The violence of silence: in U.S. imperialism and the politics of erasure

My thesis involves re-conceptualizing the way we understand violences that are specific and prolific within U.S. culture and abroad. I will use a feminist methodology, intersectional analysis and decolonizing principles to complicate theoretical work drawn primarily from feminist literature that interrogates violence of all forms (focusing on exposing and illuminating violence where you least expect it to exist). I will contextualize what I term "donor violence." Donor violence exposes the power web of non-profit funders as the gatekeepers of social and political work and the tragic stakes of centering the status quo as the imagined ideal survivor of violence. I will discuss what violence actually is in the neoliberal state, how neoliberalism relies on particular forms of violence to function, and the impact of this reliance. I aim to illuminate who our nation's most vulnerable bodies are, the specific violences they endure, and most importantly how this erasure of violence in a cultural conscience is a nation building project. This will facilitate a different understanding of what we imagine violence within "American" culture to be and who "Americans" are. I will be looking closely throughout the text at frameworks of care, punitive accountability, and biopower that illustrate the intersection of health, race, the politics of care, the politics of erasure and settler/colonialism.