UCLA

This project aims to disrupt understandings of intimate violence as something that is secluded to the private or personal sphere, and instead, demonstrates that intimate violence and state violence cannot be disentangled. They are violences that are mutually constitutive. By using a black feminist framework and centering the complex life of a young black woman named Marie Hill during the 1960s and 1970s who was arrested and sentenced to death by the time she was 17-years old, Hill’s life unveils that the intimate familial violence that she experienced prior to her incarceration continuously converged with carceral state violences. Hill’s life represents a larger process where the convergence of these violences produced a system of intimate state terror. This terror immobilizes and alienates black girls and women from institutions of care and protection, and this alienation facilitates their disposability into carceral spheres.