Cultivating Strengths-based Sexual Violence Prevention: Lesbian Feminist Epistemologies and the Transformation of Intimate Cultures

• In Event: LGBTQIA2S+ Studies in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

After three decades of prevention efforts that have failed to lower rates of sexual violence, novel approaches to cultivate alternative sexual cultures are increasingly necessary. While many interventions against sexual violence remain tethered to cisheteronormative relational logics, lesbian sexual joy offers a powerful alternative. Drawing on participatory visual arts-based research with diverse Canadian and Australian lesbian youth, aged 18-35, this paper shifts the analytic focus from what contemporary interventions fail to disrupt toward what lesbian erotic practice can produce: new forms of knowing, accountability, and collective imagination. In doing so, I advance a strengths-based approach to sexual violence prevention grounded in lesbian sexual practices. I argue that lesbian sexual joy functions as a counter-epistemology—an embodied feminist method that displaces disciplinary scripts of endurance and reorients intimacy toward reciprocity, play, authenticity, and collective flourishing. Drawing on lesbian feminist theory, particularly Audre Lorde’s formulation of the erotic as embodied power and knowledge, I examine how lesbian erotic practices cultivate ethical relationality. This relationality is marked by affective modes of discernment and mutual responsiveness that generate situated knowledges about desire, consent, and accountability. While I do not position lesbian communities as utopias free from harm, this paper maps how lesbian erotic life is learned, rehearsed, and taught as a method for producing alternative relational grammars—practices that both diagnose the limits of prevailing violence prevention strategies and instantiate possibilities for feminist worldmaking. By treating lesbian erotic practices as sites of feminist knowledge, this paper proposes concrete pathways through which these practices inform pedagogies, policies, and solidarities that resist cisheteropatriarchal constraints and the violence of rape culture. Amid the current sociopolitical context—shaped by anti-LGBTQ+ backlash, rising misogyny, resurgent white Christian nationalism, and “tradwife” ideology—critical lesbian epistemologies offer fruitful possibilities for transforming intimate life in ways that are more just, joyful, and oriented towards ethical pleasures.

Author

• JJ Wright, MacEwan University