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Racialized Women, the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism

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Abstract

In 2001, Rie Fujii, a 23-year-old Japanese national living without legal status in Calgary, Alberta, Canada left her two infant children alone in her apartment for 10 days while visiting her out-of-town boyfriend. The children, Domenic and Gemini, died of dehydration and starvation. Charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, Fujii plead guilty to manslaughter and received an 8-year sentence. Through an analysis of the publicly available judicial documents relating to the crimes of Rie Fujii, this paper explores how the law’s individualization and medicalization of crime and violence may obscure the multiple forms of everyday and structural violence that racialized women in white settler states such as Canada experience and may perpetrate. Drawing on Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’ concept of the violence continuum, I argue that the law’s conceptualization of crime and violence conceals and thus advances the violence endemic to white settler colonialism.

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Notes

  1. R. v. Fujii, ABQB 805, No. 016819476 (2002). Henceforth cited as Fujii.

  2. This includes the preliminary inquiry that took place on November 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 2001, December 11 and 12, 2001 and January 8 and 10, 2002, the sentencing hearing that took place on June 20 and 21, 2002 and the reasons for judgment (Fujii) that were heard on September 6th 2002 and dated September 9, 2002.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Krystan Jones and Sarah Rizzo for their research assistance on this project.

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Park, H. Racialized Women, the Law and the Violence of White Settler Colonialism. Fem Leg Stud 25, 267–290 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-017-9356-x

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