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

February 13, 2026 / in News

Professor Lee Ann S. Wang’s New Book Examines How “Protection” Can Produce Racial Violence

Professor Lee Ann S. Wang, assistant professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA, recently published The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women. It serves as a timely and incisive study of how systems meant to safeguard survivors of gender and sexual violence, can instead intensify policing, surveillance, and immigration enforcement in the lives of racialized communities.

Focusing on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and based on ethnographic research with legal and social advocates serving Asian American survivors in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wang examines how “protection” can come with requirements that deepen harm, especially for communities already heavily policed. The Violence of Protection invites readers to rethink what safety and care can look like beyond criminalization.

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