In my discussion of two of the ways we can understand the role of the body in anti-violence activism, I have highlighted that a heightened awareness of our bodily vulnerability unsettles our gendered identities. I now want to explore how the unsettling of identities was taken in a radical direction by my colleagues: understanding women as vulnerable bodies. The formulation of women as vulnerable bodies, characterized by an inherent corporeal vulnerability to violence, proved to be an extremely unsettling formulation, not only for me and my colleagues, but for other women and non-binary folk who came into contact with this formulation when I shared early iterations of this work with the collective, at conferences and in other academic settings. In particular, this formulation seemed unsettling as it appeared to run counter to the decades of activism that emphasized women's empowerment and work towards the celebration of women's bodies as powerful and agentic. The centricity of bodily vulnerability to anti-violence activism for the women I worked with, however, was a striking and salient theme and one that reverberated with activists working on other issues.

In my attempts to come to terms with the implications of my colleagues’ formulation of women as vulnerable bodies and the importance of this formulation for anti-violence activism, I found Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability insightful. Butler (2011b: 200) outlines vulnerability as having a twofold meaning:

Drawing on Butler's conceptualization of vulnerability, I interpreted my colleagues as not only trying to recognize women's physical vulnerability to others, but also that they were attempting to underscore that we needed to cultivate the capacity to be moved or impressed on by women subjected to violence. Positioning women as vulnerable bodies accentuated the pressing need to promote institutional and domestic protection of women. Throughout my time with the collective, I too was moved by my own exposure to my colleagues and our activism with victims, and eventually came to understand women's dependency on one another and the social conditions that produced women as vulnerable bodies.