Violence Against Women in Carole Pateman’s "The Sexual Contract"

• In Event: Women In and Out of Power

Abstract

In The Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman argues that the sexual contract, which underwrites the social contract, excludes women from politics through sexual violence. By signing onto the contract, according to Pateman, men gain sexual access to women’s bodies. Women thus become sex objects constantly subject to violence, rather than signatories and equal political actors. Some feminist theorists have critiqued Pateman for treating women only as passive victims of violence. This paper historicizes Pateman’s groundbreaking text in the debates over violence against women that stretch back to the 1960s to rethink her portrayal of women as victims, rather than agents, of violence. During the second wave, feminist activists and theorists began to define rape, domestic abuse, and other forms of sexual harassment as violence. Groups like Women against Violence against Women turned to self-defense as a way of combatting this violence. Yet over time the capacious discussion of violence against women was funneled into a much narrower debate over pornography. I argue that the resulting focus on the representation of women as victims of violence in pornography paradoxically reified women’s condition as victims, occluding the possibility of women exercising violence in self-defense. Pateman’s tendency to construct women as victims of violence stems from, and reflects, the same trend in feminist politics. Returning to early advocacy of violent self-defense encourages us to ask: How can we revise Pateman’s social contract to include women as political actors? Must women themselves commit violence in self-defense to become equal signatories?

Author

• Rose Owen