Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network –

Lee Ann S. Wang, "The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women" (Duke UP, 2026)
Release Date: April 1, 2026
Host: Eileen Zhou
Guest: Professor Lee Ann S. Wang
Duration covered: [01:15]–[68:50]

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Episode Overview

This episode features Professor Lee Ann S. Wang discussing her new book, The Violence of Protection: Policing, Immigration Law, and Asian American Women. The conversation explores how U.S. laws designed to protect immigrant survivors of gender and sexual violence—such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), U Visas, and T Visas—often require cooperation with law enforcement, which itself can perpetuate forms of racial and gender violence. Wang draws on abolition feminism, critiques of anti-Blackness, and ethnographic research with legal advocates to interrogate the construction of "victimhood" in law and the racialized expectations upheld by both legal structures and nonprofit organizations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivation for the Book

• Wang's project started during graduate studies while working with anti-violence organizations in the Bay Area, amid emerging legal tools like U and T visas ([03:02]).
• Observed a tension between the hopes advocates had for these protections and the requirement to build close ties with police ([03:44]).
• Early activism and experience in nonprofits illuminating the “nonprofit industrial complex” and the embeddedness of legal “victim” categories in neoliberal state structures ([05:22]).

2. Navigating Academia and Activist Spaces

• Wang rejects the “bridging communities and academia” narrative, emphasizing that scholars of color inhabit both realms organically ([06:50]).
• Notes university devaluation of ethnic and gender studies, and “bridging” serving institutional rather than community interests ([07:50]).
• The writing was shaped by both fieldwork and community organizing—using ethnography not simply to “represent” communities, but to contend with real tensions within them ([09:44]).

3. Academic Challenges and Methodological Innovations

• The book intentionally “writes about the law without speaking like the law”; Wang had to devise feminist ethnographic approaches to study legal objects ([12:14]).
• Traditional paradigms in Asian American Studies didn’t help critique the relationship between “protection” and punishment, or theorize gender violence as a foundation for law ([13:24], [14:25]).
• Wang critiques legal requirements for survivors to narrate stories of violence as proof, which legalizes and commodifies their suffering ([15:35]).

“I had to develop a different type of methodology...a feminist ethnographic methodology...to intervene and develop refusals that would allow me to then produce a study that put forward a legal ethnography of protection.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [15:55]

4. Abolition Feminism and Critique of “Protection”

• Explains abolition feminism as rooted in women of color’s organizing against gender violence, focusing on how punitive frameworks claim to “rescue women” but depend on policing ([18:24]).
• Critiques the assumption that interpersonal harm is only an individual problem, urging instead attention to structural/state violence ([19:24]).

“Abolition feminist critiques...are pushing our attention to the relationship between gender violence as a form of state violence, and that state violences themselves are also reproducing...gender and sexual violence.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [19:44]

• Distinguishes between legal protection and care: the law’s protection naturalizes and expands institutions of punishment, even through nonprofits ([22:46]).

5. Key Legislation: VAWA, U Visa, T Visa

• VAWA emerged in the 1990s within a broader expansion of punitive policing and welfare reform, funding policing as a response to gender violence ([25:13]).
• Many critiques from communities (e.g., Mimi Kim, Beth Richie) warned that VAWA’s focus on the victim was deeply tied to racial logics and the expansion of law enforcement ([27:44]).

6. Asian American Women’s Specific Position

• Asian American women are not named as primary targets in laws like VAWA, but the constructs and impacts of victimhood apply and are relevant to Asian American Studies ([29:42]).
• Critiques “protection” (inclusion) as itself a site of violence, not only “punishment” (exclusion); legal protections force survivors into roles that serve the expansion and legitimation of policing ([33:25], [34:40]).

“It’s not even to actually receive protection—it’s to be eligible to apply for protection. And it’s only temporary. That is also this temporal logic here.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [34:40]

7. From Victim to Survivor: Feminist Refusal

• Discusses the deliberate choice to use the term “survivor” (drawing on abolition feminist praxis), enabling attention to agency, care networks, and survival beyond state violence ([36:03]).
• “Victim” is a legal category that limits agency; only certain experiences (those matching the expectations of whiteness and universality) are recognized ([40:06]).

“The only successful victim historically are white domestic subjects...their victim also operates under a colorblind and universal configuration in the law.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [40:27]

• Advocates often experience tension as they must reframe clients’ experiences to fit legal “victim” narratives ([42:45]).

8. Ethnographic Impasse and the Internal Work of Advocacy

• Wang reflects on moments where advocates correct their own legal language (“victim” vs “community member”), highlighting both internal conflict and the deep impact of legal frameworks ([44:41]).
• The law’s design makes advocates and survivors shape narratives to fit the legal subject, with the primary goal of improving policing—not necessarily addressing survivors’ needs ([40:06]–[44:08]).
• Example: An attorney’s client refrains from disclosing the full extent of violence, believing innocence and “cleanliness” would make her a more credible cooperator ([51:39]).

9. The Racial and Gendered Logic of Anti-Human Trafficking Laws

• T Visas and the rhetoric of “modern day slavery” are bound up with U.S. anti-immigration, border enforcement, and anti-Blackness logics ([56:09]).
• Mutuality in protection offered by T Visas is a fiction: “it’s certainly not mutual when conditions of state violence are in place to both expel...and [then] also manage the temporary inclusion of survivors” ([57:42]).

10. Evolving Advocacy and the Practical Reality of Legal Protection

• Over time, administrative structures supporting U and T visa applications have expanded, increasing the professionalization of advocacy ([60:43]).
• Wang responds to critique: Why analyze legal protections when other legal penalties are worse? Because converting survivors into “cooperators” for protection is itself a form of violence and exclusion ([62:20]).

“What is so practical about making undocumented and immigrant survivors into cooperators?...We risk reproducing and repeating conditions where rape becomes the linchpin for the continual expansion and unfurling of law enforcement.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [62:20]–[65:17]

11. Abolition as World-building and Community Solidarity

• Abolition isn’t just refusal—it’s world-building, already happening in organizations like Survived and Punished and Interrupting Criminalization ([66:11]).
• Advocates for using Asian American Studies as an “insurgent practice,” not only for “policy solutions” but to develop broader solidarities and challenge the status quo ([67:22]).

“I see the study of all of this as something that is already political, definitely.”
—Lee Ann S. Wang, [68:21]

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Notable Quotes

• “Abolition feminist theorizations relentlessly remind us that we do not protect each other, we care for each other.”
  —Eileen Zhou paraphrasing Wang, [22:13]

• “The undocumented crime victim is not a person or a person's experiences...the undocumented crime victim is a legal subject.”
  —Lee Ann S. Wang, [40:06]

• “I would never say to anyone, don't apply for a visa...but when the legal design is primarily concerned...to actually improve and expand policing, the needs of survivors come second.”
  —Lee Ann S. Wang, [40:06]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:02–06:17] – Origin of the book, tensions within anti-violence and immigrant rights movements.
• [12:14–17:56] – Academic pushback, writing about law in a distinctively feminist/ethnic studies way.
• [18:24–20:42] – What is abolition feminism?
• [22:13–24:46] – Distinguishing legal protection from community care; critique of the nonprofit industrial complex.
• [25:13–29:21] – History and politics of the Violence Against Women Act, U Visas, and T Visas.
• [33:25–36:03] – Specifics for Asian American women, and the move from “victim” to “survivor.”
• [44:41–52:14] – Ethnographic cases illustrating the violence of legal protection and the internal work of advocates and survivors.
• [56:09–60:20] – T Visas, anti-human trafficking, and racial logics.
• [62:20–65:17] – The problem of legal protections requiring “cooperation.”
• [66:11–68:28] – Abolition as world-building; potential for cross-community solidarity.

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Closing Reflection

Wang’s interview is a deep challenge to the assumption that legal “protections” are automatically beneficial for immigrant survivors of violence. By framing police cooperation as a condition for legalized safety, Wang asks listeners to consider what is lost—and for whom—when protection ultimately serves the expansion of policing. Drawing from abolition feminism and grounded advocacy, Wang demonstrates the necessity of holding space for refusal, care, and true solidarity.

Recommended for:

• Listeners interested in abolition feminism, critical ethnic studies, feminist legal critique, and community-based advocacy, especially regarding Asian American and immigrant experiences with gender violence and the law.

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Transcript

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[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Eileen Zhou]

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eileen Zhou. Today I'm joined by Professor Li Ann Wong with her new book, the Violence of Policing Immigration Law and Asian American Women. It was just published by the Duke University Press this February. In this book, Lee Ann looks at how US Laws that are meant to protect immigrant survivors of gender and sexual violence often require them to cooperate with the law enforcement in order to receive receive that protection. Leanne draws on ethnographic work with legal advocates working with Asian immigrant women, and she also brings together abolition, feminism and critiques of anti blackness to question how victim is constructed in law, particularly in this case through racialized ideas like the model minority myth and the good immigrant versus bad immigrant dividend. Hello Li, and welcome to the show. And congrats on publishing this book.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

[Eileen Zhou]

So could you please start off by introducing yourself a little bit to our audience?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

I'm an assistant professor in Asian American Studies at UCLA and I teach courses on Asian Americans and the law, gender violence, policing and the law, and issues on contemporary Asian Americans. Prior to this, I taught at the University of Washington Bothell, and also at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

[Eileen Zhou]

And how did this book project begin for you?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

For me. You know, when I was a graduate student, I was doing some work with an anti violence organization in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was a really long time ago, and at the time, the U visa and the T visa were both pretty new forms of legal protections. And many of the folks that I was working with, they were really excited about these new laws and these new provisions under the Violence Against Women's Act. But many of the components of the visas required survivors and also the advocates that they worked with to develop relationships with police and law enforcement. As you know, in the Bay Area, there's a very strong abolition movement with a long history tied with prison abolition, as well as critiques of the racial violence of law enforcement, federal law enforcement and policing, as well as women of color, gender violence based organizations, and immigrant rights based organizations. So many of these different kinds of tensions and approaches came up in the conversations that I had with folks that I was working with during that time. And this led me down the path to think about how some of these impasses and differences between political groups, but also within individual advocates themselves, who are not only working with survivors, but themselves, some who are survivors, came up. And so that kind of developed into the work, the research itself and the writing. And I think later then I went back to spend time conducting participant observation with nonprofit attorneys and caseworkers. And I was also organizing and volunteering with different grassroots efforts and community accountability projects in the Bay Area. So that, I think, continued to kind of shape the project. I think, though in many ways, and I do mention this in the book, that some of the tensions between this kind of framework of Asian American politics tied to folks who are either focused on thinking about members of our communities as victims versus those who are focused on members of other communities as perpetrators of crimes against victims. And I put all of that in quotes. I think that kind of came up for me when I was much younger, before I even went to graduate school, and I was working at different nonprofits in the Los Angeles area. This, you know, shaped, I think, a lot of my uneasiness and a lot of my thinking, because it also is very much embedded with the ways the nonprofit industrial complex is funded, how it's tied to state grants and tied to state management, and the kinds of projects that get re and ones that don't. I think the legal subject of the victim and how the victim emerges as part of our political discourses also reveals a lot of these long standing neoliberal state structures.

[Eileen Zhou]

And from what you said, and also from my reading of your book, I can really tell that your writing and thinking has been evolving along with your work at the grassroots activism. So I'm wondering how you navigate both spaces, because I feel like academia is quite different from how social activism works. And how do you manage to work across these two very different spaces?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Right. Well, I will say that I think part of the navigation is a kind of understanding that it doesn't work very well and that it's always, I think, a kind of struggle that one chooses to take up. And I think that a lot of, you know, a lot of sort of, I guess, approaches to thinking about navigating spaces outside and inside the academy tend to focus on the potential of bridging, like the community and the public with the academy. And that's not really something that I'm interested in. And that's because I think that when we talk about activism, when we talk about intellectual work as something that's supposed to bridge outside the academy with inside the academy, we're often erasing scholars of color who already themselves, while they're either teaching or they are students in the university, it's not their only point of reference. Right. They also are doing other kinds of work in their neighborhoods with community based organizations, with family, with friends. They're part of interventions, they're part of social movements. And so my approach is not so much about trying to bridge these two spaces, but it's actually trying to think about how a lot of the political work in ethnic studies and gender studies is, one, often devalued by universities. And two, when there is any kind of conversation about working with social movements, or whether it's about thinking about activists or thinking about organizers, it's often only compartmentalized to this bridging type of narrative, which tends to benefit the university most. You don't really see that much of an interest in bridging when it comes to the other side. And it's also highly racialized. And I think that it's often underpinned by logics of whiteness that don't really get discussed, and also logics of tokenization as well. I think that when I was conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I spoke with a lot of practitioners and we didn't always agree. Right. And it's not really about agreeing per se, But I think that that brought up a lot of tensions for me. And as a young person, sometimes that was paralyzing because I think a lot of conversations in the institution are often about focusing on best representing voices and best representing authentic voices. That wasn't really working in the kind of project that I was doing because there were differences across those political differences. And in some ways, it also kind of pushed me to also think about how I had to be true to my own voice as well over time. So I think a lot of the support and the shaping of the writing and the shaping of the political commitments of the writing came not only from the interviews and the participant observation, but also from community organizing work that I was doing that was tied to the kinds of political questions that were in the research. But I wasn't necessarily interviewing folks that I was organizing with, if that makes any sense. I think I was also fortunate to have folks who were students as well as faculty members who were supportive of constantly kind of pushing and supporting what it meant to do this type of writing. And I think that that also is really important, and it comes at a kind of cost. And I don't take that lightly. Right. So I think for anyone who's doing work right now and asking questions that are challenging, conditions of knowledge, conditions of racial violence and gender violence, and doing that as part of their writing and their research, as well as their teaching and their organizing, every one of those individuals has been supported by networks and groups of people. And this is something that, you know, that I'm very grateful for and that I think a lot about.

[Eileen Zhou]

Yeah, definitely. And I think you put it in a way that's so powerful. And as a grad student and also a woman of color, I share a lot of similar feelings when I'm in academia. And I really appreciate that you pointing that out. So I'm also curious, through the writing or publishing processes, did you encounter any challenge or pushback in academia? Because I do feel the writing and all the way you incorporated all those ethnographic works feels very different from, you know, an Asian American studies book. So I also want to know how you. How you really get. Get through that process.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Right, yes. There, you know, it's a long time coming. I think that there were. There are several things that I think are, you know, sort of milestones of my own struggle and working through and I think staying committed to the politics and the writing itself. So first, one of the approaches that the book is really focused on developing and maintaining is an attempt to write about the law without speaking like the law. And in order to do that, I not only had to learn about the sort of scope the Violence Against Women's act, as well as the conditions of social welfare policy formation and law enforcement policy formation, but also immigration law, which is just A constantly changing force of state violence that has so many different iterations to it. So trying to develop an ethnic studies and gender studies project that was focused on race and the law, I also kind of had to find my own way towards that. Much of the work in Asian American studies is often focused on different kinds of objects of study. So for me, at the time, most of the work that was focused on law tended to be sort of more squarely in legal studies or in social sciences or law and public policy. And I wanted to build on that work because I do use that work, and it's shaped so much of the historical context as well as contemporary conversations. But it also produced certain paradigms that couldn't help me or weren't useful in order for me to be able to talk about the relationship between protection and punishment. So I had to develop the my way out of that also, in some ways. In addition, I think that typically in Asian American studies, you know, the focus on law and policy has been with formal actors or formal institutions. So that I think, also shaped over time, some of the approaches to race, which emphasize very heavily theories of racial formation and social construction. Those did not also work as well for me in theorizing the racial violence of protection and trying to think about, really, gender violence as the anchor for the unfolding of immigration law and enforcement together. It also did not, I think, allow me to be able to find a different kind of method to talk about gender violence without relying on stories of violence or stories of damage, which, you know, I saw that the law wanted those in order to provide a certain kind of evidence for particular legal fictions and racial figures, which I critique very heavily in the text. So I had to develop a different type of methodology and really a feminist ethnographic methodology. To pair and to pair is not the right word, but to really kind of intervene and develop refusals that would allow me to then produce a study that put forward a legal ethnography of protection. In addition, I think that the text is both really committed to expanding feminist politics within contemporary Asian American studies as well as contemporary Asian American politics. In order to do that, it also has to, you know, I think, come forward with certain critiques around policing and punishment, not simply to say or to point out the racial violence of policing and punishment, but to tie that to and to demonstrate how that also is unfolding and in many ways reproduced and reified by the political claims for saving, rescue, and militarized humanitarianism that are very much embedded both within local community politics. But again, it's really set in motion by neoliberal state structures. So those were some of the challenges I think that came about. I also think at the time, and really producing the text, I really wanted to be able to, to show the contributions that women of color anti violence organizing work has made possible for so many other different fields. And a lot of those questions have to do around this kind of deep critical thinking of who is worthy and who's not, of even becoming or becoming legible as a victim. And I think that that's why I think focusing on abolition feminisms and writers and organizers who have shaped those kinds of questions and have made these ties between law enforcement and policing and public safety objects that we actually have to take up in the kinds of critique that we establish. That was pretty important for me as well, definitely.

[Eileen Zhou]

And I really feel this, these questions and also your rating are really timely considering all the political and social urgencies we're going through at this moment. And as you just said, you mentioned that a key term in this book, abolition feminism. Could you explain more on that?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

I think that the way I anchor and the way I was shaped and continue to be shaped by abolition feminisms has much to do with women of color organizing work around gender violence and a critique of the reliance on punishment through policing in prisons to supposedly rescue women. I think this is an old story that has roots in colonialism and imperialism and nation state building projects. What I am really trying to highlight is that abolition feminist critiques on the reliance of policing to provide so called public safety or safety is absolutely necessary in order for us to critique the relationship between immigration law and policing and the expansion of those two, both at local state levels as well as federal levels. I also, I think, draw pretty heavily from writers who have taken up abolition feminist critiques as part of their analysis around gender based violence and a critique of state violence. So instead of thinking about interpersonal violence as just the problem of individual harms or the quote, the supposed violent individual, abolition feminist critiques are instead really pushing our attention to the relationship between gender violence as a form of state violence and that state violence is themselves are also reproducing and rely upon forms of gender and sexual violence. So this is just one, I think, a set of ideas and frameworks. There's really so much more, and the book only, I think, attends to these sets of questions and these sets of conversations that are made possible by the larger legacy of prison abolition and anti violence organizing work amongst indigenous folks, women of color and immigrant communities.

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[Eileen Zhou]

Thank you for helping us map out the whole framework. And I remember in your book you wrote that abolition feminist theorizations relentlessly remind us that we do not protect each other, we care for each other. So I feel like that dimension of care and caring is also something you try to convey through your work through your writing.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Yes, I am really invested in separating and taking the time to detach legal protection from care practices. If anything, the book is really concerned with trying to highlight how legal protections are used and continue to unfold in order to naturalize, normalize and expand institutions of punishment not only through state structure such as policing and law enforcement, but also through, I think, spaces that we often think of as outside the state, such as Nonprofits and critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex, its militarized form, its form of racial capitalism and its neoliberal structures have long been a part of organizing work as well as writing and scholarly work. And I think that that's not possible without folks who have been organizing and doing writing around prison abolition, as well as abolition feminist scholars who have been working against mainstream white feminist anti violence movements and their police allies and the policies that they've created. So it's for me, I think, focusing on legal protection was one way to be able to contribute to that political genealogy and that political history. And that's also the way that I have chosen to focus on the history of immigration and its contemporary politics as part of these kind of emerging immigration law law enforcement structures, as well as the kind of growth and buildup of the Violence Against Women's Act.

[Eileen Zhou]

I think we'll definitely dive deeper into those aspects as we move forward to discuss the three chapters in your book. But before that, could you walk us through some of the, you know, key legislations that you already brought up in your conversation, like the Violence Against Women act and also U Visa and T Visa.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

The Violence Against Women's act is often celebrated as, you know, a large feminist success. And I think in many ways it has been able to maintain that memory. And, you know, the Violence Against Women's act has its history embedded within a larger crime bill that expanded policing and prison systems that we have today. It also emerges during the era of Clinton's welfare reform policies and their punitive measures tied to work, many of which are again, I think, also part of the growing neoliberal state structures and policies that come about during this late 1980s, 1990s era. We also see during the same time period new federal legislation tied to immigration restrictions and reform, many of which still carry out today. During these new immigration laws in this neoliberal period, we see for the first time some of these distinctions between qualified and unqualified immigrant categories tied to who is able to access health and social welfare benefits along the lines of their legal status, whether it's citizenship status, temporary status, refugee and asylum. So these are the bright lines that are drawn around access to healthcare and social welfare and education that are expanded upon during this time. So this is the era that VAWA emerges, and VAWA comes about under a law enforcement push. The emphasis is to expand and fund and to create new partnerships between law enforcement and local organizations in order to protect public safety and the figure of the victim and the gendered figure of the victim unfolds much of this racial logic around policing. And certainly I am not the first person to write about this. I learned from and I am informed by all the different social movements that spoke up and critiqued VAWA's heavy reliance on funding policing in order to address gender and sexual violence, Much of which really ended up actually just expanding policing and expanding police power. But we're nowhere, you know, 30 some years later. It's certainly not a situation where we've seen the end of rape or where we are seeing less experiences of gender and sexual violence. What we are seeing is more targeted policing of communities. We are seeing more targeted funding going into establishing cooperation and trying to normalize the presence of policing and surveillance in our communities. On top of that, it also disregards and ignores all the different kinds of efforts from community organizers and early anti violence organizers and who spoke up against the reliance on policing in order to address gender and sexual violence. So there certainly were folks who proposed different kinds of avenues. Mimi Kim's work is, I think, fundamental and Beth Ritchie's work is foundational to the different kinds of efforts amongst organizers around gender and sexual violence that were, you know, I think, critical of these more mainstream agendas that were dominated by pro policing logics.

[Eileen Zhou]

Then under this logic or all of these laws, what are some of the specific conditions that the Asian American community or Asian immigrant women are faced with compared with other immigrant women of color?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

That is definitely, I think, one of the specificity tied to Asian American women. What I want to suggest is an orientation where we might think about why something like the Violence Against Women's act and all of these different critiques around policing and the racial violence of law enforcement, how we might think about that as something that's just as important to talk about in Asian American studies. Even if the racial figure of Asian woman was not the primary target of vawa.

[Eileen Zhou]

Right.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

So part of what the book discusses is that VAWA is not a law that says that it's focused on Asian American women in the way, for example, maybe the Page act is, which is often kind of the. The historical law that's talked about in Asian American studies. But my argument here is that we don't have to wait to become statistically relevant to a bad law or to a law that reproduces policing and punishment to then think about why we should continue to ask and continue to kind of push critiques around policing to be a part of Asian American studies scholarship and certainly contemporary political formations, because the legal subject of the victim and all the different configurations and political claims that come out of that have already emerged within our contemporary politics and in our writing. And so the book kind of takes pains to go through. So for example, hate crimes discourses in our current moment, much of that is anchored on the crime victim as a legal subject. At the end of the book, I engage with different organizations and different writers who I think reflect abolition feminist critiques of the reliance on hate crimes discourses for their pro policing agendas and the kind of sanitization of sexuality, to quote Hae Jin Shim, that has emerged from contemporary Asian American political embrace of a hate crimes discourse to address violence. A lot of that erases the insights of feminist thinkers who have really written about victimization and victimhood and gender violence for so long. So much of that I think it's kind of submerged and not accounting for by these more anti Asian hate political rhetoric. The last thing I'll say is that in immigration law, which is very central, and immigration history, which is also very central to Asian American studies, Asian American communities, and both historically and in the contemporary moment, typically the problem with the law is thought of when there is an exclusion, when immigration law constructs forms of racial exclusion against Asian immigrant and refugee communities, or when the law enacts unnameable and legible violence against Asian immigrant and refugee communities. That does not work for something like the analysis around gender and sexual violence under the conditions of bawa. What is actually happening is the law's attempt to try to include and engulf survivors into these pro policing programs and into cooperation with the expansion of law enforcement under the guise of saving and rescuing survivors of gender and sexual violence. These are forms of immigration law. It's actually protection, not punishment and exclusion that is the site of violence that I see. It's important to be able to connect these things together. I'm not saying that the history of legal exclusion and the history extractive violence isn't relevant. What I'm saying is that we actually have to kind of connect how protection and punishment are constituted formation. And when we can do that, we can also see how legal protections that reproduce logics of anti blackness can teach us so much about how we might be able to ask something differently of ourselves and of other communities. Rather than following the law's expectations that survivors have to police themselves and police their own communities and others in order to receive protection. And again, it's. It's not even to. To actually receive protection. It's to be eligible to apply for protection. And it's only temporary. Right? It's. That is also this, this temporal logic Here is that one is temporary protected. Second to the law's primary design, which is to use the victim subject to unfurl and improve and make better policing practices.

[Eileen Zhou]

Thanks for help, help us unpack all this complexities because I feel like there's just so many layers adding up together to the whole scene. And I like how you shift the narrative from victim to survivor. And would you like to say more about that? Because I feel like that's an intentional move in this book, throughout this book.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Sure. I chose to write with the term survivor because of my own, I think, you know, because I learned, I wouldn't say my own, but because of my experience learning and working with abish and feminist groups and organizing work. I think the there the approach, you know, instead of referring to people who have experienced harm as damaged, you know, voiceless victims talking about survivors and allows, I think the political claims as well as the political work and the writing to be able to think about relationships that help survivors and relationships of care that help build support for survivors. But it also highlights what one has to survive beyond and what one has to survive from. So there's also a critique that can take place. The framework also points to what violence one has to survive. And I think that that's important versus I think the emphasis on talking about a person as a victim tends to only think about violence of the victim tied to their, to their body versus the violence of a state structure. So often frameworks that emphasize victimization or that kind of lean into or normalize victimhood will reduce it to the body. And so one can't, especially in this legal structure that I'm talking about with the U and the TV says in Vala, you know, one can only be a victim of another subject, but one can never come before the law as a victim of state violences such as the immigration system or policing systems or the social welfare system. And so when the legal I, you know, to me, victim as a legal subject is to make that kind of argument is to say who becomes legible as a victim is something that is produced and maintained and protected by the law, that the law determines who can become worthy and who can become legible as a victim. It is not something that communities ask for. It is not something that's self determined by communities. It is something that is structured and maintained and highly managed by legal structures by the legal design of the letter of law and by the state. So for us to talk and use the term victim as if it is something that we create for ourselves is not true. I think that also pushes us to think about why we would want to be recognized and when certain political claims attempt to make Asian Americans recognized by the state as victims when victim was never made for us.

[Eileen Zhou]

So I feel like that's also. It's about the whole book, but also very much about the first chapter of your. Yeah, the first chapter of your book is about feminist refusal. I think what you just talked about is actually things that not only you as a scholar, but probably more broadly the Asian American community, or even Asian American studies should be refusing in general.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

I think so. Absolutely. And we have so much to learn, I think, also from black feminists and indigenous feminist thinkers and the writers and thinkers that are engaged in that chapter and really throughout the book are talking a lot about all these different historical and current community experiences and individual experiences of folks who are never quite able to become legible victims, and that the only successful victim historically are white domestic subjects. And I think what I mean by that is that their victim also operates under a colorblind and universal configuration in the law, which means that it rewards experiences that are able to match up to that configuration. And that also is a criticism and a critique that the book is really focused on. It is a problem and a condition of violence, in my view, when someone has to undergo matching their experiences up to the legal subject. So the book is really arguing that the undocumented crime victim is not a person or a person's experiences. That personhood is. Is not the thing that will allow us to make whole this condition because the undocumented crime victim is a legal subject. And so a lot of the advocacy stories that are in the book, I think, lay out the struggle that nonprofit attorneys and case managers are experiencing when they're working with their clients who are survivors to have their experiences of violence match up to that crime victim subject condition. That is where you see legal violence happening. And it's something that none of the advocates can do without. Right. And I would never say to anyone, you know, don't apply for a visa. I would never say that. But what I am saying is that these conditions, when the legal design is primarily concerned and the primary goal is to actually improve and expand policing, the needs of survivors come second. And this is what it looks like when that happens. There's a temporal logic to it. There's the racial violence that happens with this matching. Right. And so a lot of what I'm kind of talking about is that the problem with the law is not that survivors are silenced and they can't be heard. They're actually always speaking. The problem with the law is that the design of it forces advocates and survivors to have to match their own experiences up to the legal subject, whose goal is not to actually prioritize the needs of survivors, but the goal is actually to improve and expand police structures and law enforcement structures. So that's much of what I tried to show both in analyzing the letter of law and doing that with. Not after, but with the legal ethnographic stories. And so the writing of the law, or thinking about protection as a genre of law's writing required me to take on that kind of method. Just it was quite challenging. And I think that there's still a lot more that needs to be built on. But my hope was to at least provide that opening with this book.

[Eileen Zhou]

Because you've documented quite a few cases and stories in your book. I'm wondering if you can share with us one or two to really like or audience, know what those legal and social advocates really navigate on the ground between their clients and the state structure or legal, the legislation.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Sure, I'm trying to think of one. Well, I might share like there's several moments throughout the text where I. I try to. To talk about ethnographic impasse. And I phrase that as moments where there's an impasse between me and the advocate I'm speaking with. And that has to do with how we're both talking. You know, in many of the interviews, advocates would. They would talk with me and they would use one word, and then it was so, for example, they might say victim, but then they would always say something different. They would refer to the person that they were working with as an immigrant woman or a member of a community. They might use a specific word, such as perpetrator, but then they would use a different word and they would say a family member, father or brother or sister. Another example is talking about stories of violence. So oftentimes they would start to explain it to me, and it had to do with the kinds of evidence that were needed and the kinds of, I think, anticipations and worries about how an immigration official who's interviewing their client or judge might view them. And then they would retell the story in their own words. And so I saw this happening a lot. And I think that also signaled a certain kind of struggle in the work that, you know, for the folks that I spoke with, it was not only just about the need to apply and receive a certain kind of protection for survivors that they were working with, but there was also this other kind of struggle, which is to Find ways to talk about the law in a different way. And I think that signaled something for me, right? That there would always be. It's like. They'd always say, like, victim, and then they would say something else to correct it. So that's one example. I think that another. And what I mean by example there is that this type of impasse between speakers also reflects and actually comes from the impasses between law. So these within the letter law itself. And I was really interested in trying to draw that out. And really, I think theorizing the violence of protection, rather than writing about protection as something that corrects punishment, and rather than writing about protection as a nonviolent construction that then addresses or corrects or resolves some other racial violence or some other gender violence, it was really important to me to critique the racial and gender violence of legal protection. And that is what I think allowed me to also contribute a conversation on immigration to these broader abolition feminist writings around the relationship of the Violence Against Women's act and the expansion of policing since the 1990s. So those, I think, are some examples. I think another one that is particularly important, and this comes up, I think, in several different instances are moments where folks I interviewed and spoke with would ask me, you know, why are you. Why are you asking me these questions? So we'd be talking about something, and then they'd say, well, why are you asking me about police? It doesn't really have anything to do with what's happening. One example that comes up in the book, an attorney I'm talking with says to me, you know, why are you asking about policing? It's not really something that Asian American clients deal with as much. And so I think that paying attention to that and really thinking about that and writing about that was important as well, because it refuses this kind of clean expectation that ethnography should only. The goal of ethnography should only be to represent the authentic voice. I don't think that that's actually what a feminist approach to ethnography would be. I think that through ethnographic practice, whether it's interviews, you know, participant observation, whether it's being a part of the space and the people refusing the moments where we are not supposed to talk about these kinds of difficulties. That kind of refusal is, I think, something that feminist writers and organizers deal with all the time. And so that was kind of why I really myself struggled to be able to do this. But I tried to as best I could in. In that. In those sections. The last thing that I'll say is that there's one moment in, in the book where I talk about an attorney who's working with a client, and she asks, and her client's being interviewed by immigration, and she kind of asks for a moment and a pause and she, you know, asks, you know, speaks with her client, is like, why? Why aren't you telling all the stories and all the bad things that happened to you? Why aren't you telling them? And her client says to her, oh, you know, I thought that it would be better if I kind of made myself more innocent and more clean. And then they'll want the. They being the people interviewing her, then they'll want to help me more, is what she says. And, you know, the attorney is telling me about this and, you know, she's just reflecting on how I think, how profound, but also how I think in many ways the stakes of that kind of conversation, how it reflects all these different experience of violence and structures of violence, like in that one moment and in that one conversation. And so that really shaped my thinking quite a bit. And we talked about this a lot throughout the interview and in different conversations that we had.

[Eileen Zhou]

I remember the case you just brought up, because when I was reading that, it was really powerful to me because you were also saying, according to the attorney's retelling of the story, the client was somehow gigling and most of the people who interviewed her were white. And I feel like that case really, really shows us how Asian immigrant women are somehow internalizing the type of violence, racial and gendered violence.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Oh, I see. I think. I think what I was trying to. I like in that moment. And I understand what you're saying by internalizing, and I think what you mean is that. And you can tell me if I'm hearing you incorrectly, but I think what you're saying is that this is, you know, in this scene there, the, you know, the survivor sees how the state sees her. And what's really, I think, horrifying about that particular scene is that violence, or having experienced different kinds of gender and sexual violence, having evidence of that, displaying that, whether it's expressing it or documenting it, is supposed to be the requirement. But actually, what the attorney is shocked by is that her client is saying, no, it's. I think the state needs me or wants me to be more innocent and more clean in order to be credible. Right. As a cooperator and in order for her will to cooperate, to be more credible. So that very much highlights the, again, the kind of pro policing goals of these protections and of these rescue projects to the point where she's not saying and she's downplaying the client is downplaying conditions of violence that she has experienced. And all of that is also tied to her sexuality and also tied to conditions of migration and how that might be seen. And so I think that that's kind of all a part of the kind of, I guess the story of that relationship between legal protection and punishment when it comes from the state. That's different than how communities practice care and attempt to build care for each other. And again, this doesn't mean that one can live without the law. We don't have a choice. And I think that's again, how do we. And organizers and advocates are asking these questions all the time. And in terms of writing, I wanted to also be able to take up the struggle and that kind of struggle in the writing. What were the things that I needed to refuse in my own ethnographic practices and what were the ideas and objects that I had to refuse in order for me to write a kind of abolition feminist critique of legal protection? So that is what I tried to do.

[Eileen Zhou]

Now I get it. And I think another key aspect that we haven't really touched upon is the anti human trafficking law that you mostly discuss in the third chapter. And in that chapter you focus on T visa that is designed specifically to provide protection for human trafficking survivors. So would you want to explain that a little bit? Like, what's the power mechanisms behind that type of protection?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Sure. So in that chapter I'm theorizing the racial and gendered configuration of the contractable victim. And the TV says reliance on this framework and the rhetoric around modern day slavery. And so this racial figure of the modern day slave. There has been so much work by other researchers and writers and organizers that are mentioned in this chapter that have laid out the, you know, the, the militarized humanitarian projects that are framed as anti trafficking projects that are kind of germinated and generated from western nation states. Some of them are religious, many of them are religious, driven to save and rescue sex trafficking victims in other countries. And there are also writers who have talked about US Anti trafficking laws as forms of anti immigration laws, that anti trafficking laws rely on an anti immigrant rhetoric, the separation which immigrants should be here and which shouldn't. The use of anti trafficking or the focus on traffickers to promote and to legitimize harsher immigration laws, more surveillance at borders, harsher border restrictions. So building on all of their work, what I also wanted to discuss was thinking about the T visa as a policing tool. And how the T visa also produced conditions where survivors are being legally constructed as cooperators. Much of the book, both the you and the TV side, am really emphasizing and critiquing this argument that there's a mutual exchange that exists. These legal protections kind of frame temporary protection as a mutual exchange exchange between survivors and the state. But the mutual part of it I disagree with and the exchange part of it I also disagree with that there's a logic, a racial capitalism logic to the valuing of protection and the worthiness of who can become legible as a victim in order to be exchanged. And it's certainly not mutual when conditions of state violence are in place to both expel and deport undocumented survivors. And these same systems are then also the ones managing and I think monitoring, whether it's through an administrative or enforcement arm, either the inclusion, the temporary inclusion of survivors. So neither mutual nor neither, I think neutral free exchange. Less than with the T visa, I focused on the racial figure of the modern day slave and the kinds of promises and its reliance on logics of anti blackness to create subjects of injury. And so later in that chapter I make moves to talk about legal injury as white injury. Rather than thinking about, you know, rather than thinking about injury as something that is kind of an experience, that something that people experience. I am actually arguing there that it's a legal production.

[Eileen Zhou]

And I'm just wondering how women or those advocates and attorneys are dealing with today. Any changes you've noticed over, you know, the past few years or from when you first started this project?

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Sure, when I first started, these provisions were very new. So the book talks about how many of the folks I interviewed were trying out all these different efforts to get certification. They were trying to create the paperwork themselves. Law enforcement often was hesitant to actually give certification or to sign a certification form which was needed in order to mail in the application, or UNT visas. And since then, with VAWA's reauthorization, there's been more funding for things like technical trainings. And so I think the law is doing its work. I think that it has succeeded in many ways. I think there is more administrative structures and there's even more public knowledge, I think, about the UNT visas. And so you, you see that unfolding. And one of the difficulties I faced and often questions from other people were questions such as this, why critique a legal protection when there's so many other horrible legal punishments that are happening, especially with all of the immigration restrictions. When we see this unprecedented presence of ICE enforcement and kidnappings why, you know, critique something like that provides something and something that's like a practical tool and

[Eileen Zhou]

seems to be a good law.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Right. And my response to that is, you know, what is so practical about making undocumented and immigrant survivors into cooperators? Why do we accept the fact that we think non citizens should always give something up in order to be able to appear? And I think those are the kinds of questions we have to keep asking ourselves. Otherwise, our analyses and our politics are just going to render legal protections as exceptions to other forms of state violence, rather than seeing how legal protections actually unfold and play a role in that connection and that normalization of protection and punishment in law and in our political claims. So that's why I think that it really, I think, shifts the conversation around and can, I think, shift the conversation around policing and immigration. And look, even when we sort of think about what happens in nonprofit or advocacy work, many of the folks who are working on UNT cases and UNT applications, they have to talk with law enforcement. And there are other kinds of apprehensions that are put in place when that happens. That creates distances with other immigrant organizing political groups that refuse to cooperate with immigration and are actively critiquing local police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, which by the way, has been going on for many years and is sanctioned by programs that were funded through that 90s era, such as 287 insecure communities. So I think that looking at the ways in which survivors of gender and sexual violence are often used in these debates, I think is just one other way to continue to show that an abolitionist politics has to be a part of any kind of immigrant rights framework or any kind of gender violence, sexual violence, political project. Otherwise we, you know, risk reproducing and repeating conditions where rape becomes the linchpin for the. The continual expansion and unfurling of law enforcement and immigration enforcement.

[Eileen Zhou]

So we've been talking about abolition politics and also feminist refusals. And I feel it's not just refusing, but also there's something generative or more potential there. And also in your book you were writing that abolition is actually about world building. So I'm wondering what, what kind of world could we imagine through this abolition politics and feminist refusals, or if you see any potential of solidarity among different communities and people from different racial or socioeconomic backgrounds, I think it's already happening.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

I think that if we look at the work of organizations such as the Long Legacy of Insight and Survived and Punishment or Survived and Punished, if we look at interrupting criminalization, if we think about all these different political projects and community organizing projects, that kind of work has been ongoing. And I certainly would not be able to ask the kinds of questions that I have tried to ask without the thinking and the organizing work that I have been able to be a part of and also those that I have not been able to be a part of, but I have learned from. So I think that this is different than thinking about Asian Americans as allies. This is very this is not that. I think this is more about thinking about a feminist politics and thinking about Asian American studies as an insurgent practice. And I think this is also something that highlights the difference between groups of people who are interested in Asian Americans and coming up with solutions or policies for Asian Americans, but they are not interested in the critical potential of Asian American Studies or challenging, I think, the possibility for a different kind of ethnic studies framework. So I think those are some of the things I think about with and thank you for your question. I'm not sure if I totally answered it, but that's kind of where my thinking is. I definitely, I see the study of all of this as something that is already political, definitely.

[Eileen Zhou]

And I think by bringing up all these questions and by problem, problematizing things seem to be normal and good is already a way that leads toward possibly a better future. Thanks again for joining us on the New Books Network.

[Professor Li Ann Wong]

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed my time here and thank you for the really thoughtful questions. Found something funny. Send it instantly. TikTok makes sharing with friends effortless. One tap whole group laughing moments move fast. Download TikTok now.