In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

Criticism can sometimes provoke defensive reactions, particularly when it implicates identities people hold dear. For instance, feminists told they are upholding rape culture might become angry or upset, since the criticism conflicts with an identity that is important to them. These kinds of defensive reactions are a primary focus of this paper. What is it to be defensive in this way, and why do some kinds of criticism, or implied criticism, tend to provoke this kind of response? What are the (...) connections between defensiveness, identity, and active ignorance? What are the social, political, and epistemic consequences of the tendency to defensiveness? Are there ways to improve the situation? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

In their well-known paper, John Gardner and Stephen Shute (2000) propose a pure case of rape, in which a woman is raped while unconscious and the rape, for a variety of stipulated reasons, never comes to light. This makes the pure case a harmless case of rape, or so they argue. In this paper I show that their argument hinges on an outdated conception of trauma, one which conflates evaluative responses that arise in the aftermath of rape with the non-deliberative (...) somatic responses of a central nervous system to a threatening event. In the first part of this paper, I elaborate this objection by drawing on the neurobiological model of trauma. This gives me an opportunity to illustrate the different ways that rape harms its victims, including the central way, what I call ‘threat-circuitry harm.’ This discussion of trauma invites us to rethink the wrong of rape, and sets the groundwork for my argument, in the second part of the paper, that the wrong of rape consists in its central harm. (shrink)

The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. Recent (...) work in analytic moral philosophy on the nature of rape offers a way to resolve this dilemma. It is argued that rape is not sex, but is nonetheless sexual. This distinction allows for a charitable reformulation of the central tenet in rape crisis support, which can facilitate the dual therapeutic aims of countering the sense of shame and of recognising the especially serious kind of the harm suffered by the victim. (shrink)

Research on pornography has distinguished between its violent and nonviolent forms. Analyses of the content of violent pornography have largely focused on readily available soft-core images in adult films and magazines. However, current research has not adequately addressed pornography on the Internet. We show that discussions about violent pornography are incomplete without an understanding of the Internet as a unique and rapidly expanding medium for disseminating images of sexual violence against women. This article attempts to fill that gap by examining (...) violent pornography using a sample of 31 free Internet sites. Each site was analyzed for its portrayal of women victims, male perpetrators, and its story of rape. Please be advised that the analysis contains graphic descriptions of violence toward women found on Internet rape sites. (shrink)

Social interactions at fraternities that undergraduate women identified as places where there is a high risk of rape are compared to those at fraternities identified as low risk as well as two local bars. Factors that contribute to rape are common on this campus; however, both men and women behaved differently in different settings. Implications of these findings are considered.

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings (...) of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism. (shrink)

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the non-accidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This paper examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Fricker’s (2007) discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration. Fricker’s work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to (...) understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color’s epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker’s whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism. (shrink)

This article intervenes in a critical debate about the use of consent to distinguish sex from rape. Drawing from critical contract theories, it argues that sexual consent is a cruel optimism that often operates to facilitate, rather than alleviate, sexual violence. Sexual consent as a cruel optimism promises to simplify rape allegations in the popular cultural imagination, confounds the distinction between victims and agents of sexual violence, and establishes certainty for potential victimizers who rely on it to convince themselves and (...) others that their partners implicitly or explicitly agreed to sex. In each of these cases, the power of consent rests in its tendency to obscure sexual violence in a set of questions around victimhood and agency, rather than to clarify whether or when it has occurred. Following in the critical contract tradition, this article argues that the optimistic attachment to the clarifying power of consent helps to explain the persistent commitment to better sexual consent as a ‘solution’ to the problems of rape and sexual violence, and that this ‘solution’ is insufficient to the task. (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

Because “rape” has such a powerful appraisive meaning, how one defines the term has normative significance. Those who define rape rigidly so as to exclude contemporary feminist understandings are therefore seeking to silence some moral perspectives “by definition.” I argue that understanding rape as an essentially contested concept allows the concept sufficient flexibility to permit open moral discourse, while at the same time preserving a core meaning that can frame the discourse.

This paper reconsiders the use of the term "victim" in feminist theory to attempt to find common ground for the intersection and interconnection of Western and indigenous feminisms. The role of the victim in the discourse of victimology, a branch of criminology, is assessed and applied to the work of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Lata Mani who both examine the construction of women's subjectivity in the practice of "sati" in India.

In 1977, Michel Foucault suggested that legal approaches to rape define it as merely an act of violence, not of sexuality, and therefore not distinct from other types of assaults. I argue that rape can not be considered merely an act of violence because it is instrumental in the construction of the distinctly feminine body. Insofar as the threat of rape is ineluctably, although not determinately, associated with the development of feminine bodily comportment, rape itself holds a host of bodily (...) and sexually specific meanings. (shrink)

New York defines rape as forced penile vaginal penetration, which means only women can be rape victims. Given this definition, rape should always be considered a type of hate crime and thus eligible for sentencing enhancement because the perpetrators target victims based on their group membership. Such a narrow definition of rape is problematic because it fails to acknowledge oral and anal rape and overlooks the fact that men can also be raped. I argue that regardless of the type of (...) sexual assault that occurs, rape should be considered a hate crime when the rapist chooses the victim based on gender, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation and the rape reinforces the patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony. (shrink)

I argue that there are strong consequentialist grounds for thinking that hate speech should be legally protected. The protection of hate speech allows those who are hateful to make their beliefs public, thereby exposing prejudices that might otherwise be suppressed to evaluation by other members of society. This greater transparency about prejudices has two social benefits. First, it facilitates social trust by making it easier to discover who holds beliefs that should exclude them from positions of authority, responsibility, and influence. (...) Second, it facilitates efforts to combat hatred by revealing which prejudiced members of society must be persuaded or discredited by those seeking to promote tolerance. (shrink)

Peter Ludlow shows how word meanings are much more dynamic than we might have supposed, and explores how they are modulated even during everyday conversation. The resulting view is radical, and has far-reaching consequences for our political and legal discourse, and for enduring puzzles in the foundations of semantics, epistemology, and logic.

In this article I will revisit the question of what I term the continuum of heteronormative sexual interactions, that is, the idea that purportedly ethically acceptable heterosexual interactions are conceptually, ethically, and politically associated with instances of sexual violence. Spurred by recent work by psychologist Nicola , I conclude that some of my earlier critiques of Catharine MacKinnon's theoretical linkages between sexual violence and normative heterosex are wanting. In addition, neither MacKinnon's theory nor my critique of it seem up to (...) the task of providing an ethical account of the examples of “unjust sex” that Gavey has described. I come to the conclusion that an ethical analysis of sexual interactions requires a focus on sexual desire, but that desire cannot take on the by now heavily criticized role of consent. Rather than looking for the presence or absence of sexual desire prior to sexual encounters as a kind of ethical certification of them, we ought instead to focus on the efficacy of that sexual desire, that is, its ability (or lack thereof) to shape an encounter in substantial and meaningful ways. (shrink)

This article examines the notion of gender neutrality in rape, its meaning and why rape definitions that include females and males as potential victims of rape have become influential in those jurisdictions that have engaged in significant levels of rape law reform over the last four decades. In so doing, several of Annabelle Mooney’s criticisms of gender neutral rape laws, published in an earlier article, will be critically examined. The second part of this article draws on themes that have been (...) identified in the linguistic analysis of rape trials involving female complainants and applies those themes to two cases of rape and sexual assault involving male complainants. Finally, this article examines whether the tactics used by defence lawyers during cross-examination can be said to be uniquely ‘gendered’ or whether similar tactics exist in cases of male rape and sexual assault. Explanations for possible similarities in treatment are also examined. (shrink)

Historically, numbers of women complainants in rape trials have been regarded suspiciously, or prejudiced in that their credibility has been seriously called into question, or undermined, both from within and outside the courtroom. Arguably, public and legal perceptions as to the expected conduct and behaviour of the stereotypical rape victim have been grounded in the belief that genuine women who allege rape should act and portray themselves as unequivocal victims. This suggests that the contemporary construct of the female rape victim (...) and her associated stereotypical image should be considered not solely as a legal derivative but also within a wider cultural context. This article explores the historical influences that shaped the cultural construct operating in the U.K., in particular, the societal and legal attitudes of the mid-Victorians towards women and sexual violence, creating an historical mystification around the construct of the female rape victim and the crime of rape itself. Reference is made to a number of cases reported in The Times newspaper between 1850–1885 which underline the requisite portrayal of the rape complainant as an unequivocal victim. It is argued that the relocation of this historical and socially constructed mythological imaginary within the context of the law and the trial process has disproportionately contributed to the modern scepticism which surrounds the female complainant. (shrink)

Sociobiologists and feminists agree that men in patriarchal social systems seek to control females, but sociobiologists go further, using Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and Trivers’s ideas on parental investment to explain why males should attempt to control female sexuality. From this perspective, the stage for the development under some conditions of patriarchal social systems was set over the course of primate evolution. Sexual selection encompasses both competition between males and female choice. But in applying this theory to our “lower (...) origins” (prehominid ancestors), Darwin assumed that choices were made by essentially “coy” females. I argue here that female solicitation of multiple males (either simultaneously or sequentially, depending on the breeding system) characterized prehominid females; this prehominid legacy of cyclical sexual assertiveness, itself possibly a female counter-strategy to male efforts to control the timing of female reproduction, generated further male counter-strategies. This dialectic had important implications for emerging hominid mating systems, human evolution, and the development of patriarchal arrangements in some human societies. For hominid males who will invest in offspring, there would be powerful selection for emotions, behaviors, and customs that ensure them certainty of paternity. The sexual modesty that so struck Darwin can be explained as a recent evolved or learned (perhaps both) adaptation in women to avoid penalties imposed by patrilines on daughters and mates who failed to conform to the patriline’s prevailing norms for their sex. Other supposedly innate universals, such as female preferences for wealthy husbands, are also likely to be facultative accommodations by women to constraints set up when patrilines monopolized resources needed by females to survive and reproduce, and passed on intergenerational control of these resources preferentially to sons. (shrink)

Widespread and systematic rape pervaded both the genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 and in Rwanda in 1994. In response to these conflicts, the Yugoslav Tribunal (ICTY) and the Rwandan Tribunal (ICTR) were created and charged with meting justice for crimes committed, including rape. Nevertheless, the two tribunals differ in their relative success in administering justice for crimes of rape. Addressing rape has been a consistent element of the ICTY prosecution strategy, which resulted in gender-sensitive investigative procedures, higher frequencies of rape (...) indictments, and more successful prosecutions. In contrast, rape has not been a central focus of the ICTR prosecution strategy, which resulted in a sporadic approach to gender-sensitive investigative procedures, inconsistent rape indictments, and few successful prosecutions. What accounts for this disparity in rape prosecutions between the Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals? Building off the existing literature that discusses factors such as legal instruments and resource capacity of the tribunal, this article argues that transnational advocacy helped generate the necessary political will to adopt and implement legal norms regarding crimes of sexual violence at the ICTY and the ICTR. Following the importance of transnational advocacy as agents of norm change, this paper also explores the antecedent conditions of advocacy mobilization that conditioned different levels of mobilization vis-à-vis the ICTY and the ICTR, including media attention and framing, connections and interest match with local groups, and geopolitical context. (shrink)

This essay examines how rape of women and girls by male soldiers works as a martial weapon. Continuities with other torture and terrorism and with civilian rape are suggested. The inadequacy of past philosophical treatments of the enslavement of war captives is briefly discussed. Social strategies are suggested for responding and a concluding fantasy offered, not entirely social, of a strategy to change the meanings of rape to undermine its use as a martial weapon.

Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual violence includes both (...) types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them. (shrink)

In mainstream discussion, violent crimes against women frequently are presented as inexplicable and their perpetrators as social deviants. Feminists have argued for an awareness of the sexually political and conformist nature of such crimes and have invented the word gynocide to name the range of systematic violence against women by men. I look at the issues raised by three recent manifestations of gynocide in the United States: the battering of Hedda Nussbaum and murder of Lisa Steinberg by Joel Steinberg, the (...) execution of serial killer Ted Bundy, and a series of murders of “prestigeless” women. (shrink)

The literature on the aetiology of serial killing has benefited from analyses which offer an alternative perspective to individual/psychological approaches and consider serial murder as a sociological phenomenon. The main argument brought to bear within this body of work identifies the socio-economic and cultural conditions of modernity as enabling and legitimating the motivations and actions of the serial killer. This article interrogates this work from the standpoint of a gendered reading of modernity. Using the Yorkshire Ripper case, it emphasizes how (...) in addition to the political economy, gender relations and masculinity shape the dynamics of serial murder and its representation. (shrink)

Early ecofeminists often emphasized the similarities of the oppression of women and earth and delineated both as rape. Is it helpful for ecofeminists today to connect women and nature in such a way? Is this metaphor an adequate expression for third wave feminists or does it cast female bodies and the cosmos into passive victimization? This article uses Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath as a platform to tease out three important aspects of the metaphor of rape, by examining the (...) green apolcalypse present in Steinbeck‘s book, by pointing out Steinbeck’s identification of the exploitatoin of nature as a rape, and by thinking about the ways in which women are portrayed as earth mothers. Through an examination of the metaphors of rape as exploitation and grapes as apocalyptic wrath, the article seeks to counter the hidden apocalyptic and dualistic structures of maternal images and ecorapes and to identify them, question them and channel that powerful linguistic energy. (shrink)

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. The (...) paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice. (shrink)

The naming of violence in feminist political campaigns and in the context of feminist theory has rhetorical and political effects. Feminist contention about the scope and meaning of ‘Violence against Women' (VAW) and ‘Sex and Gender-Based Violence' (SGBV), and about the concepts of gender and of violence itself, are fundamentally debates about the politics of feminist contestation, and the goals, strategies and tactics of feminist organisation, campaigns and action. This article examines the propulsion since the late twentieth century of the (...) problems of VAW and SGBV on to global and national political agendas. The feminist theory that underpins the uptake of this new agenda is contested by opponents of feminism. More significantly for the article it is also contested within feminism, in disputes about how feminist political aims should be furthered, through what institutions and with what strategic goals in view. The article aims to show that theoretical and philosophical controversy about the concepts of violence, and sex and gender, are always political, both in the sense that they are an aspect of feminist competition about how feminist politics should proceed, and in the sense that the political implications of concepts and theory must always be a significant factor in their salience for feminist action. (shrink)

While pornography addiction currently circulates as a comprehensible, diagnosable, and describable way to make sense of some people’s ostensibly problematic relationship with pornography, such a comprehensive description of this relationship has only recently been made possible. The current analysis makes visible pornography addiction as situated within a varied history of concerns about pornography, masturbation, fantasy, and technology in an effort to bring to bear a conceptual critique of the modern concept of pornography addiction. Such a critique in turn works to (...) offer an alternative to treating the study of pornography addiction as the discovery of a new disease, instead conceiving it as the propagation of old forms of knowledge under a new moniker. (shrink)

Despite its prevalence, the term ‘extreme’ has received little critical attention. ‘Extremity’ is routinely employed in ways that imply its meanings are self-evident. However, the adjective itself offers no such clarity. This article focuses on one particular use of the term – ‘extreme porn’ – in order to illustrate a broader set of concerns about the pitfalls of labelling. The label ‘extreme’ is typically employed as a substitute for engaging with the term’s supposed referents (here, pornographic content). In its contemporary (...) usage, ‘extreme’ primarily refers to a set of context-dependent judgements rather than absolute standards or any specific properties the ‘extreme’ item is alleged to have. Concurrently then, the label ‘extreme’ carries a host of implicit values, and the presumption that the term’s meanings are ‘obvious’ obfuscates those values. In the case of ‘extreme porn’, this obfuscation is significant because it has facilitated the cultural and legal suppression of pornography. (shrink)

This paper reads Deleuze through a Spinozist lens to conceive of the human being as a dynamic and complex whole in constant interchange with its environment. The author thus moves beyond philosophical dualisms, and challenges the assumption that a hierarchical normative organization is the only possible world. Using the example of rape, she argues that micropolitical strategies might disrupt and “pass” the juridical order and open up alternative, more equitable, forms of sociability.

Evolutionary biology and feminism share a variety of philosophical and practical concerns. I have tried to describe how a perspective from both evolutionary biology and feminism can accelerate the achievement of goals for both feminists and evolutionary biologists. In an early section of this paper I discuss the importance of variation to the disciplines of evolutionary biology and feminism. In the section entitled “Control of Female Reproduction” I demonstrate how insight provided by participation in life as woman and also as (...) a feminist suggests testable hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior—hypotheses that are applicable to our investigations of the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman animals. In the section on “Deceit, Self-deception, and Patriarchal Reversals” I have overtly conceded that evolutionary biology, a scientific discipline, also represents a human cultural practice that, like other human cultural practices, may in parts and at times be characterized by deceit and self-deception. In the section on “Femininity” I have indicated how questions cast and answered and hypotheses tested from an evolutionary perspective can serve women and men struggling with sexist oppression. (shrink)

One of the most significant shifts in current thinking on war and gender is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a simple by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy. For many feminists ‘rape as a weapon of war’ provides a way to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marks it as integral rather than incidental to war. This recognition of rape as a weapon of war has taken on legal (...) significance at the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals where rape has been prosecuted as a crime against humanity and genocide. In this paper, I examine how the Rwanda Tribunal’s record of judgments conceives of rape enacted as an instrument of the genocide. I consider in particular how the Tribunal’s conception of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ shapes what can be known about sexual violence and gender in the Rwandan genocide and what cannot, the categories of victims legally recognised and those that are not, and the questions pursued, and those foreclosed, about the patterns of violence before and during the genocide. (shrink)

I take it that liberal justice recognises special protections against the restriction of speech and expression; this is what I call the Free Speech Principle. I ask if this Principle includes speech acts which might broadly be termed ‘hate speech’, where ‘includes’ is sensitive to the distinction between coverage and protection , and between speech that is regulable and speech that should be regulated . I suggest that ‘hate speech’ is too broad a designation to be usefully analysed as a (...) single category, since it includes many different kinds of speech acts, each of which involves very different kinds of free speech interests, and may cause very different kinds of harm. I therefore propose to disaggregate hate speech into various categories which are analysed in turn. I distinguish four main categories of hate speech, namely (1) targeted vilification, (2) diffuse vilification, (3) organised political advocacy for exclusionary and/or eliminationist policies, and (4) other assertions of fact or value which constitute an adverse judgment on an identifiable racial or religious group. Reviewing these categories in the light of the justifications for the Free Speech Principle, I will argue that category (1) is uncovered by the Principle, categories (2) and (3) are covered but unprotected , and that category (4) is protected speech. (shrink)

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument-that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic-demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.

Art and pornography are often thought to be mutually exclusive. The present article argues that this popular view is without adequate support. Section 1 looks at some of the classic ways of drawing the distinction between these two domains of representation. In Section 2, it is argued that the classic dichotomies may help to illuminate the differences between certain prototypical instances of pornography and art, but will not serve to justify the claim that pornography and art are fundamentally incompatible. Section (...) 3 considers those definitions of pornography that make an a priori distinction between pornographic and artistic representations. The difference between the ‘merely’ erotic and the pornographic is also discussed in this context. Section 4 provides a critical assessment of the most recent and elaborate arguments against the compatibility of pornography and art. Finally, in Section 5, a case is made for the existence of pornographic art, as a subcategory of erotic art. (shrink)

This paper extends Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) scholarship to focus on issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence. Despite a significant body of work on gender and CSR from a variety of feminist perspectives, long-standing evidence of sexual harassment and sexual violence in business, particularly in global value chains, and the rise of the #MeToo movement, there has been little scholarship focused specifically on these issues in the context of CSR. Our conceptual paper addresses this gap in the literature through (...) two key contributions. First, we extend the theoretical base of CSR scholarship by drawing upon and explicating radical feminist theory, a resource that has been underutilized in the field to date. This theoretical perspective is well placed to offer insights around the issues of sexual harassment and sexual violence, and to explain the centrality of these concerns to the gender equality agenda in business and in CSR. Second, building upon insights from radical feminism, and from research on CSR and human rights, we explicate a business and human rights approach to sexual harassment, sexual violence and CSR. We point to ways in which this approach might be more effective in addressing these issues than previously adopted strategies and suggest directions for future research arising from our analysis. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it. A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. (...) However, I show how a work’s curation and genre-membership can ‘switch on’ Quality, allowing artworks to lie at different levels. (shrink)