No, ‘Anticipating Violence’ Is Not Violence

Taxpayer funded “research” shows how language is being manipulated to serve a radical ideological agenda.

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About the Author

James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.

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One of the most troubling trends in contemporary academia is the systematic attempt to erase or radically redefine ordinary language—especially words with clear, longstanding meanings. Critical, feminist, and queer theorists are driving much of this linguistic demolition, and their work should be called out plainly whenever possible.

Earlier this year, the academic journal Feminist Theory published a perfect example of this phenomenon: a paper titled “‘I’ve grown fearful of any rustle behind me’: defining anticipating discriminatory violence as violence.” It was written by three academics at Canadian public universities—Celeste E. Orr, Alessia Mastrorillo, and Nicholas Hrynyk—and supported by a federal grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In other words, taxpayers funded it.

The authors advance a simple but astonishing claim: that “anticipating discriminatory violence is violence in and of itself.” They argue that violence need not involve an action, a perpetrator, or even intent. They contend that simply living in what they describe as a “Western capitalist cisheteropatriarchal” society is itself a form of violence, because such societies are “systems of oppression,” and therefore “[a]nticipating violence is the logical consequence of living under systems of oppression.”