Sherene H Razack
Biographic Data
| ID | 1451209 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sherene H Razack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sherene H |
| FAMILY NAME | Razack |
| SIGNATURE | RAZACK S H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7861-3753 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 498 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Can you be a feminist and stay silent about genocide
Can you be a feminist and be silent about the Israeli state’s genocide of Palestinians? In this article I answer this question by reflecting on a falling out between Black and Jewish feminists in 1982. I maintain that those feminists in 1982 who were silent about Israel’s genocidal actions and who insisted that an unspecified antisemitism take priority in the wake of genocidal violence against Palestinians, did not practice an anti-imperial femin…
Whose Gender Counts
It Didn’t Begin in Hate: Why a Hate Crimes Framework Can’t Take Us to Abolition
Hate, naturalized as a universal human emotion, is an increasingly popular analytical container in which to put terrible crimes of violence, crimes that are ineluctably racial. Hate as analytic does not offer a promising path towards understanding the oppressive systems and structures, war-making, race-making and colonial projects that produce and require considerable violence. There is, however, obvious political capital to be gained by employin…
The Weaponization of Feminism in a Time of Genocide: A Response to Masha Gessen
In this essay, the author considers how the focus on mass rapes allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7 achieves coherency through race, leaving feminist politics mired in racial politics. The feminist truism that women are always raped in war is relied upon to confirm that mass rapes took place on October 7—a weaponization of feminism designed to shut down questions about evidence and the deliberate circulation of false narratives about rape, …
Australian war crimes in Afghanistan: Race, Gender and Responsibility
This is article introduces the special issue focused on allegations of war crimes committed by Australian Defence Forces (ADF) in Afghanistan. Submissions focus on these specific allegation and also offer broader context in terms of both the history of war crimes committed by ADF forces internationally, and the global context of Western military war crimes and illicit activities in foreign countries, military culture and military masculinities. T…
Race and Palestine
Race and Palestine Sherene H. Razack (bio) what does race have to do with the genocidal actions Currently happening right now in Gaza? There is an obvious answer to this question. The Zionist project to form the nation of Israel on Palestinian land has a simple, powerful premise: God gave the land to the Jews who have been on it for millennia–the latter being an important word designed to emphasize the timelessness of a Jewish claim to the land. …
Should Feminists Stop Talking About Culture in the Context of Violence Against Muslim Women? The Case of “Honour Killing”
The violence, scale, and power of anti-Muslim narratives circulated on the internet and elsewhere continue to have considerable impact on feminist antiviolence initiatives. I examine contemporary responses to “honour killings” with particular reference to the Palestinian, Indian, and North American contexts, reflecting on how anti-violence advocates negotiate the terrain of culture in the case of honour killings. I ask whether the focus on cultur…
Alternatives: What anti-Muslim racism can tell us about Christianity, white supremacy, and the US insurrection 2021
Whiteness was abundantly in evidence during the 2020 election in the United States and subsequently when a white mob stormed the Capitol to protest what they regarded as a stolen election. I suggest that we locate the confluence of “God, guns, and country” on that day on a settler-colonial and imperial landscape, tracing how a territorial white subject comes to feel racial entitlement and aggrievement through Christianity, an affect that is evide…
Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine
At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror
A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear: The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman's Niqab
The niqab, the main subject of this article, is the garment worn by some Muslim women that conceals the face of its wearer, leaving only eyes visible. The Niqabi, as the wearer of the niqab is called, gives rise to high anxiety in the West. She generates an intense repugnance, a repugnance, I shall argue, that is paradoxically about desire. We need to ask why the niqab unsettles and who is unsettled by it and to ask these questions in a historica…
Asian Canadian Studies Reader
Roland Sintos Coloma and Gordon Pon’s Asian Canadian Studies Reader brings together essential writings by leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore the vibrancy of the diverse Asian diaspora in Canada
Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette
Populations marked for disposability who are deemed to have no place in the modern, including the Indigenous everywhere and all who stand in the way of the progress of capital accumulation, are always on their way to becoming waste, their communities targeted for destruction. Disposability is a racial condition, the mark of sub-humanity. Forced to flee, those who are targeted find themselves travelling through zones over which a diffused terror r…
Violence sexualisée et colonialisme: Réflexions relatives à l'enquête sur les femmes autochtones disparues et assassinées
Gendering Disposability
In 2011, thirty-six-year-old Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman, bled to death in a hotel bathtub in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. On the night she died, Gladue had contracted for sexual exchange with Bradley Barton, a white man who worked as a trucker. In 2015, Barton was tried for the murder of Cindy Gladue. With more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women, there is compelling reason to focus on the violence Barton inflicted on Gladue, understan…
Sexualized Violence and Colonialism: Reflections on the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
It Happened More Than Once”: Freezing Deaths in Saskatchewan
This article examines inquests and an inquiry into freezing deaths in Saskatchewan, Canada. It outlines the racial spatial economies of which these deaths are a part, and it proposes that the structural relations of settler colonialism produce and sustain ongoing, daily evictions of Aboriginal people from settler life, evictions that are inevitably violent. The colonial city belongs to the settler, and Aboriginal presence in the city inevitably c…
Memorializing Colonial Power: The Death of Frank Paul
Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Fra…
A Hole in the Wall; A Rose at a Checkpoint: The Spatiality of Colonial Encounters in Occupied Palestine
This article reflects on the spatial arrangements that memorialize power on the bodies of the colonized in occupied Palestine. These are the reflections of someone whose research is focused on the Canadian context. I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my re…
The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how …
Timely Deaths: Medicalizing the Deaths of Aboriginal People in Police Custody
This article is part of a larger study of inquests into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. I suggest that the Aboriginal body is considered to be one that is already dead, and thus a body on whom a full measure of care would be wasted. The inquest becomes a place where this ‘‘truth’’ is established. I explore how the deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody have been persistently “medicalized” – that is, attributed to the medical co…
Reframing Two Worlds Colliding: A Conversation Between Tasha Hubbard and Sherene Razack
Two Worlds Colliding chronicles the painful story of what came to be known as Saskatoon's infamous “freezing deaths,” and the schism between a fearful, mistrustful Aboriginal community and a police
Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics
Combining rich theoretical perspectives and extensive research, Casting Out makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on race and the 'war on terror' and their implications in areas such as law, politics, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, and race relations
The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture
Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses
Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages
Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses
Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder Pamela George
En 1995, Pamela George a été brutalement assassinée par deux jeunes athlètes universitaires de dix-huit ans. Les deux hommes condamnés pour meurtre se virent infliger des peines légères pour leur crime. Dans cet article, j'examine le meurtre de Pamela George comme un acte de violence raciale sexuée faisant partie de la poursuite de la colonisation des Autochtones. Je suggère qu'en tant que femme autochtone travaillant dans un espace de prostituti…
The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture
"From the "Clean Snows of Petawawa: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia
Making Canada White: Law and the Policing of Bodies of Colour in the 1990s
The 1990s inaugurated a new era of policing the border, one in which a variety of legislative initiatives were introduced to regulate more tightly the flow of immigrants and refugees to Canada. Border control is closely linked to the internal policing of people of colour, stigmatising and monitoring such bodies in ways that clearly establish their subordinate status in the nation. In this article, I reflect on the practices involved in the polici…
Gendering Disposability
In 2011, thirty-six-year-old Cindy Gladue, a Cree woman, bled to death in a hotel bathtub in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. On the night she died, Gladue had contracted for sexual exchange with Bradley Barton, a white man who worked as a trucker. In 2015, Barton was tried for the murder of Cindy Gladue. With more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous women, there is compelling reason to focus on the violence Barton inflicted on Gladue, understan…
Memorializing Colonial Power: The Death of Frank Paul
Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Fra…
Story‐telling for Social Change
As strategies for social change, feminist activities in the area of law and popular education both rely on the oppressed telling stories of their daily lives. Storytelling in these contexts represents different perceptions of reality that are intended as an opposition to established knowledge. Focusing primarily on popular education, the author describes how the uncritical reliance on stories has led to the failure in the classroom to acknowledge…
Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine
Sexualized Violence and Colonialism: Reflections on the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women
It Happened More Than Once”: Freezing Deaths in Saskatchewan
This article examines inquests and an inquiry into freezing deaths in Saskatchewan, Canada. It outlines the racial spatial economies of which these deaths are a part, and it proposes that the structural relations of settler colonialism produce and sustain ongoing, daily evictions of Aboriginal people from settler life, evictions that are inevitably violent. The colonial city belongs to the settler, and Aboriginal presence in the city inevitably c…
Timely Deaths: Medicalizing the Deaths of Aboriginal People in Police Custody
This article is part of a larger study of inquests into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. I suggest that the Aboriginal body is considered to be one that is already dead, and thus a body on whom a full measure of care would be wasted. The inquest becomes a place where this ‘‘truth’’ is established. I explore how the deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody have been persistently “medicalized” – that is, attributed to the medical co…
What Is to Be Gained by Looking White People in the Eye? Culture, Race, and Gender in Cases of Sexual Violence
A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear: The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman's Niqab
The niqab, the main subject of this article, is the garment worn by some Muslim women that conceals the face of its wearer, leaving only eyes visible. The Niqabi, as the wearer of the niqab is called, gives rise to high anxiety in the West. She generates an intense repugnance, a repugnance, I shall argue, that is paradoxically about desire. We need to ask why the niqab unsettles and who is unsettled by it and to ask these questions in a historica…
A Violent Culture or Culturalized Violence: Feminist Narratives of Sexual Violence against South Asian Women
From Consent to Responsibility, from Pity to Respect: Subtexts in Cases of Sexual Violence Involving Girls and Women with Developmental Disabilities
How might feminist law reform serve all women? The author explores this question within the context of sexual violence involving girls and women with developmental disabilities. She presents the difference impasse as a theoretical tool for understanding how women are positioned in law differently and unequally in relation to each other. She explores how, within the consent framework of a rape trail, competing social narratives or subtexts about r…
The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how …
Human Waste and the Border: A Vignette
Populations marked for disposability who are deemed to have no place in the modern, including the Indigenous everywhere and all who stand in the way of the progress of capital accumulation, are always on their way to becoming waste, their communities targeted for destruction. Disposability is a racial condition, the mark of sub-humanity. Forced to flee, those who are targeted find themselves travelling through zones over which a diffused terror r…
Reframing Two Worlds Colliding: A Conversation Between Tasha Hubbard and Sherene Razack
Two Worlds Colliding chronicles the painful story of what came to be known as Saskatoon's infamous “freezing deaths,” and the schism between a fearful, mistrustful Aboriginal community and a police
Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers' Education for Women, 1914-1984
Sisterhood and Solidarity was one of the first volumes, and remains one of the few, to call attention to the importance of workers’ education for women. The ten original essays, written by some of the best known labor and working-class history scholars of the time, analyze an educational experiment in which industrial, clerical, and service workers participated with educators, feminists, and social workers. Among the sponsors of these educational…
Those Who “Witness the Evil”
For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with “absolute evil.” Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase “axis of evil” in the New World Order. 1 argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology s…
The Weaponization of Feminism in a Time of Genocide: A Response to Masha Gessen
In this essay, the author considers how the focus on mass rapes allegedly committed by Hamas on October 7 achieves coherency through race, leaving feminist politics mired in racial politics. The feminist truism that women are always raped in war is relied upon to confirm that mass rapes took place on October 7—a weaponization of feminism designed to shut down questions about evidence and the deliberate circulation of false narratives about rape, …
Alternatives: What anti-Muslim racism can tell us about Christianity, white supremacy, and the US insurrection 2021
Whiteness was abundantly in evidence during the 2020 election in the United States and subsequently when a white mob stormed the Capitol to protest what they regarded as a stolen election. I suggest that we locate the confluence of “God, guns, and country” on that day on a settler-colonial and imperial landscape, tracing how a territorial white subject comes to feel racial entitlement and aggrievement through Christianity, an affect that is evide…
Seeking Relations: Law and Feminism Roundtables
Currently the rhetoric of difference and diversity among women dominates discussions in legal feminism about where women stand in relation to each other. The words difference and diversity organize the relationship among women in ways that can eclipse the differential impact of ableism, economic exploitation, heterosexism, racism, and sexism in women's lives. Differences among women are taken into account, for example, in the recognition that som…
Sisterhood and Solidarity: Workers' Education for Women, 1914-1984
Sisterhood and Solidarity was one of the first volumes, and remains one of the few, to call attention to the importance of workers’ education for women. The ten original essays, written by some of the best known labor and working-class history scholars of the time, analyze an educational experiment in which industrial, clerical, and service workers participated with educators, feminists, and social workers. Among the sponsors of these educational…
Collective rights and women: The cold game of equality staring
Story‐telling for Social Change
As strategies for social change, feminist activities in the area of law and popular education both rely on the oppressed telling stories of their daily lives. Storytelling in these contexts represents different perceptions of reality that are intended as an opposition to established knowledge. Focusing primarily on popular education, the author describes how the uncritical reliance on stories has led to the failure in the classroom to acknowledge…
From Consent to Responsibility, from Pity to Respect: Subtexts in Cases of Sexual Violence Involving Girls and Women with Developmental Disabilities
How might feminist law reform serve all women? The author explores this question within the context of sexual violence involving girls and women with developmental disabilities. She presents the difference impasse as a theoretical tool for understanding how women are positioned in law differently and unequally in relation to each other. She explores how, within the consent framework of a rape trail, competing social narratives or subtexts about r…
Seeking Relations: Law and Feminism Roundtables
Currently the rhetoric of difference and diversity among women dominates discussions in legal feminism about where women stand in relation to each other. The words difference and diversity organize the relationship among women in ways that can eclipse the differential impact of ableism, economic exploitation, heterosexism, racism, and sexism in women's lives. Differences among women are taken into account, for example, in the recognition that som…
What Is to Be Gained by Looking White People in the Eye? Culture, Race, and Gender in Cases of Sexual Violence
Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms
Examining the classroom discussion of equity issues and legal cases involving immigration and sexual violence, Razack addresses how non-white women are viewed, and how they must respond, in classrooms and courtrooms
Making Canada White: Law and the Policing of Bodies of Colour in the 1990s
The 1990s inaugurated a new era of policing the border, one in which a variety of legislative initiatives were introduced to regulate more tightly the flow of immigrants and refugees to Canada. Border control is closely linked to the internal policing of people of colour, stigmatising and monitoring such bodies in ways that clearly establish their subordinate status in the nation. In this article, I reflect on the practices involved in the polici…
Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder Pamela George
En 1995, Pamela George a été brutalement assassinée par deux jeunes athlètes universitaires de dix-huit ans. Les deux hommes condamnés pour meurtre se virent infliger des peines légères pour leur crime. Dans cet article, j'examine le meurtre de Pamela George comme un acte de violence raciale sexuée faisant partie de la poursuite de la colonisation des Autochtones. Je suggère qu'en tant que femme autochtone travaillant dans un espace de prostituti…
"From the "Clean Snows of Petawawa: The Violence of Canadian Peacekeepers in Somalia
Those Who “Witness the Evil”
For the better part of the last decade, Canadian peacekeepers have been encouraged to frame their activities in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia as encounters with “absolute evil.” Peacekeeping is seen as a moral project in which the North civilizes the South. Using the Canadian peacekeeping context, I reflect on President Bush's use of the phrase “axis of evil” in the New World Order. 1 argue that this phrase reveals an epistemology s…
A Violent Culture or Culturalized Violence: Feminist Narratives of Sexual Violence against South Asian Women
Race, Space and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society
Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages
Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism
Somalia. March 4, 1993. Two Somalis are shot in the back by Canadian peacekeepers, one fatally. Barely two weeks later, sixteen-year-old Shidane Abukar Arone is tortured to death. Dozens of Canadian soldiers look on or know of the torture. The first reports of what became known in Canada as the Somalia Affair challenged national claims to a special expertise in peacekeeping and to a society free of racism. Today, however, despite a national inqui…
The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture
Stealing the Pain of Others: Reflections on Canadian Humanitarian Responses
Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics
Combining rich theoretical perspectives and extensive research, Casting Out makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on race and the 'war on terror' and their implications in areas such as law, politics, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, and race relations
A Hole in the Wall; A Rose at a Checkpoint: The Spatiality of Colonial Encounters in Occupied Palestine
This article reflects on the spatial arrangements that memorialize power on the bodies of the colonized in occupied Palestine. These are the reflections of someone whose research is focused on the Canadian context. I attempt here to have a conversation with those scholars who are more conversant with the Israeli/Palestinian context than I, reading them through the prism of my own extremely brief experience of occupied Palestine, and through my re…
The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how …
Timely Deaths: Medicalizing the Deaths of Aboriginal People in Police Custody
This article is part of a larger study of inquests into the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody. I suggest that the Aboriginal body is considered to be one that is already dead, and thus a body on whom a full measure of care would be wasted. The inquest becomes a place where this ‘‘truth’’ is established. I explore how the deaths of Aboriginal people in police custody have been persistently “medicalized” – that is, attributed to the medical co…
Reframing Two Worlds Colliding: A Conversation Between Tasha Hubbard and Sherene Razack
Two Worlds Colliding chronicles the painful story of what came to be known as Saskatoon's infamous “freezing deaths,” and the schism between a fearful, mistrustful Aboriginal community and a police
Memorializing Colonial Power: The Death of Frank Paul
Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Fra…
It Happened More Than Once”: Freezing Deaths in Saskatchewan
This article examines inquests and an inquiry into freezing deaths in Saskatchewan, Canada. It outlines the racial spatial economies of which these deaths are a part, and it proposes that the structural relations of settler colonialism produce and sustain ongoing, daily evictions of Aboriginal people from settler life, evictions that are inevitably violent. The colonial city belongs to the settler, and Aboriginal presence in the city inevitably c…
Violence sexualisée et colonialisme: Réflexions relatives à l'enquête sur les femmes autochtones disparues et assassinées
Sociology (33 works) · Political science (32 works) · Law (30 works) · Law (23 works) · Criminology (20 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · History (17 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · History (12 works) · Politics (12 works)