Troubling the ‘self’ in self-protection

Self-protection heeds the promise to disrupt the often-gendered hierarchies intrinsic to the relations between the protector and the protected. At the same time, relational feminists have more recently troubled the very notion of ‘self’ as deeply grounded in the body politic of the modern State, on the one hand, and the liberal imaginary of the sovereign individual, on the other. Drawing on this critique, we unpack who the ‘self’ is in self-protection and what kind of ‘bodies’ it claims to represent. Moving away from ethical individualism towards the feminist ethics of solidarity, we reimagine self-protection in relation to the collective body of the social or political community, where all subjects are able to act as both protectors and the protected. By uprooting the ‘self’ of protection from the liberal framework of sovereign state/individual, this intervention opens up the space to explore new possibilities for collective action for protection, based on a relational co-production of self.