Democratic Restraint: Dismantling the Norm of Violable Bodies

• In Event: Intersectionality and Violence in Politics

Abstract

A central tenet of liberalism—the harm principle—holds that people should be able to do with their bodies what they want up to the point where their actions harm another person or prevent another person from doing what they want with their body. Yet, in post-Dobbs United States we not only have a checkerboard of jurisdictions in which pregnant people have neither a right nor access to abortions, but we argue that in both pre- and post-Dobbs U.S. we have had a patriarchal, misogynist cultural norm that carves out (the possibility of) exceptional treatment of girls and women where their bodies (and lives) are considered both violable and mutable. This norm of violable bodies is not only harmful, but also anti-democratic. In this paper, we lay a theoretical framework for thinking about the relationship between the corporal body and democracy. Through an intersectional approach, we then explore various contexts of corporal pleasure, reproductivity, and violation, and discuss what each context has to do with the health of democracy. We close with the argument that our civil society and our government need to exercise "democratic restraint," a posture that opens up the possibilities of democratic vistas we've not yet imagined.

Authors

• Vincent Jungkunz

• Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, George Mason University