Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide.

• Author: Arsenault, Emily

Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide by Ardath Whynacht (Fernwood, 2021)

HOW DO WE ADDRESS THE NEEDS OF THOSE AT RISK OF DYING FROM domestic violence and the people who cause harm? How do we intervene when someone challenges our safety and survival? How can we create a world that places collective care and compassion at the forefront of safety? Is any of this even possible? Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide navigates these complex questions through a deeply compelling and personal exploration of the interwoven relationship between domestic homicide, racial capitalism, and state violence and the possibilities of transformative justice, abolition, and community-based accountability, action, and healing. Insurgent Love contributes new and valuable insight into thinking about and working toward a society that prioritizes safe and sustainable strategies to reduce and prevent harm through and within the ongoing resistance and dismantling of the carceral, capitalist, and colonial logics that create and perpetuate such harm in the first place.

Activist, writer, and sociology professor Ardath Whynacht (2021) offers a feminist abolitionist perspective on domestic homicide that challenges and resists carceral feminist approaches to intimate and sexual violence that view policing, prosecution, and punishment as the most effective means of addressing harm. As an alternative framework, Whynacht provides evidence-based arguments supporting abolitionist perspectives that aim to eradicate carceral systems by constructing healing systems that effectively operate to prevent and address harm in our homes and communities. Whynacht contends that in the efforts to transform the conditions that create and perpetuate violence, communities should look to transformative and abolitionist justice as both a model and conceptual framework to guide their social justice work and politics. Importantly, these perspectives are humbly presented by Whynacht as she reminds readers that these frameworks and movements belong first and foremost to Indigenous and Black feminists, queer, trans, and two-spirit activists, and disabled and neurodivergent organizers and survivors who have "relentlessly, creatively, and courageously brought movements for prison abolition and transformative justice into existence"(23). Another noteworthy component of Insurgent Love is Whynacht's unique and vulnerable methodological approach to exploring state and family violence...