Challenges of Responsibility: Vulnerability, Sexual Violence, and Feminism Contra Neoliberalism

• In Event: Feminist Perspectives on Sexual Violence and Subjectivity: Vulnerability, Shame, and Humiliation

Abstract

This paper considers how feminist critique can traverse the complex terrain of neoliberal understanding of sexual violence. Neoliberal politics of responsibility shape the affective lens through which sexual violence is perceived, discouraging and inhibiting some affects, producing and fostering others, and generally constraining the range of affective response. It does so, in part, by framing how vulnerability, invulnerability, and precarity are felt and perceived. The paper explores how this regulation of affective responses to sexual violence restricts responsibility, and considers what modes of affective relation form the basis for a feminist conception of responsibility and how these might be cultivated.

Presenter

• Erinn Gilson, University of North Florida