Sexual Coercion, Gender Construction, and Responsibility for Freedom: A Beauvoirian Account of Me Too (original) (raw)
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Outlines. Critical Practice Studies
When not acting in ways that are recognised as physicalself-defence, women are often – in psychology and inother dominant discourses – generalised as inherentlypassive during subjection to sexualised coercion (rapeand attempted rape). Likewise, in the aftermaths, their(in)actions are frequently pathologised as ‘maladaptivecoping strategies’.We present theoretically and empirically based argumentsfor an agency-oriented approach to women’sperspectives on sexualised coercion. Agency is understoodas intentional, situated and strategic. Sexualisedcoercion is not generalised as a single “traumatic”event, but conceptualised as life events. Meanings ofcoercion are embedded in social activities connectedto discourses on ‘rape’ and ‘trauma’. Thus personalmeanings of subjection are understood as developed inand through participation in trajectories across diversecontexts.Adopted in our study, this approach points to thegreat diversity of personal meanings of sexualised coercion.Moreover, it re...
Sexual Agency is not a Problem of Neoliberalism: Feminism, Sexual Justice, & the Carceral Turn
Sex Roles, 2015
We examine the promises and limitations of Laina Y. Bay-Cheng's model of the Agency Line in terms of its contribution to interdisciplinary feminist discussions of young women's sexuality in the U.S. Bay-Cheng offers a welcome critique of neoliberal assumptions embedded in contemporary sexual discourses and her new Agency Line model contributes to complicating the virgin/whore dichotomy. While we find the model interesting and compelling, we critique the argument along three dimensions: conceptual tools, evidence offered, and theoretical scope. First, the model's central concepts-neoliberalism and agency-are awkwardly conjoined. We point to additional conceptual tools from commodity and third wave feminisms and carceral studies of sexuality in order to further an understanding of agency and constraint. Second, the claim that agentic sexual scripts produce harm for young women is speculative and we provide empirical evidence to the contrary. Third, we argue that the article's theoretical claims both overgeneralize about (all) young women and under-generalize nonagents or victims. We explain how Bay-Cheng's tendency to scrutinize the neoliberal demand for agency without also interrogating the neoliberal demand for victims runs the risk of reinscribing gendered nodes of morality and under analyzes the relationship between state surveillance, scrutiny, and policing of women's sexuality. We conclude by calling on progressive feminists to think through sexual agency more carefully by resisting carceral feminist cooptation and supporting sexual justice principles. In so doing, the promise of sexual agency might be more fully realized by a broader range of girls and women across lines of privilege and oppression.
Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, 2005
Australia's version of the popular genre of the ''victim-feminism'' debate played out via a case of sexual harassment in a university college, in which two young women alleged that they had been sexually harassed by the master [chief executive officer] of their college. This event became much more than a matter of parochial interest when one of Australia's best-known novelists decided to write a book about it. The book generated enormous media attention, though this was often very polarized and not very useful in furthering our understanding of sexual harassment. However, there was some interesting debate in the wake of the book that did manage to transcend the dichotomy of ''power'' versus ''powerlessness.'' La version australienne du de´bat populaire du « fe´minisme de victimisation » s'est de´roule´e par le biais d'un cas de harce`lement sexuel dans un colle`ge universitaire, dans lequel deux jeunes femmes ont alle´gue´avoir e´te´harcele´es sexuellement par le maıtre [p. d.g.] de leur colle`ge. Cet e´ve´nement a eu une porte´e qui de´borde largement son lieu d'origine lorsque l'une des romancie`res les plus connues en Australie a de´cide´d'e´crire un livre a`ce sujet. Le livre a e´tet re`s me´diatise´, bien que les reportages aient e´te´souvent tre`s polarise´s et sans grande utilite´pour approfondir notre compre´hension du harce`lement sexuel. Il y a eu, ne´anmoins, dans la foule´e de la publication du livre, un de´bat inte´ressant qui a re´ussi a`transcender la dichotomie du « pouvoir » face a`« l'impuissance ». Who would have thought that writing about a defining moment in (legal) feminism could have induced performance anxiety? The performance anxiety reduced when I remembered that we were asked to write about a defining moment rather than the defining moment. Thus, I did not have to establish my moment's superior prominence, only its importance. Yet I was asked to write about an Australian moment for a Canadian journal, and, while the Canadians might be happy with an Australian moment, the Australians who read the anniversary issue of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law might be more critical of my singular choice. Agony can take one only so far. .. embrace the choice and write! 1. The High Court of Australia is the highest federal court, the equivalent of the Supreme Court of Canada.
How Can I Deny This Body is Mine: Normative Violence, Embodiment and Resignification.docx
This thesis seeks to explore, problematize and critique the violence of norms—normative violence, especially gender norms and heteronormativity-- in contemporary political life. It focuses on the interaction and engagement between norms and the body, and demonstrates that normative violence manifests itself in a twofold way: norms not only regulate, normalize and manage bodies that are already intelligible into reified forms, but also through their exclusionary logic produce unintelligible bodies that are unlivable. Situated within contemporary feminist and queer movements, this thesis bridges between aporias and problems emergent from them and critical readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This thesis identifies and indicates normative violence and erasures inherited in the popular rhetoric of the movements and diverse theoretical accounts of the body. Finally, the argument is made that feminist and queer readings of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty provide possibilities for undoing normative violence by resignifying norms temporally and performatively via collective action.
Gender, Bodies, Power, spring 2020
This course will explore gender and power through the category of the body. Due to the preeminence first of the soul and then of the mind, and to its constructed opposition to the body in Western philosophy, the latter has suffered a systematical and unfair relegation in the study of politics. Among other discourses, feminism has been recognized for having conferred the body its deserved place, identifying it as a central category of analysis. But what is a body? How do we confer meaning to it? Is the body private or public? Historical or technological? What, if anything, is political about it? This course will explore these salient questions following the intersectional relationship between gender, race, class and sexuality. During the semester, we will compare case studies such as abortion, sex work, surrogacy, reproductive labor and trans politics. The ultimate goal will be to examine how the body, oftentimes instrumentalized as a site of oppression, can be also mobilized as a mode of resistance for the purpose of collective liberation.
Untimely meditations on sex, gender, and feminism
All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."-Diderot Note: Much of what follows isn't exactly "politically correct." A large proportion of respectable psychological and scientific literature from the past and present is contrary to feminist dogmas about gender, but I'm skeptical that this fact in itself invalidates that literature. As I see it, there are interesting innate (and also socially constructed) differences between men and women, and over the years I've liked to reflectively probe what those differences might be. Perhaps in doing so I've been a bit too provocative sometimes; but we should all be open to perspectives that diverge from our own, at least if they're professed in good faith. Anyway, for what it's worth, none of the following bears on the feminist moral crusade, which every ethically aware person is obligated to support. We should all be feminists in the sense of fighting for political and economic equality. I'm critical only of the movement's idealist, postmodernist (and thus pretentious) orientation. To speak bluntly, in order to explain gender and sexuality I don't think it's necessary to resort to the airy discourse-mongering and labyrinthine deconstructionism of postmodernism, feminism, and queer theory. These sorts of "theoretical" writings may be useful for academics hoping to get tenure, but they often serve more to obfuscate than to explicate. A more fruitful and accessible approach is to use good old-fashioned straightforward reasoning, combined with respect for the findings of relevant scientific research. Readers accustomed to academic language and argument will find that much of the following (excerpted from books) has a rather unsophisticated and even offensive sound. This is because, unlike academic language, it's direct and unpretentious, based only on neutral observation and contemplation of humanity, rather than adherence to disciplinary norms. Professional intellectuals would do well to reflect on Noam Chomsky's statement that their institutional function, which they carry out with relish, is to make simple things appear complicated. *** On feminine self-ambivalence.-Why does the feminine as such seem to be more prone to insecurity about itself and its place in society than the masculine? There are many reasons, of course. One set of them is suggested by this passage from Christine Downing's book Women's Mysteries: Toward a Poetics of Gender (2003): …From a series of letters written to me over the course of years I have culled these reflections: "I write today as I bleed. The first day and the heaviest flow. I write feeling my weightedness, the drag of my uterus. Feeling my wound, my incapacity. All the changes in my body-my voice flattened, my belly swollen, my clumsiness, a flood of dreams I cannot bring back to consciousness. "How difficult it is to stay in the body. I get up, get to the bathroom, reach into my vagina for the menstrual sponge-a bloody mess! Squeeze the blood into a cup. It splatters everywhere. "Can I write this to you? Am I so crazy I don't even know it? Today I feel such selfdoubt. "The knowledge of taboo returns. The blood is not to be touched, let alone saved. "Even what we value of menstruation-are our bodies there? We value the rhythmic cycle, the feelings, the dreams, the bond. We talk and interpret. Analyze dreams. Theorize. Baroque elaborations. Virginal fluffy clouds. Ascending out of the blood, the mess, the ache, the wound. "Even this writing. How difficult for me to stay with my body. My feelings of vulnerability. My tears that I had hoped were past, falling again. Fears and doubts. "Here I am. The ache in my lower spine is sensual, as is the openness of my vulva, my blood slipping in my vagina. "A wound not to be healed-but attended to-felt, touched, smelled, seen. Received." Merida's words remind me of how our monthly periods open us to our vulnerability, our tears, our doubts, our fears, to a sense of wounds as not to be fixed but attended to. She encourages us to honor our dreams, the dreams we have that prepare us for our bleeding, the dreams that accompany our bleeding, the dreams that warn us we may cease to bleed… This passage highlights the importance of the body, and of biology, to our behavior and selfconceptions. What it suggests, for instance, is that the body tends to be more "other" for women than for men, even as women have a more intimate relationship with it. It asserts itself against their will, it has its own cycles and rhythms, it bleeds and leaks and swells and gets pregnant and determines moods. These facts, combined with women's relative physical weakness and smallness, evidently cause them to feel, at least implicitly, more "passive" and weak than males as such (which is what makes it possible for them to desire the feeling of being "protected" by their man). 2 Firmness, leanness, muscular tautness, as in young men-but also in some women, for example female athletes or bodybuilders-is experienced as signifying things like fighting against opponents, being active and confident, dominating, being mobile and strong; softness, physical weakness, pregnant immobility, do not foster a dominating self-confidence relative to the opposite sex. A second obvious answer to the question I posed above is the ubiquity of the "male gaze." It seems to be a biological fact that male sexual arousal operates largely by virtue of the look, the look at a beautiful woman, a naked woman, a scantily clad woman. Women tend to be aroused by touch, emotional intimacy, male assertiveness and strength; men are aroused, in large part, by sexobjecthood in the woman. So there are strong tendencies for the male gaze, and hence for some degree of objectification of women, to be an ever-present element in most or all societies. This will, first of all, tend to make women relatively self-conscious, conscious of their appearances.