Vulnerability and the feminist politics of sexual violence

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.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2019

Author dc:creator

• Cousens, Emily

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/j9gk-q084

OAI identifier oai:identifier

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