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Vulnerability and the Feminist Politics of Sexual Violence

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Vulnerability and the Feminist Politics of Sexual Violence Vulnerability and the Feminist Politics of Sexual Violence Emily Cousens A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy, Oxford Brookes University for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy September 2019 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for the examination for the PhD degree of Oxford Brookes University is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). I declare that my thesis consists of 95,739 words. 2 Abstract 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 anti- violence 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 ‘anti- pornography’ 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. 3 Contents Introduction 6 0.1 Vulnerability and sexual violence 11 0.2 Methodology 13 0.3 Terminology and the ‘trouble’ with sexual violence 14 0.4 Research relevance 18 0.5 Chapter outline 21 Chapter one Vulnerability: from structural to ontological accounts of the condition 27 1.1 What does vulnerability mean? 27 1.2 Structural perspectives on vulnerability 28 1.3 Shortcomings of the structural approach 36 1.4 Ontological perspectives on vulnerability 39 1.5 Revaluing vulnerability 47 1.6 Conclusion 54 Chapter two Vulnerability and the sexual politics of the sex wars 56 2.1 Vexed histories 56 2.2 The sex wars 59 2.3 The 1982 Barnard Conference 60 2.4 Anti-pornography after Barnard: intersectionality and the role of the state 73 2.5 Vulnerability and the state in the HIV/AIDS crisis 76 2.6 Second wave sexual politics and the contradictory character of sexuality 78 2.7 Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa 86 2.8 Re-sexualizing the second wave 91 2.9 Conclusion: the shifting terrain of pleasure/danger 93 Chapter three Andrea Dworkin and the violence of heterosexuality 95 3.1 Who’s afraid of Andrea Dworkin? 95 3.2 Dworkin’s negative legacy 99 3.3 Andrea Dworkin on sex, gender and heterosexuality 100 3.4 The role of institutions in the reproduction of male dominance 116 3.5 Dworkin’s contribution to theorising vulnerability and sexual violence 119 3.6 Linguistic essentialism and the reduction of social role to sexual role 120 3.7 Dworkin in dialogue with queer sex-negativity 123 3.8 Conclusion 126 4 Chapter four Judith Butler, vulnerability and livable lives: from performativity to precarity 129 4.1 Judith Butler, the philosopher’s feminist 129 4.2 Butler’s positive spectral presence 131 4.3 Contextualising Butler’s focus: gender, vulnerability and violence 133 4.4 The relationship between vulnerability and violence 140 4.6 Linguistic vulnerability 142 4.7 Corporeal vulnerability 148 4.8 Vulnerability and sexual violence in Judith Butler 154 4.9 Conclusion 156 Chapter five Mobilising vulnerability in sexual violence discourses 158 5.1 The political purchase of gendered vulnerability 158 5.2 Feminism and anti-feminism in vulnerability discourses 161 5.3 Reactionary mobilisations #1: racialising vulnerability 162 5.4 Oppositional vulnerability in racialised sexual violence discourses 168 5.5 Reactionary mobilisations #2: the vulnerable cisgender woman 172 5.6 Two-dimensional vulnerability and victims of sexual violence 179 5.7 Conclusion 186 Chapter six Vulnerability, Me Too and feminist sexual violence activisms 189 6.1 Introduction: The return of sexual politics 189 6.2 Tarana Burke’s Me Too movement: A movement of survivors 193 6.3 Intersectional activism and the problem of prisons 197 6.4 The viral #MeToo movement 204 6.5 Oppositional vulnerability and the viral #MeToo movement 208 6.6 Vulnerability and sexual violence activisms 214 6.7 Conclusion 216 Chapter seven Conclusion: Vulnerability and bodily autonomy 219 7.1 Bringing sexual violence into vulnerability studies 219 7.2 Collating the contributions of the thesis by way of bodily autonomy 220 7.3 Vulnerability: what now and where next? 229 Reference List 231 5 Introduction I want to be between her legs and all over her and her thighs a vise around my neck; I want my teeth in her; I want her muscles squeezing me to death and I want to push down on her, all my weight on her hips, my skin, bluish, on the inside of my thighs feeling her bones. [sic] Pleasures are in some sense determined by the melancholic structure of gender whereby some organs are deadened to pleasure, and others brought to life. Which pleasures shall live and which shall die is often a matter of which serve the legitimating practices of identity formation that take place within the matrix of gender norms. Both of these extracts were written in 1990 by authors who have become heavily associated with sexual politics, and both explore the question of pleasure and desire from a feminist perspective. However, whilst the writer that penned the first quote has become academically maligned and associated with a decidedly anti-sex version of sexual politics, the author of the latter, and the text from which this was taken, has gone on to become canon within the fields of feminism and queer theory. The author of the second is – recognisably perhaps – Judith Butler (1999: 90). The author of the former: Andrea Dworkin (1990: 105-6). I begin an examination into what vulnerability can do for feminist sexual politics with these two quotes in order to highlight that the academic study of feminism and sexual politics is itself political. Whilst Andrea Dworkin has come to stand for all that is bad and to be avoided in feminist sexual politics – crude, naïve, anti-trans and anti-sex worker1 – Judith Butler has elevated the feminist study of sex and gender into being a mainstay of almost all undergraduate humanities and social science courses. In 1990, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published, offering a ‘founding contribution to queer theory’ (Jagger 2008: 1) and becoming canon in feminist studies for its consecration of a new era for feminism (Hemmings 2011: 22-3). It has been translated 1 In chapter three, I outline Dworkin’s theory of sex, gender and heterosexuality. Whilst her work has been regrettably deployed by contemporary feminists seeking to delegitimise trans women’s claims to womanhood – and therefore to existence on their own terms – this is a distortion and departure from Dworkin’s arguments. 6 into twenty-seven different languages, while Dworkin struggled to get most of her work published at all. There is a citation politics in sexual politics. This matters because sex matters and how feminists engage with sex matters: ‘Feminist theorists must continue to demand recognition and redress for the problem of women’s disproportionate availability to various types of violence’ (2009: 64) writes Ann Murphy. Yet if the boundaries for engagement are circumscribed from the start, then what feminists are able to explore, think and say will be similarly delineated. And whilst there may be good reasons for this, such parameters need to be acknowledged if they are in play. In addition to exploring how understanding vulnerability can inform feminist theorists on the difficult subject of sexual violence, this thesis makes a historiographical argument, which is that there are unspoken disciplinary conventions shaping the contours of thinking on vulnerability and sexual politics.2 Contributions to sexual politics from the period categorised as ‘the second wave’3 - women’s movements between the late 1960s and 1980s- are dismissed as anti-sex, and much contemporary academic scholarship on sexual politics takes the late 1980s as a point of departure. These citation norms exercise a performative effect on the boundaries of legitimate knowledge which have the effect of excluding important and relevant contributions from lesbians, women of colour and proto-queer theorists, including Dworkin4. 2 This is distinct from the critique of ‘wave narratives’ (see note 3; also Snyder 2008; Aikau, Erickson & Pierce 2007) or ‘generational thinking’ (Hogeland 2001). These critiques highlight what gets excluded when clear boundaries such as these are evoked.
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