“What Real Empowerment Looks Like”: White Rage and the Necropolitics of Armed Womanhood

Rage-fueled appeals to women’s armed empowerment drive a market in civilian-owned firearms and related commodities while fortifying deregulatory gun policy. Drawing from Achille Mbembe’s (2003) concept of necropolitics, I unpack the intersecting racial and gender logics of women’s armed response to patriarchal violence as a means by which the state “attributes rational objectives to the very act of killing.” In spite of its facial appeals to all women’s empowerment, the “good woman with a gun” remains an exclusionary trope that neutralizes women’s rage in the service of deregulatory governance and the efficient, cost-effective outsourcing of state violence. The emphasis on stranger danger masks the number-one threat to women’s safety—their own male acquaintances and intimate partners—while effacing the disproportionate impact of structural violence on Black, Brown, and Indigenous women and girls.