Description
Through a queer, feminist, autoethnographic lens, I both explore the role of the state in my experience of sexual violence, and discursively analyze state documents that employ what Dean Spade calls “administrative violence.” My thesis examines the California State Beach lifeguarding institution as a state-sponsored site of gendered surveillance and sexual violence towards women of color. I coined the phrase patch privilege to illustrate the way that lifeguards become shielded from public criticism, particularly in relation to sexual assault/harassment, through the patch that, as cultural myth, designates them as public saviors. I make connections between the infrastructures of lifeguarding and the U.S. military in relation to sexual violence, contexts of impunity, and an implied code of silence mired in these patriocolonial systems. From Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth, which draws critical attention to the surveillance of trans bodies, to the Chicanx/Latinx methodology of testimonio holding the bodymindspirit as a valued site of knowledge, these queer of color feminist analyses inform my project as decolonial tools to flip the research gaze back on to the institution, and motion toward visions of transformative justice and radical deviant care.
