New Faculty Book: The Violence of Protection by Lee Ann S. Wang

February 17, 2026 / in News

The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women rewrites “victim” as a category of the human enforced through laws that bind protection to punishment through mutual exchange and cooperation. Overall, the book frames the racial conditions of policing and immigration law through a focus on gender violence and abolition feminist critique. Celebrated as a feminist victory upon its passage as part of the Clinton Crime Bill, the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is a landmark piece of legislation that provides protections for survivors of gender and sexual violence. However, as Lee Ann Wang shows, VAWA primarily funds law enforcement efforts to rescue women, and in doing so, creates conditions of racial violence, surveillance, and immigration enforcement. This book critiques the legal condition that immigrant survivors must cooperate with policing in exchange for protection. Wang argues that the undocumented crime victim is not a person, but a legal subject that reproduces racial figures to humanize the legal violence of protection: the modern-day slave, cooperator, the good/bad immigrant, the model minority, the silenced and hidden. Through methodologies of feminist refusal and retelling, ethnographic fieldwork in the book draws from legal and social service advocates working with Asian American survivors of gender and sexual violence in the San Francisco Bay Area, who attempt to utilize the law to serve survivors while also grappling with partnerships with policing and law enforcement. Drawing from the intellectual and political genealogy of Black feminist abolitionist writings and women of color anti-violence movements, this book contributes a discussion of immigration to further show how both political agendas have enforced survivors into policing of the self and others.

Praise

“A work of demanding precision, one that rewards the reader with insights that shift the foundations upon which so much work on race, immigration, and feminist anti-violence politics continues to rely. With distinctive lucidity and searing analytical prose, Wang brilliantly distills how the ‘Asian Immigrant Woman’ sutures the state-sanctioned effort to end gender-based violence to anti-Black policing in the United States.”
— Chandan Reddy, author of Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State

“The Violence of Protection could not be timelier, unveiling the violence and policing embedded into the very core of immigration law, reaching beyond the brutality we are currently witnessing in the streets into the intimate lives of racialized survivors of gender-based violence. Not content with critique, Wang draws on legacies of abolition feminisms to invite us into the possibilities that open up when we resist the borders imposed by law and explode the conditioned meanings of ‘victim’ and ‘care’ within the logics of criminalization into a constellation of care.”
— Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

Note: Praise quotes are from Duke University Press.

Learn more & Purchase Book: Duke University Press