The Fight Against Sexual Violence

Review of International Studies, 2021

A key curiosity animating this article concerns how sexual violence is theorised. The work of feminist scholars has been crucial in unearthing ways in which women's traditionally demeaned bodies regularly materialised as ‘easy targets’ for such violence. The gift of the concept of gender has played a significant role in facilitating the production of this corpus of knowledge. Less noticed in the literature, in policy and legislation has been sexual violence against men – an egregious omission. Yet it seems that redeploying the concept of gender to make sense of sexual violence against men and elevate this violence into the realms of theoretical and legislative attention is not straightforward. Identifying feminist work as in part responsible for the rendering of sexual violence against men as too ‘unseen’ in theory provoked my attention, though it's not that I place feminist theory as ‘innocent’ or infallible – far from it. In this article I unpack some of the complexities a...

Critical Reflections: Exploring the Continuum between Sexuality and Sexual Violence (2015)

The four volumes are compilations of the rich, vibrant discussions from the Roundtable on Exploring the Continuum between Sexuality and Sexual Violence on April 28, 2015, representing each of the panels. ‘Critical Reflections‘ is our endeavour to share the nuanced perspectives that emerged from the roundtable with the larger movement, to initiate and sustain dialogue on protectionist frameworks arising from an exclusive focus on sexual violence, to the neglect of concerns of sexuality.

2019

This thesis asks: how does understanding vulnerability enable feminists to engage with sexual violence? Whilst there has been a 'return to vulnerability' (Murphy 2012: 70) in the recent feminist literature, sexual violence is notably absent. These contributions to the field emphasise the shared character of vulnerability, focusing on it as an ambiguous ontological condition (Gilson 2014). This is in contrast to activist antiviolence movements of the 1970s that articulated a 'structural' account of vulnerability, where women's disproportionate vulnerability to sexual violence was a point of departure. The thesis will argue that an intersectional feminist politics of sexual violence needs to take a two-dimensional approach to vulnerability and incorporate insights from both the structural and ontological perspectives. It begins with a historiographical argument, which is that the affective and institutional legacy of the sex wars, debates on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1980s that saw discussions about women's sexuality polarise into 'pro-sex' and 'antipornography' positions, has resulted in the academic aversion to thinking vulnerability and sexual violence together. By considering in detail the contributions of Andrea Dworkin and Judith Butler on the questions of vulnerability and sexual violence, thinkers associated with anti-pornography and pro-sex perspectives respectively, I disrupt this oppositional narrative. In the process, I pave the way for my own perspective, which argues that sexual violence politics must be able to both i) counter the weaponisation of gendered vulnerability by reactionary movements and ii) challenge sexual violence, as an endemic social issue. I contrast the mainstream #MeToo movement with Tarana Burke's grassroots, black feminist, original Me Too movement in order to draw out the intersectional implications of my argument. Burke's Me Too demonstrated the radical potential for a sexual violence activism that begins with vulnerability in both its ontological and structural dimensions. Chapter four Judith Butler, vulnerability and livable lives: from performativity to precarity 4.1 Judith Butler, the philosopher's feminist 4.2 Butler's positive spectral presence 4.3 Contextualising Butler's focus: gender, vulnerability and violence 4.4 The relationship between vulnerability and violence 4.6 Linguistic vulnerability 4.7 Corporeal vulnerability 4.8 Vulnerability and sexual violence in Judith Butler 4.9 Conclusion Chapter five Mobilising vulnerability in sexual violence discourses 5.1 The political purchase of gendered vulnerability 5.2 Feminism and anti-feminism in vulnerability discourses 5.3 Reactionary mobilisations #1: racialising vulnerability 5.4 Oppositional vulnerability in racialised sexual violence discourses 5.5 Reactionary mobilisations #2: the vulnerable cisgender woman 5.6 Two-dimensional vulnerability and victims of sexual violence 5.7 Conclusion Chapter six Vulnerability, Me Too and feminist sexual violence activisms 6.1 Introduction: The return of sexual politics 6.2 Tarana Burke's Me Too movement: A movement of survivors 6.3 Intersectional activism and the problem of prisons 6.4 The viral #MeToo movement 6.5 Oppositional vulnerability and the viral #MeToo movement 6.6 Vulnerability and sexual violence activisms 6.7 Conclusion Chapter seven Conclusion: Vulnerability and bodily autonomy 7.1 Bringing sexual violence into vulnerability studies 7.2 Collating the contributions of the thesis by way of bodily autonomy 7.3 Vulnerability: what now and where next? Reference List 10 In the 'self-help-terrain' Ewa Ziarek writes how 'from books to talk shows, vulnerability signifies a risk that has to be managed by individuals themselves or is reclaimed as a new virtue to be cultivated' (2013: 67)

SFRA Review, 2022

The subtext of the power hierarchy behind rape disturbs its positionality as a violent expression of bodily desire. In feminist dystopian narratives, power over the body – in its creation, usage and disciplining – is a central theme. The heterogeneous approaches of these dystopian narratives to sexual violence utilizes cognitive estrangement in order to make statements about power itself. In Ros Anderson’s The Hierarchies (2020) and Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters (2017), the female posthuman and human suffer from sexual violence from their creators/fathers. The ethics of these interactions are left questionable, but not condemned by the narratives themselves. Sexual violence becomes a visceral expression of power instituted by the respective societies over the female rather than an expression of male desire. I posit that these contemporary feminist dystopian texts explore human and posthuman subjectivities in relation to sexual violence. Each of these texts attempts to portray sexual violence as an expression of power either instituted already in a world by means of norms and traditions, or in the process of being a tool for enforcing patriarchal power relations. I conclude that sexual violence in these texts is a means of constituting identities and maintaining social hierarchies, both being complementary acts to create and sustain conflict.

This special issue set out to showcase debates around the relative utility of concepts such as everyday sexism, lad culture and rape culture, to shift thinking and enable change in how sexual violence in all its complexity is experienced, researched and communicated. The contributions engage with the populist energy of these concepts, but also consider them critically, taking them beyond the everyday and mining them for their usefulness and limitations in context-specic ways. The papers also illuminate how these notions interact with policy and practice discourses such as violence against women and girls1 and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)2, and when populist language can be at cross-purposes with policy. As editors of the special issue, what interests us is the ways in which the papers, both individu- ally and collectively, show how researching gender and sexual violence demands new conceptual and methodological tools. They enable discussion across a wide range of contexts to explore, problematize, and transform new mediations of gendered and sexual violence.

Journal of the Odisha Association for English Studies, 2016

Operationalizing feminism has been a challenging tribulation despite the various efforts of previous feminist and critical scholars. Previous Feminist conceptualizations fail to acknowledge the politicized process of feminism and have focused too much on gender mainstreaming, which can limit the scholars' ability to ask critical questions about the process of feminism. While a plethora of definitions of Feminism exist, this paper aims to redefine the existing theory and to examine the process of the intersection of sex-gender oppression on the one hand and the sex-positive women's rights on the other. The paper discusses the background of feminism that situates movement for women's liberation in the existing literature. It also analyses the early phase of Feminism, including early activists who sought to advance women's suffrage; the later phase of women's fight for their rights focusing on their politicized inequalities, and the sex-positive feminism that strongly campaigns for sexual freedom to enjoy sexual pleasure and promiscuity at par with the men to liberate women from sex-gender oppression. After analyzing each phase, this paper argues that redefining Feminism provides important implications for post-modern Feminist scholars on how we can conceptualize this theory to ask critical questions for inquiry purposes and to discuss the process of understanding Feminism's political, sociological, economical, and historical roots.

Critical Reflections: Exploring the Continuum between Sexuality and Sexual Violence (2015)

The four volumes are compilations of the rich, vibrant discussions from the Roundtable on Exploring the Continuum between Sexuality and Sexual Violence on April 28, 2015, representing each of the panels. ‘Critical Reflections‘ is our endeavour to share the nuanced perspectives that emerged from the roundtable with the larger movement, to initiate and sustain dialogue on protectionist frameworks arising from an exclusive focus on sexual violence, to the neglect of concerns of sexuality.

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2016

This paper explores the role that men's rights activism (MRA) is playing in a contemporary backlash to feminist anti-rape activism. We engage in a discourse analysis of popular MRA websites to reveal a set of interrelated claims, including: that sexual violence, like domestic violence, is a gender-neutral problem; that feminists are responsible for erasing men's experiences of victimization; that false allegations are widespread; and that rape culture is a feminist-produced moral panic. We argue that sexual violence is emerging as a new focus of the men's rights movement, competing with a longstanding emphasis on fathers' rights. The subject of MRA activism has shifted and is becoming less familial and more sexual. MRAs appear to be using the issue of rape to mobilize young men and to exploit their anxieties about shifting consent standards and changing gender norms.

The Journal of Social Policy Studies, 2018

Claudia Mitchell – PhD, James McGill Professor, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Email: [email protected] Turbulent times in relation to sexual violence in the lives of girls and young women call for solidarity and global action. One of the effects of globalization is the increased recognition of a borderless world that, in some ways, erases the boundaries between 'over there' and 'over here', challenging some of the distinctions behind a Global North and a Global South. In this article, I offer an analysis of the issues behind sexual violence, which frame the possibilities for research teams working with girls and young women across the Global North and the Global South. At the same time, I highlight the possibilities for learning more about North-North and South-South interactions. What would such an approach entail and what kinds of strategies are useful for sustaining such a strategy in combating sexual violence? In particular, how can such a framewo...