Survivor Injustice State-Sanctioned Abuse, Domestic Violence, and the Fight for Bodily Autonomy

Journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung exposes the insidious--and often unseen--connections among domestic abuse, state-based violence, political disenfranchisement, and the carceral state.
For readers of The Revolution Starts at Home, Feminism for the 99%, and Good and Mad.

Incisive, urgent, and written exactly for our post-Roe times, Survivor Injustice is the feminist frame-changing read we need now--for each of us, and for all that’s at stake.
With an abolitionist lens, journalist and Jezebel staff writer Kylie Cheung shows how domestic abuse and state violence are systemic and interconnected. She shatters the harmful and convenient narrative that abuse is a “private matter” perpetrated by individual bad actors--and situates popular understandings of domestic abuse in an indictment of the racism, misogyny, and carcerality baked into U.S. culture and politics. Cheung explores:

• The links between capitalism and domestic abuse: how late-stage capitalism colludes with the state to incentivize forced birth and reproductive coercion
• Intimate partner violence as a tool of political silence and social control
• America’s tacit acceptance of sexual assault, from the home to the White House
• The interplay of race, power, gender, and sexuality in state-based violence
• How the United States runs on carcerality, and what that means for victims
• The way we view survival crimes, and our complicity in defining which acts are “violent” and whose actions are “criminal”
• How white feminism and carceral feminism fail us all

Cheung plainly names all that goes unsaid when we, as a culture, talk about abuse: How state and society criminalize women, girls, and gender-oppressed people of color. That what happens behind closed doors affects whose voices we hear at the ballot box. What it means when we put predators--from every party--up for vote. That sex workers are more likely to be victimized by law enforcement than “saved” by them. That this is all by design. And that ultimately--with organizing, abolition, and beyond-the-ballot action--we can change it all for good.

KYLIE CHEUNG is a staff writer at Jezebel, where she reports on gender, power, and identity at the intersections of culture and politics. She was previously a staff writer at the culture desk at Salon, and for six years, she reported on these topics as a freelance writer with bylines in Teen Vogue, Dame Magazine, Bitch Media, Alternet, Wear Your Voice, Feministing, and other publications. Cheung is the author of two prior books of feminist essays, The Gaslit Diaries (2018) and A Woman’s Place (2020). Prior to her journalism career, Cheung worked for and organized with leading reproductive justice organizations, including the National Network of Abortion Funds, Reproaction, and NARAL. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her pit bull-chihuahua, Bucky.