entitlement to basic

respect and courtesy in daily life “that none of us should have to earn[,]” and

“conferred dominance,” the unjust power to ignore, exclude, and silence those

who are not part of the dominant racial group (1989, 8-9). The former constitutes

an advantage or privilege because one is free from the negative effects that oth-

ers experience and benefits from their disadvantage. Thus, privilege is often ex-

perienced simply as the absence of impediments that others face. Accordingly, as

Alison Bailey concludes, “one of the functions of privilege is to structure the world

so that mechanisms of privilege are invisible – in the sense that they are unexam-

ined – to those who benefit from them” (1998, 112). Further, because it is sys-

temic, dominant group privilege has a “wild card” quality that makes it effective in

a wide array of situations (1998, 114). Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological approach

to whiteness expands this point, exploring how whiteness as a bodily habit of en-

gagement invisibly structures spaces and institutions: “Spaces are orientated

‘around’ whiteness, insofar as whiteness is not seen. … The effect of this ‘around

whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white

bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this

space” (2007, 157).

In light of this definition, how does the attribution of or claim to vulnerability

function as a form of privilege? How does it both create benefit and amount to the

absence of hindrances in a way that is widely transferrable yet unrecognizable/in-

visible? Those for whom vulnerability can become a privilege are those whose

vulnerability is publicly legible and credible; they appear publicly as normative

subjects. Their gender, race, sexuality, and other socially relevant identity deter-

minants conduce to their being recognized as vulnerable when they make a claim

to be so and when the claim is made in relation to another who is recognized as a

threat or danger. Accordingly, we can identify three main ways in which privilege

accrues around vulnerability: 1) having public space to speak and be heard about

one’s vulnerability, 2) having one’s claims about one’s vulnerability be taken up,

perceived as credible, and generally find them translated into responsive action,

and 3) there existing a publicly accepted de facto justification for a wide range of

action to protect oneself and mitigate one’s vulnerability. The first two count as

unearned advantages to which all should be entitled. The third is a manifestation

of conferred dominance that highlights the wild card quality of privilege, which is

reflected clearly in justifications of police violence. All reflect the ways institu-

tions, such as media, and spaces are oriented around privileged subjectivities.

Having a general sense of the privileges pertaining to vulnerability, we can turn

now to the specific types of peril or harm done via nonrecognition or misrecogni-

tion of vulnerability.

III. Peril

How does the phenomenon of mass incarceration, as part of the “prison industrial

complex” (Davis 2003, 16) and within the broader context of a prison nation, dis-

tribute vulnerability as a peril? Most directly, first, the carceral state and mass in-

carceration in particular create myriad harmful forms of vulnerability. Second, the

stereotypes, stigmas, and ideological framing inherent in a prison nation preclude

recognition of these forms of vulnerability as vulnerabilities that warrant ethical

response, thus compounding harm. Third, the vulnerabilities may be recognized

as such – as ways of being open to harm – but their connection to others’ actions

and fundamental vulnerability is disregarded; that is, the fundamental and shared

quality of vulnerability as that which binds us to one another is not apprehended,

but a limited perception of vulnerability as an opportunity for exploitation, domi-

nation, and the maintenance of one’s own privilege is. These three types of per-

ilous vulnerability overlap and mutually reinforce one another: the stigma associ-

ated with identities cannot be separated from the specific, direct harms done by

mass incarceration, and the ideological framing makes possible disregard for and

exploitation of vulnerability.

The rich literature on the carceral state, the prison nation, and mass incar-

ceration amply demonstrates the many ways that mass incarceration causes

harm, so here I simply summarize the various types of harmful vulnerability gen-

erated by a prison nation. Most evident is the physical, bodily vulnerability from

the sanctioned exposure to force via both heightened police surveillance and cor-

rectional control within and outside of prison walls. Corporeal vulnerability is ac-

companied by political, economic, social, and legal forms of vulnerability: e.g.,

isolation from ‘normal’ society, the second-class status of felon disenfranchise-

ment, the debt burden associated with arrest and/or conviction (Harris, Evans,

and Beckett 2010), the reduction of prospects for securing employment and hous-

ing, and thus the overall encumbrance of life prospects (see Alexander 2012,

Davis 2003, Guenther 2013, Western 2007). These harms of mass incarceration

exacerbate racial and socio-economic inequality, contributing to poverty, and to

political inequality, a reduction of “the extent of American citizenship” (Western

2007, 530). These forms of vulnerability are compounded by the psychological

and emotional vulnerability of having one’s life rendered precarious, one’s every-

day existence utterly controlled, and/or continuously and arbitrarily monitored.

Such experiences amount to a devaluation of one’s life and a pervasive loss of a

sense of autonomy. As young men dealing with stop-and-frisk in New York City

note, there is little way to avoid confrontation with police: if they walk away when

a police car approaches they are deemed suspicious for attempting to leave but if

they stand still on the sidewalk they are deemed suspicious for loitering. Avoiding

such situations is almost entirely outside of their control. The vulnerability of lack-

ing control over one’s own body, activities, and fate and having another’s will im-

posed upon one is far more acute for those who are incarcerated. This kind of pre-

carity is that of the absence of the most basic sense of security in one’s everyday

life; such is the psychic side of corporeal vulnerability.

These vulnerabilities are compounded by their differential distribution along

lines of race and class in particular, and the inability to contest the racialization of

the logic of carcerality within the terms of the law (Murakawa and Beckett 2010).

Michelle Alexander’s definition of mass incarceration makes this intensification of

vulnerability evident: it is a “system of control [that] permanently locks a huge

percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society

and economy … [insofar as it creates] a lower caste of individuals who are perma-

nently barred by law and custom from mainstream society” (2012, 13). On the

whole, mass incarceration’s effect is to marginalize by incarcerating, by stigmatiz-

ing, and by isolating those bearing the stigma of having someone close to them in

prison (Alexander 2012, 161-169; Crenshaw 2012, 1443). Because it creates the

harmful vulnerabilities summarized above it reinforces the racialized stereotypes,

stigmas, and ideological framing that have operated to justify implicitly the puni-

tive techniques of the prison nation.

The inability to perceive and tendency to misrecognize the aforementioned

conditions and experiences as vulnerabilities is, in many instances, due to stereo-

types about complex social identities, and such complex social identities are con-

stituted as marginalized ones in virtue of persistence denials of vulnerability.

Most simply, for instance, racist and gendered stereotypes in the US so closely

link Black masculinity with criminality that Katheryn Russell-Brown coined the

term “criminalblackman” to identify the phenomenon (1998, 3). In the dominant

cultural imaginary, criminals are perceived solely as those who do harm and thus

are imagined to be invulnerable rather than vulnerable. Thus, the vulnerability of

Black men is underestimated and under-perceived. Furthermore, given the asso-

ciation between criminality and masculinity, female criminality is pathologized as

abnormal (Davis 2003, 66); women who are labeled perpetrators, targeted for

surveillance, or otherwise tied to crime are seen as violating normative feminin-

ity. Yet, because the social identities at stake are complex, the lens of race or

class or gender alone is not sufficient to analyze the dynamics of marginalization

at work.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw points out, both analyses focused on race and gen-

der-responsive interventions in criminal justice elide the experiences of women of

color (2012, 1423-1424; cf. Rodríguez 2001 and Bumiller 2008). An intersectional

analysis both brings the experiences of women of color to the fore and can reveal

the conditions that make possible this kind of regime of social control: that is, ne-

oliberal ideologies that privatize social responsibility (2012, 1424).9 Such an ac-

count provides a deeper understanding of the processes through which nonrecog-

nition of vulnerabilities develops and persists. The aforementioned vulnerabilities

of those whose complex social identities marginalize them in relation to currently

dominant norms for vulnerability (e.g., purity, weakness, innocence, propriety,

which are linked to gender-conformity, femaleness, whiteness, and upper-middle

class status) are rendered unintelligible. Such marginalization happens in a vari-

ety of ways: one is regarded as a danger rather than as susceptible; one’s suscep-

tibility to harm is construed as product of one’s own choices and so one is per-

ceived as blameworthy rather than worthy of protection; one is socially marginal-

ized to such an extent that little to no knowledge of one’s vulnerabilities is had by

the dominant culture; features of one’s identity are perceived as objectionable by

the dominant culture and thus one is perceived as morally inferior and not worthy

of protection. The consequence is the same: one’s vulnerability is not perceived

as warranting ethical response (e.g., protection and aid) and is more likely to be

exploited. Thus, one’s vulnerability imperils.

The practices of the US prison nation therefore create disavowed forms of

vulnerability that imperil while simultaneously affording others privilege. In other

words, these practices sustain the stereotypical “hermeneutic impact” of

marginalized complex social identities (Dotson and Gilbert 2014, 876). Processes

that work to perpetuate the marginalization of some perpetuate the dominance of

others. If privilege includes 1) having public space to speak and be heard about

one’s vulnerability, 2) having one’s claims about one’s vulnerability be taken up,

perceived as credible, and generally finding them translated into responsive ac-

tion, and 3) having a wide range of action to protect oneself and mitigate one’s

vulnerability publicly accepted as justified, then vulnerability can imperil simply

by not having such space, credibility, and justification for one’s claims and ac-

tions. Further, though, perilous vulnerability is created when some are regarded

as the cause of other’s vulnerability and thus deemed an invulnerable potential or

actual threat.

Beth Richie’s analysis of the experiences of the New Jersey 4, four young

Black lesbian women who were incarcerated for protecting themselves from sex-

ual harassment in Greenwich Village in 2006, illustrates this point. Even in the ab-

sence of physical evidence tying any one of the NJ4 to the weapon that injured

their attacker, all of the four women who were tried were given prison sentences;

three other women accepted plea deals. The man who harassed, stalked, and

eventually assaulted them was not tried nor were the two men who intervened to

assist them, getting involved in the physical altercation. They were tried for gang-

related assault and during the trial were characterized in sensationalized fashion

as part of a “lesbian wolfpack” and a “gang of angry lesbians.” Terrain Dandridge’s

sentence was overturned after appeal, Vernice Brown and Renata Hill spent two

years in prison, and Patreese Johnson has only recently been released after her

eleven year sentence was eventually reduced to eight years (2012, 13; cf. The

News 2007 and Meronek 2013). As Richie concludes, “a dangerous schism is cre-

ated between ‘deserving victims’ (whose experience is easily understood by main-

stream society) and the women whose experience is turned against them. Such

women are blamed, stigmatized or, worse, criminalized because of their abuse”

(2012, 24). These young women from New Jersey were clearly not the “tourists”

that the judge in the case, Edward J. McLaughlin, asserted that the city ought to

protect from violence; their vulnerability did not register but rather became the

condition for their pathologization and criminalization. The women find no space

in which to speak about their experiences. They do not even encounter in-

credulity about their account because it was preempted by a stigmatizing narra-

tive spun by prosecutors and the press; they are subject to both “hypervisibility

and substantive erasure” (Crenshaw 2012, 1463). In Dotson and Gilbert’s terms,

they are disempowered and find themselves within failed “webs of reciprocity” in

virtue of both being “villainized” and having their needs (i.e., their sexuality) vil-

lainized; in particular, they are villainized because their very existence is “a per-

ceived compromise to real or imagined moral codes” (2014, 878). They are imag-

ined as threat, danger, and so as invulnerable. Thus, their villainization is consti-

tutive of the third kind of privilege: they are denied the preemptive justification

for protective action by being denied status as vulnerable, but in virtue of their

being labeled dangerous this privilege is afforded others (“deserving victims” and

their protectors who do not violate “real or imagined moral codes”). Correspond-

ing, an exercise of the third type of privilege is made possible by the moralizing

framing involved in villainization. There may be recognition of vulnerability of

those who are villainized and stigmatized, and even recognition of how one’s de-

fensive actions (i.e., incarcerating them) opens them to harm, but this action is

justified by the preexistent moral condemnation of villainization: one should de-

fend oneself and one’s community even if it makes others vulnerable because

they deserve it and one does not.

Thus, as Crenshaw contends, “systems work in tandem to create and justify

conditions that render women vulnerable and subsequently punish them for their

vulnerability” (1447). These systems are both institutions such as the prison sys-

tem and the systems of social significance that operate in and through those

within institutional structures. Stereotypical, stigmatizing “controlling images” dis-

tort perception, precluding recognition of vulnerabilities as such (Collins 2000).

Because the privileges and perils distributed through the rubric of vulnerability

are relationally defined, by casting some as invulnerable, as de facto perpetrators

in virtue of their social identities, others are afforded the privilege of recognizable

vulnerability and thus justified defensive action, of which the policing and incar-

ceration of others is a leading example. This kind of unthinking repetition of “con-

trolling images” does more than prevent recognition of vulnerability; it also sus-

tains normative ideologies that privilege those with dominant social identities. In

particular, as McIntosh suggests, white ignorance about the experiences of those

with marginalized social identities sustains the myth of meritocracy (and thus

their own privilege). The neoliberal ideology that Crenshaw identifies as underly-

ing biopolitical surveillance and social control requires belief in norms of meritoc-

racy, personal responsibility, self-control, and individual choice (cf. Giroux 2008,

Goldberg 2009, Roberts and Mahtani 2010, Wacquant 2010, Winant 1997). Such

norms are integral to both the retention of privilege, since one can believe one is

a ‘good’ subject insofar as one embodies these values, and the rationalization of

the prison nation effected by privatizing responsibility. Framing the causes of

mass incarceration as familial, communal, and simply a matter of being ‘at risk’ is

a “subtle erasure of the structural and institutional dimensions of social justice

politics[,]” and involves assuming that “the structural dimensions of social life in

which they and everyone else in their communities are situated are themselves

relatively uncontroversial and transparent” (Crenshaw 2012, 1466). By stereotyp-

ing, pathologizing, and villainizing people of color, those who are positioned to

benefit from rhetoric concerning personal responsibility and merit, and policies in-

stantiated on its basis, retain privilege. They can continue to ignore the many

ways that “this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it;

many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own” and many

doors close for many others through no vice of their own (McIntosh 1989, 6). They

can continue to believe themselves to be good, successful people and, most im-

portantly, can do so precisely because others are pathologized, penalized, pre-

emptively judged, and incarcerated.

IV. Vulnerability beyond privilege and peril

If vulnerability is a concept through which privilege and peril are attributed in rad-

ically disparate ways, fostering continued injustice, then could it possibly be a

concept that also advances social justice? I suggested at the outset that how vul-

nerability is conceived is central to its differential and inequitable attribution. A

dualist understanding of vulnerability opposes vulnerability to invulnerability,

imagines vulnerability only as susceptibility to harm, and thus constructs an im-

age of vulnerability that aligns with norms for culturally approved victims. This

kind of oppositional, dualist understanding makes possible the problem of rela-

tional definition analyzed above. The problem of how vulnerability is conceptual-

ized is not merely theoretical; it manifests in myriad ways in practice and enables

rationalizations for these unjust practices. For instance, the dominant

retributive/punitive framework for criminal justice pit victims and perpetrators,

prisoners and ‘normal’ citizens, against one another in dualist fashion, as vulnera-

ble and invulnerable in mutually exclusive ways. This framing relies upon a sim-

plistic understanding of vulnerability as a condition on which some have more

purchase than others. Vulnerability thus is habitually imagined as the potential to

be harmed, forming an integral part of rhetoric that bolsters fear and anxiety

about security, and thus prioritizes the safety of dominant, privileged groups. In

this context, mass incarceration and surveillance have increased even as crime

rates have decreased or stagnated. Likewise, defensiveness concerning the abil-

ity of the police to protect themselves comes when police mortality in the line of

duty is at historic low but police violence is being challenged by the claim that

“black lives matter” (Coates 2015). Thus, vulnerability can function as a rhetorical

buttress justifying the defense of some and endangerment of others precisely be-

cause it is conceived solely as susceptibility to harm.

Since a dualist understanding of vulnerability is complicit in its inequitable

differential distribution and attribution, it is necessary to reframe how vulnerabil-

ity is understood. One crucial starting point is shifting who is heard speaking

about vulnerability. In this brief concluding section, I suggest that projects and ac-

tivism that seek racial justice, and so either implicitly or explicitly critique the re-

tributivism of carceral logics, the prison nation, and mass incarceration, often do

and should disrupt the dominant dualist framework for understanding vulnerabil-

ity, violence, harm, and justice. Here I understand activism in the broadest sense,

encompassing practices of mediation as well as movements that challenge any

aspects of the prison nation, such as the organizing, protests, and theorizing that

has emerged since 2014 under the label “Black Lives Matter.”

First, activism involves strategic assertions and performances of vulnerabil-

ity in various ways and with various aims. These assertions of vulnerability appear

designed to demonstrate that vulnerability is both the susceptibility to harm of

members of particular subordinated groups and a shared fundamental condition.

That is, they call attention to the words and experiences of those whose vulnera-

bility is mis- or nonrecognized in the aforementioned ways to demand recognition

of that specific form of vulnerability, e.g., vulnerability to police violence, and

recognition of the way that vulnerability ties their lives to the lives of all others.

The protests that have followed in the wake of widely publicized unjustified

killings of Black men and boys (including Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Jordan

Davis, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray among others)

and the failure of grand juries to indict the police officers who killed Brown and

Garner are one noteworthy example. The phrases “hands up, don’t shoot” and “I

can’t breathe” used on signs in protests around the US echo Brown and Garner’s

last moments, ones of profound corporeal vulnerability. The widespread use of

these phrases directly references both their vulnerability, the intentional non-

recognition and denial of that vulnerability by the officers and others, conditioned

by the way they are perceived as threats and villainized, and the way many of the

protestors themselves embody the same potential vulnerability. In terms of But-

ler’s analysis of the politics of grief, the assertion of vulnerability is a demand that

Garner and Brown’s lives and the lives of all other people of color be perceived as

grieveable rather than expendable (Yancy and Butler 2015). Here, the bodily vul-

nerability that imperils is used as a call to action, it is emphasized as vulnerabil-

ity, and the ignorance and refusal of it on the part of mainstream white culture is

emphasized. It serves as a counter-indictment in the face of the failure to indict

those responsible for their deaths.

Thus, protestors make a tactical use of the vulnerability that tends to im-

peril. In doing so, they reference vulnerability not solely as susceptibility to harm

but as a fundamental, ambivalent and ambiguous condition of potential. Accord-

ingly, protestors also make themselves vulnerable in how they protest: they oc-

cupy streets, stop traffic, stage ‘die-ins,’ open themselves to further police vio-

lence, all seeking to call attention to themselves in ways that may not draw posi-

tive reactions but will cause discomfort to bystanders. In this way, they aim to im-

plicate as part of the problem those who regard themselves as apart from it (e.g.,

middle class white folks) by eliciting experiences of vulnerability on the part of

those who witness protests. The attempt seems to be to generate experiences of

epistemic vulnerability by contesting the privileged vulnerability of the white

mainstream (Gilson 2011). Given the likelihood that bystanders will not be recep-

tive to these claims, protestors’ vulnerability is ambiguous and ambivalent; it

opens them to the risks of “testimonial quieting” and reinforcing pernicious stereo-

types in relation to audiences who are unprepared and/or unwilling to take up and

genuinely hear their claims (Dotson 2011, 242-43).10 Thus, a different relation to

vulnerability can be seen in such strategies of resistance: protestors in Ferguson,

Missouri, for instance, exposed themselves to physical violence, to arrest and in-

carceration as part of their challenge to the violence and militarism of the police

state. Their willingness to put themselves in harm’s way reveals that vulnerability

is not merely susceptibility to harm (although it retains that potential as well) but

is also the bodily basis for expressive agency. In activism, therefore, vulnerability

can be a chosen form of endangerment that is simultaneously an expression of

agency. Moreover, it is performed knowingly as such.

Thus, these performances and invocations of vulnerability function to jetti-

son simplistic, dualist frameworks for understanding vulnerability, violence, and

justice: the expressions of vulnerability are simultaneously expressions of agency;

vulnerability is asserted as a shared condition and a basis for ethical responsive-

ness. As a consequence, these tactics do more than address any one case of in-

justice: they work to disrupt the social ontology that makes injustice possible,

calling for recognition of shared intersubjective vulnerability as condition of our

existence together. Accordingly, the theoretical lens of vulnerability can help us

understand and respond to the social injustices of the prison nation, including

that of pervasive racial inequity. To do so, however, requires taking stock of all

the forms of vulnerability involved, not just privileged vulnerability, by critically

analyzing the distribution and attribution of vulnerability. Such an analysis in-

volves considering the ways vulnerability’s meaning can be narrowed so that it is

perceived simply as a resource that can be withheld or granted in order to exac-

erbate or reduce susceptibility to harm. For vulnerability to be transformative,

though, we must also recognize that it is, most fundamentally, an openness to al-

teration that is the condition for change and perceive the ways it manifests as

such.

Endnotes

1 I take the term “complex social identities” from Dotson and Gilbert, who state, “Complex social identities, then, refers to identities that are readable in social landscapes according to our (real or perceived) membership in multiple communi-ties whose membership has hermeneutic impact. This understanding of complex social identities attempts to move away from understanding social identities ac-cording to one salient or foundational identifier, which often serves to render un-intelligible the fact that we simultaneously belong to multiple communities with different social and political features that travel and change through the travel-ing” (2014, 876). 2 On intersectionality as a methodological approach see McCall 2005 and the spe-cial issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society on “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory,” volume 34, no. 4, especially Carbado 2013.3 Space does not permit a more thorough account of the carceral state and the prison society, but their development has been thoroughly and capably articu-lated by, e.g., Davis 2003, Gottschalk 2006, Rodríguez 2008, Simon 2007, Wac-quant 2002.

4 Judith Butler’s term “precarity” names this way that vulnerability, or precarious-ness in her terminology, is exacerbated by social, political, and economic condi-tions, made worse for some and better for others (2009, 25-26).5 Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds call the former “inherent vulnerability” and the latter “situational vulnerability,” which may be “pathogenic” when its source is abuse, injustice, dysfunction, or oppression (2014, 6-9).6 The norms through which vulnerability and responsiveness to it are distributed in these ways are often shifting. Both the standards by which one is deemed an acceptable “victim” shift and who is able to meet those standards shifts because of alterations in behavior. The former may shift in light of the latter to keep some persons from claiming victim status. 7 On relational definition see Beauvoir 2011 and Plumwood 1993, 52. Plumwood argues directly that dualism, which is defined by “relational definition” among other things, is integral to oppression and domination. 8 Although space does not permit a full elaboration of the phenomenon, the profit generated from the prison industrial complex is also a key instance of the contin-ued privilege of the corporate stakeholders invested in prisons as business. As Angela Davis has shown, the privatization of prisons means there is “a clear stake in the continued growth of prison populations” and thus in the making-vulnerable of those regarded as “the detritus of contemporary capitalism” (2003, 16).9 As Crenshaw defines it, although “intersectionality transcends an exclusive focus on identity or mere categorization, the lived experiences of racially marginalized women and girls are shaped by a range of social and institutional practices that produce and sustain social categories and infuse them with social meanings. … In-tersectionality also points to the relationships between established hierarchies that structure the relative vulnerability of subjects to the public and private exer-cises of social power” (2012, 1426-1427).10 Much more could be said about the vulnerabilities involved in activist speech, especially regarding Dotson’s analysis of practices of silencing she terms “testimonial quieting” and “testimonial smothering.” Unfortunately, I lack the space to expand on this point here and will simply note that on Dotson’s analysis, it is “testimonial smothering” when speakers are faced with the dilemma of offer-ing unsafe testimony or suppressing that testimony; such linguistic situations run “the risk of leading to the formation of false beliefs that can cause social, political, and/or material harm” (Dotson 2011, 244). Yet, since “quieting” is the failure to perceive the speaker as a knower, it too could hold such risk, one that follows from technically hearing what is said but failing to understand the speaker’s meaning (because the audience fails to perceive the speaker as a knower) and so misinterpreting the testimony in line with one’s preconceived notions and familiar stereotypes.

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