Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms

Through the pandemic, widespread media coverage of the gruesome deaths of Asian women marks a rupture from the silence that has historically shrouded similar moments of violence. Additionally, media coverage and public discourse about anti-Asian violences under the umbrella of “#StopAsianHate” has worked to make Asian-ness more visible in discussions of racism and has also been used as an argument for racial justice motivations to increase policing. By questioning how violence against Asian women becomes rendered legible and visible (and illegible and invisible) in the US media landscape, this chapter offers theoretical frameworks for understanding racial and gendered violence in the context of how state violence structures death and dying. In addition, this chapter outlines the duality of criminalised violence against Asian women alongside the racialisation of Asian women as criminals. We connect subsequent state-based responses to this violence, particularly demonstrating how crime-based frameworks lead to expansions of structural harms. While policing has always been racially unjust, media spectacles of the perceived new phenomena of anti-Asian racism offer sites to examine and critique the narrative possibility that a “racially just” response to violence requires additional policing.