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Sexual Agency is not a Problem of Neoliberalism: Feminism, Sexual Justice, & the Carceral Turn
Abstract
We examine the promises and limitations of Laina Y.Bay-Cheng’s model of the Agency Line in terms of its contribution to interdisciplinary feminist discussions of young women’s sexuality in the U.S. Bay-Cheng offers a welcome critique of neoliberal assumptions embedded in contemporary sexual discourses and her new Agency Line model contributes to complicating the virgin/whore dichotomy. While we find the model interesting and compelling, we critique the argument along three dimensions: conceptual tools, evidence offered, and theoretical scope. First, the model’s central concepts - neoliberalism and agency - are awkwardly conjoined. We point to additional conceptual tools from commodity and third wave feminisms and carceral studies of sexuality in order to further an understanding of agency and constraint. Second, the claim that agentic sexual scripts produce harm for young women is speculative and we provide empirical evidence to the contrary. Third, we argue that the article’s theoretical claims both overgeneralize about (all) young women and under-generalize nonagents or victims. We explain how Bay-Cheng’s tendency to scrutinize the neoliberal demand for agency without also interrogating the neoliberal demand for victims runs the risk of reinscribing gendered nodes of morality and under analyzes the relationship between state surveillance, scrutiny, and policing of women’s sexuality. We conclude by calling on progressive feminists to think through sexual agency more carefully by resisting carceral feminist cooptation and supporting sexual justice principles. In so doing, the promise of sexual agency might be more fully realized by a broader range of girls and women across lines of privilege and oppression.
... It was not meant as an exhaustive dissertation or a deeply held conviction, but a springboard for new conversations and perspectives on young women's sexuality, one that accounts for the emergence of neoliberal ideology and its intersection with dominant gender ideology in the U.S. It is sincerely gratifying to read the reactions from colleagues, including some of the most prominent and provocative scholars of young women's sexuality. All of their contributions, corrections, and critiques round out and strengthen the proposal, whether by enriching its foundation and fleshing out its ramifications (Lamb 2015;Tolman et al. 2015), extending its relevance by mapping it onto other domains (Katz and Tirone 2015), or challenging its fundamental tenets and claims (Lerum and Dworkin 2015;Tolman et al. 2015). In all cases, I appreciate their feedback (after all, is there anything worse than venturing a comment and being met by dead silence?). ...
... I fear that the target of my critique, the neoliberal brand of sexual agency imposed on girls, was at least partially mistaken by some of the respondents. For instance, my references to neoliberal sexual agency do not equate neoliberalism with agency, as Lerum and Dworkin (2015) assert. Instead, I use Bneoliberal^as a modifier for the precise purpose of distinguishing it from the varied, multifaceted forms of sexual agency explored by Tolman et al. (2015). ...
... My emphasis is on the performance of neoliberal sexual agency, not feelings of sexual subjectivity. This is why I cite relatively few studies focused on girls' own feelings or experiences of sexuality, an aspect of my original commentary that both Tolman et al. (2015) and Lerum and Dworkin (2015) question. If I gloss over the nuance, diversity, and complexity among young women's feelings of sexual agency (or impotence or ambivalence, for that matter), it is because their internal experiences are not the point of this work. ...
By proposing that gendered sexual norms dictating young women’s sexuality (i.e., the Virgin-Slut Continuum) are now joined by neoliberal scripts for sexual agency (i.e., the Agency Line), my hope was to prompt new conversations about the ideological context in which young women in the U.S. forge their sexualities. The responses to my original commentary indicate that there are many such conversations to be had. Before pursuing those, I wish to clarify some of the tenets of my proposal, most importantly that I do not advocate for the Agency Line and the matrix created by its intersection with the Virgin-Slut Continuum to be a fair or apt characterization of young women’s lived experiences. To the contrary, I see neoliberal sexual agency as a prescribed and prescriptive normative force that works in tandem with enduring gendered prohibitions to constrain young women’s sexual expression and to reinforce the sexual stigmatization of minority girls and women.
... Scholars have argued that Black female sexual scripts are rooted in heteronormative, patriarchal, racial, and classist structural social factors [57]. However, the current literature on sexual subjectivity and sexual agency dismisses these in favor of sociohistorical factors more associated with wealthy White women and individual sexual decision-making [58][59][60]. The perspectives of Black women about sexuality and sexual behaviors through the lens of the historical gendered racial inequities that have impacted the sexuality of Black girls and women are essential to address sexuality within Black womanhood and influence sexual scripts. ...
While Black girls and women are disproportionately impacted by sexual health disparities, there continues to be an overwhelming focus on individual risk behaviors within prevention initiatives, which offers a fragmented narrative of the multidimensional nature of risk and plausibly limits effectiveness of prevention programs and attenuates reductions in disparities. Because sexual health is experienced within an individual’s beliefs/values, interpersonal relationships, and behaviors and reflects larger social and cultural systems, it is important to critically examine common theories used to inform HIV/STI prevention interventions for Black women and girls. To fill this gap in the literature, we critique two commonly used theories in HIV/STI prevention interventions, namely the social cognitive theory and the theory of gender and power, by highlighting theoretical and practical strengths and weaknesses. We propose research implications that incorporate key strengths of the two theories while adding new concepts grounded in the intersectionality theory. The overall goal is to introduce a more comprehensive conceptual model that is reflective of and applicable to the multidimensional sexual experiences of Black girls and women within the evolving definition of sexual health and behavior.
... We aim to address this paucity of research on what is arguably one of the most viewed women's health promotions of all time. What is crucial to our argument is that in this era of strong neoliberal and postfeminist debates on agency and empowerment (Bay-Cheng, 2015;Francombe, 2014;Gill, 2007;Lerum & Dworkin, 2015;Toffoletti, 2016), This Girl Can is as an example of the continuing power of hegemonic discipline over women's bodies and self-conception. As Levy (2005) argues, women have been sold empowerment under the guise of objectification and sexism. ...
We examine the potential unforeseen consequences from Sport England’s This Girl Can (2015) promotion program, specifically arguing that the campaign videos released in 2015 and 2017 take the previously narrow heteronormative gaze of desire, and inclusively apply it to all women, suggesting empowerment where there is only sexual subjectification. Overall, what prevails is a campaign that presents the female body – historically a locus of social control – as a body-as-object, despite being ‘in process’, and suggesting the attributes of female sexualisation – hips, lips, butts and breasts – are essential to attention and visibility, rather than action, movement, fitness or strength. Thus, it is the sexualisation of women posited as essential to agency and action that muddies a campaign of intended empowerment into being one of subjectification and self-surveillance.
... Nowhere have feminist psychologists explored the complexity of agency and choice more thoroughly than in research on adolescent girls' sexuality (see, e.g., Bay-Cheng, 2015;Fahs & McClelland, 2016;Lamb, 2010;Lerum & Dworkin, 2015;Z. Peterson, 2010). ...
Numerous feminist scholars have argued that women, especially young women, have been constructed as ideal neoliberal subjects. Informed by Foucauldian approaches that extend neoliberalism beyond a set of free market principles to a dynamic that creates new forms of subjectivity, these scholars have demonstrated the elisions between “postfeminism” and neoliberalism in the positioning of young women as consumers, self-helpers, and “empowered” agents par excellence. The psy-disciplines have actively participated in gendering neoliberal subjectivity and I selectively review feminist critiques of this complicity. These critiques problematize discourses of empowerment, agency, and choice, even as they have seeped into feminist psychology itself. I then consider the theoretical resources that are available within and beyond feminist psychology to disrupt and even displace neoliberal forms of subjectivity. Building on insights from psychosocial studies, intersectional and decolonial approaches, and critical history and conjunctural thinking, I brainstorm some alternatives that feminist psychologists could offer.
... In many respects, these findings echo other research encouraging midlife women to be "the gatekeepers to sexual behavior" and to take ownership in negotiating safer sex (Morton, Kim, & Treise, 2011). In line with other findings (Altschuler, 2017;Lerum & Dworkin, 2015), we argue for health promotion programs to incorporate content to empower women in this age group in an attempt to breakdown active/passive dichotomies. Such content could focus on identifying and learning how to address power imbalances in sexual relationships and assertiveness skills training to deal with potential resistance when trying to negotiate condom use. ...
The rates of STIs in women over 45 years have been steadily increasing in Australia and other Western countries. Traditionally sexual health and STI prevention and research has positioned young people as the priority population; to date, insufficient attention has been paid to the sexual health of women over 45 years. Using a strengths-based approach, the objective of this study was to explore the factors and mechanisms that enable Australian women aged 45 to 64 years to successfully negotiate safer sex practices in new relationships. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was employed for an in-depth exploratory study of a sample of eight women. Three broad themes emerged: being informed, being prepared, and being empowered. These findings provide a valuable insight into how we can initiate change and support safer sex practices for this target group.
... Notwithstanding what may be conveyed through prevailing discourses, those young women who view themselves as sexual subjects are not necessarily in danger of unwanted sexual attention (Lamb 2015;Lerum and Dworkin 2015). In fact, there is reason to hypothesize that these young women may be unlikely to engage in undesired sex, or sexual activity that their partners desire but they do not desire for themselves. ...
Young people’s sexuality is often discursively constructed within the confines of a masculine/feminine binary that minimizes young women’s sexual subjectivity (i.e., desire, pleasure, and agency) while taking young men’s subjectivity for granted. Accordingly, young women who acknowledge themselves as sexual subjects are constructed as “bad girls” who incite males’ purportedly uncontrollable desire and, thus, invite undesired sexual attention. However, there is reason to hypothesize that young women who view themselves as sexual subjects may be less likely than other women to engage in undesired sexual activity (i.e., sex that their partners desire, but they do not desire for themselves). In this study, I used data from the Online College Social Life Survey (N = 7255) to explore relationships between two measures of sexual subjectivity (i.e., pleasure prioritization and sexual agency) and college women’s participation in undesired sexual activity during hookups (i.e., performance of undesired sexual acts to please a partner and succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse). Logistic regression analyses suggest that pleasure prioritization and sexual agency are associated with lower odds of performing undesired sexual acts to please a partner—and sexual agency is associated with lower odds of succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse. These findings point to the importance of sexuality education that includes discussions of women’s sexual subjectivity. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
... However, children are frequently blamed across cultures where they are not seen to conform to ideal norms of behavior or where an offense cannot be explained through a socially deviant perpetrator. A neoliberal focus on sexual self-determination and on the legal system and punishment disregards that marginalized groups often do not obtain justice in this system but may actually suffer further violence or marginalization at the hands of authorities (Lerum & Dworkin, 2015). Different factors such as gender, poverty, and disability intersect in this. ...
International research has commented on social stigma as a key reason for nondisclosure of child sexual abuse. However, the actual components of this social stigma frequently remain unexplored. The present study deals with perceptions of consequences of child sexual abuse among professionals and laypeople in Ghana (N = 44), employing a bystander perspective. As a qualitative study using a grounded theory framework, it considers these consequences in light of their underlying beliefs about child and adolescent development, particularly in relation to gender-based expectations placed on girls and boys. Consequences of child sexual abuse could be divided into sexual health consequences, beliefs about “destroyed innocence” and beliefs about a “destroyed future,” which were strongly related to the sexual nature of the violence perpetrated. These perceived consequences of child sexual abuse hold implications for what surviving child sexual abuse means on a social level. Implications for practice are discussed on the basis of the data analysis.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/HtTiDTuatFN2pkJkhaYi/full
... Our findings revealed tensions in ensuring that feminist insights and concerns for sexual victimization, coercion, and violence are trusted and present in the criminal justice process, but alongside a reflexive capacity to remain critical about the theories and worldviews we use to frame victimization in sensitive ways that do not betray survivors or undermine feminist scholarship. Much evidence has led several critical criminologists to believe that systemic and social problems cannot be resolved through shame, punishment, or the criminalizing state and prison industrial complex (Bernstein, 2010;Christie, 2000;Davis, 2003;Khan, 2014;Lerum and Dworkin, 2015;Whittier, 2016). This case has proven just how difficult it is for legal experts, scholars, and members of the public to adopt a political position that honours the rights of victims to obtain support and accountability in a system that believes them and does not strip them of their dignity, as well as the rights of defendants to retain their constitutional entitlements to defend themselves from state retribution. ...
Drawing on an affective framework, this qualitative content analysis of the immediate public responses on Twitter in the hours following Jian Ghomeshi’s not guilty verdict (n = 3943 tweets) reveals two key discourses of public opinion. Twitter users depicted the criminal justice system (CJS) as having worked and/or failed, and these intensifying divisions were highly gendered. Members of the public pitted notions of the “rational male” against the “emotional female”, and these debates heavily supported or opposed a patriarchal legal rationality. This study sheds light on the ways in which adversarial justice systems reproduce adversarial discourses on crime, and overlook the problems entangled in misleading applications of rationality to sexual consent. The wide circulation of blame to all parties involved in this case leads us to the conclusion that the CJS, in its current punitive form, does not instil a sense of confidence in the public. With a shifted focus on the healing and dignity of everyone involved in sexual assault cases, we recommend Restorative and Transformative approaches to justice as alternative measures to respond to sexual assault.
... The feminist narration created a new line of apology and shunned any possibility to question the fundamental premises of the doctrine of feminism or neo-liberalism. 20 A few recent articles have made suggestions that feminism and neo-liberalism are infused with dogmatic double standards 21 and that they are little more than original doctrine of money and control. 22 It would be inefficient to delve into each and every one of these theories while their logical deconstructions have been completed elsewhere. ...
... Girls were considered to require special protection due to male sexuality in this context, which limited their freedom of movement. A neoliberal focus on sexual self-determination and individuals, on the legal system and punishment disregards that marginalised groups often do not obtain "justice" in this system, but may actually suffer further violence or marginalisation at the hands of authorities (Lerum & Dworkin, 2015). Different factors such as gender, poverty and disability intersect in this. ...
Child sexual abuse has been recognised as a worldwide issue, with multiple international approaches to prevention and intervention. These approaches frequently comment on the importance of cultural sensitivity in developing programmes, without clearly delineating the role of culture in attitudes towards child sexual abuse. The present study deals with attitudes towards child sexual abuse among professionals and laypeople in Ghana (N= 44) and their implications for prevention and intervention practices. As a qualitative study employing a Grounded Theory framework, it differentiates these attitudes and asks the question how they are shaped by beliefs about the causes, course of events and consequences of sexual violence against children and adolescents. In particular, attitudes are contextualised in relation to gender-based expectations placed on girls and boys and the effects of these expectations on the perception of the social problem and interactions with those affected by abuse. Structural as well as cultural factors are considered in this. Finally, implications for practice are discussed on the basis of the data analysis.
... Feminist scholars working in this tradition are increasingly critical of how feminist calls for sexual agency, control, and resistance have largely been appropriated and transformed by other compulsory requirements and propagated by a new postfeminist model of how young "emancipated" women ought to behave within romantic relationships (Brown-Bowers et al., 2015;Gill, 2008Gill, , 2009aGill, , 2009b. These debates have resulted in further useful discussion about the limits, blind spots, and assumptions about how terms are employed in defining and CRITICAL SEXUALITY STUDIES designing research, including, for example, the limitations of conflating levels of "high sexual agency" with "good" sexual decision making or "better" mental health (Lerum & Dworkin, 2015;Tolman, Anderson, Belmonte, 2015). ...
Attentive to the collision of sex and power, we add momentum to the ongoing development of the subfield of critical sexuality studies. We argue that this body of work is defined by its critical orientation toward the study of sexuality, along with a clear allegiance to critical modalities of thought, particularly feminist thought. Critical sexuality studies takes its cues from several other critical moments in related fields, including critical psychology, critical race theory, critical public health, and critical youth studies. Across these varied critical stances is a shared investment in examining how power and privilege operate, understanding the role of historical and epistemological violence in research, and generating new models and paradigms to guide empirical and theoretical research. With this guiding framework, we propose three central characteristics of critical sexuality studies: (a) conceptual analysis, with particular attention to how we define key terms and conceptually organize our research (e.g., attraction, sexually active, consent, agency, embodiment, sexual subjectivity); (b) attention to the material qualities of abject bodies, particularly bodies that are ignored, overlooked, or pushed out of bounds (e.g., viscous bodies, fat bodies, bodies in pain); and (c) heteronormativity and heterosexual privilege, particularly how assumptions about heterosexuality and heteronormativity circulate in sexuality research. Through these three critical practices, we argue that critical sexuality studies showcases how sex and power collide and recognizes (and tries to subvert) the various power imbalances that are deployed and replicated in sex research.
The second wave of the feminist movement brought unprecedented changes in awareness of criminal legal system (CLS) responses to domestic violence (DV). The seemingly feminist “success” in the harsher CLS responses, however, resulted in the disparate criminalization of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and poor individuals, among both DV defendants and victims. Therefore, feminist support for anti-carceral/abolitionist feminism, recognizing the cooptation of feminist ideals within a neoliberal CLS system, has grown. Colonial policing, however, has only tangentially been applied to DV (and other gender-based abuse offenses’) CLS responses. This article advocates for significant changes to policing DV.
This chapter examines the new visibility of the sexual predator discourse in making sense of sexual harassment and assault. The popularisation of the term sexual predator has dovetailed with neoliberal carceral politics of mass incarceration. Within the sexual predator discourse, sex offending is treated as symptomatic of an individual’s abnormal psychology. This chapter explores this discourse in media reportings of celebrity perpetrator apologies for sexual harassment during the galvanisation of #MeToo. The chapter concludes that the sexual predator discourse may constrain or even undo the impacts of #MeToo, which include men’s discussion and reflection on personal sexual relationships.
In January 2018, a feminist blog, babe, detailed an anonymous woman’s date with comedian Aziz Ansari, ending with her accusation that he had sexually assaulted her by escalating his sexual advances despite her verbal and nonverbal objections. Online reaction to the babe article was swift and plentiful, including a New York Times editorial written by conservative provocateur Bari Weiss entitled, “Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader.” Weiss’ piece drew 2953 online responses before the comment section closed the next day, with wide-ranging views addressing the respective behaviors and motivations of Ansari, “Grace,” and Weiss. The responses provide an opportunity to explore how commenters negotiate the boundaries of the #MeToo movement in the venue that had ignited the movement’s resurgence with the story of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s longstanding sexual abuse of women working in the film industry. This study applies quantitative and qualitative analysis to comment discourse and elicits three major themes: (1) expectations for seeking or conveying consent, (2) criteria for publicizing the private, and (3) demarcations between insensitivity and abuse. Justifications frequently offered for the positions articulated were based on references to personal experience, cultural expectations, the #MeToo movement, and feminism.
While access to and control over assets can minimize
women’s HIV risk, little is known about the processes
through which property rights violations increase the sexual
transmission of HIV. The current study focused on two rural
areas in Nyanza and Western Province, Kenya where HIV
prevalence was high (23.8–33%) and property rights violations
were common. The current work drew on in-depth interview
data collected from50 individuals involved in the development
and implementation of a community-led land and property
rights program. The program was designed to respond to
property rights violations, prevent disinheritance and asset
stripping, and reduce HIV risk among women. In our findings,
we detailed the social and economic mechanisms through
which a loss of property rights was perceived to influence primary
and secondarypreventionofHIV. These included: loss of
income, loss of livelihood and shelter, and migration to slums,
markets, or beaches where the exchange of sex for food, money,
shelter, clothing, or other goods was common. We also
examined the perceived influence of cultural practices, such as
wife inheritance, on HIV risk. In the conclusions, we made
recommendations for future research in the science-base
focused on the development of property ownership as a structural
HIV prevention and treatment intervention.
This article concerns women's images in ads, their responses to those images, and advertisers methods of managing these responses. Feminist discourses have been rerouted in the mass media according to the logic of commodity relations. Rather than fight the legitimacy of feminist discourse, advertisers have attempted to channel key aspects of that discourse into semiotic markers that can be attached to commodity brandnames. In today's crowded corporate marketplace where it is imperative to differentiate brandnames from those of competitors, advertisers compete at translating women's discourses into stylized commodity signs. Though at first glance this may appear as evidence of a new era of democratic cultural pluralism, we argue that the many faces of feminism appearing in women's magazines are a single aspect of an internally contradictory hegemonic process—an ongoing dialectic between dominant and oppositional discourse.
In this article, we deconstruct the epistemological framework underlying recent discussions on the sexualization of girls.
Conducting a close textual analysis of scholarly and activist writings and their media coverage in Australia, Britain and
the United States we examine the foundational assumptions of the argument against sexualization and explore its potential
social and political implications. It is our contention that the conceptualization of sexualization as both a process and
outcome relies on an ambivalent and overly deterministic model which makes the danger of sexualizing materials uniform, but
their outcome gender specific. The unintended consequence of this discourse is that girls are framed as passive recipients
and their sexuality becomes the result of and reduced to sexualization.
This paper responds to calls from social scientists in the area of globalization and women's empowerment to test a model that investigates both structural and individual components of women's empowerment in the context of globalization. The investigation uses a liberation psychology framework by taking into account the effects of globalization, human rights discourse, and women's activism within social movements to identify how structural inequities may be related to empowerment. Surveys conducted in rural Nicaragua revealed that land ownership and organizational participation among women were related to more progressive gender ideology, and in turn, women's power and control within the marital relationship, individual levels of agency, and subjective well-being. The study demonstrates that psychology can bridge the theoretical arguments surrounding human rights with the practical implementation of development interventions, and provide empirical support that has yet to be demonstrated elsewhere. The findings have important implications for strategies and interventions that can improve conditions for women and contribute to the aims of social justice articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action.
Even though they are immersed in sex-saturated society, millions of teens are pledging to remain virgins until their wedding night. How are evangelical Christians persuading young people to wait until marriage? This book looks closely at the language of the chastity movement and discovers a savvy campaign that uses sex to “sell” abstinence. Drawing from interviews with evangelical leaders and teenagers, the book examines the strategy to shift from a negative “just say no” approach to a positive one: “just say yes” to great sex within marriage. The book sheds new light on an abstinence campaign that has successfully recast a traditionally feminist idea—“my body, my choice”—into a powerful message, but one that the author suggests may ultimately reduce evangelicalism's transformative power. Focusing on the United States, the study also includes a comparative dimension by examining the export of this evangelical agenda to sub-Saharan Africa.
Drawing on more than fifty interviews in both the US and the Netherlands, Wendy Chapkis captures the wide-ranging experiences of women performing erotic labor and offers a complex, multi-faceted depiction of sex work. Her expansive analytic perspective encompasses both a serious examination of international prostitution policy as well as hands-on accounts of contemporary commercial sexual practices. Scholarly, but never simply academic, this book is explicitly grounded in a concern for how competing political discourses work concretely in the world--to frame policy and define perceptions of AIDS, to mobilize women into opposing camps, to silence some agendas and to promote others.
Book synopsis: Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Straightforward and challenging, she invites an exploration of sex in our culture - an exploration that could reverse the traditional male gaze and phallic construction of the heterosexual woman. Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists - their right to sexual fulfillment symbolized their right to selfhood. However, the most positive women's writing on female sexuality in recent years has come primarily from the lesbian community.Segal addresses the silence of heterosexual feminists on questions of sex and love and notes the shift toward sexual conservatism. She looks at the trends that followed Sixties radicalism: sex as a subversive activity, the "liberated orgasm," sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, Queer politics, antipornography campaigns, the rise of the moral right. The hidden anxieties of male sexuality are also discussed.For both men and women, says Segal, our wildest dreams and worst fears are often projected onto sex. She urges an understanding of how our personal pleasures and pains remain public issues, and how a rethinking of sexual liberation could inspire a truly progressive politics for our time. "It is always another whom we try to reach when we experience desire, it is their physical contact we want - sometimes, any sort of contact will suffice ...and by whom we yearn to feel ourselves desired. It is the very greatest of joys, as I experience it ...simply to know that we are able to desire, maybe even able to love, some other human adult." - from the book.
Although the first AIDS cases were attributed to men having sex with men, over 70% of HIV infections worldwide are now estimated to occur through sex between women and men. In Men at Risk, Shari L. Dworkin argues that the centrality of heterosexual relationship dynamics to the transmission of HIV means that both women and men need to be taken into account in gender-specific HIV/AIDS prevention interventions. She looks at the “costs of masculinity” that shape men’s HIV risks, such as their initiation of sex and their increased status from sex with multiple partners. Engaging with the common paradigm in HIV research that portrays only women-and not heterosexually active men-as being “vulnerable” to HIV, Dworkin examines the gaps in public health knowledge that result in substandard treatment for HIV transmission and infection among heterosexual men both domestically and globally. She examines a vast array of structural factors that shape men’s HIV transmission risks and also focuses on a relatively new category of global health programs with men known as “gender-transformative” that seeks to move men in the direction of gender equality in the name of improved health. Dworkin makes suggestions for the next generation of gender-transformative health interventions by calling for masculinities-based and structurally driven HIV prevention programming. Thoroughly researched and theoretically grounded, Men at Risk presents a unique approach to HIV prevention at the intersection of sociological and public health research.
Congratulations to Dr. McRobbie! This book has been named to the list of books for the 2009 Critics Choice Book Award of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA).These essays show Angela McRobbie reflecting on a range of issues which have political consequence for women, particularly young women, in a context where it is frequently assumed that progress has been made in the last 30 years, and that with gender issues now 'mainstreamed' in cultural and social life, the moment of feminism per se is now passed. McRobbie trenchantly argues that it is precisely on these grounds that invidious forms of gender -re-stabilisation are able to be re-established. Consumer culture, she argues, encroaches on the terrain of so called female freedom, appears supportive of female success only to tie women into new post-feminist neurotic dependencies. These nine essays span a wide range of topics, including - the UK government's 'new sexual contract' to young women, - popular TV makeover programmes, - feminist theories of backlash and the 'undoing' of sexual politics, - feminism in a global frame- the 'illegible rage' underlying contemporary femininities.
We interrogate Nike’s implication in the developments of 1980s and 1990s popular feminisms by contextualizing and examining the advertising strategies deployed by Nike in its efforts to seduce women consumers. Although Nike is represented as progressive and pro-women, we demonstrate Nike’s alliance with normative forces dominating 1980s America. We suggest that Nike’s solicitation relies on the logic of addiction, which demonized those people most affected by post-Fordist dynamics. While Nike’s narrations of “empowerment” appeal to a deep, authentic self located at the crossroads of power and lifestyle, we suggest that these narratives offer ways of thinking/identities that impede political action. Finally, we consider the relations among Nike, celebrity feminism, and the complex and invisible dynamics that enable transnationals to exploit Third World women workers.
Even though they are immersed in sex-saturated society, millions of teens are pledging to remain virgins until their wedding night. How are evangelical Christians persuading young people to wait until marriage? Christine J. Gardner looks closely at the language of the chastity movement and discovers a savvy campaign that uses sex to "sell" abstinence. Drawing from interviews with evangelical leaders and teenagers, she examines the strategy to shift from a negative "just say no" approach to a positive one: "just say yes" to great sex within marriage. Making Chastity Sexy sheds new light on an abstinence campaign that has successfully recast a traditionally feminist idea-"my body, my choice"-into a powerful message, but one that Gardner suggests may ultimately reduce evangelicalism's transformative power. Focusing on the United States, her study also includes a comparative dimension by examining the export of this evangelical agenda to sub-Saharan Africa.
This book is a collection of essays written during the 1980s and 1990s, generated as parts of other, larger activist efforts going on at the time. Read together, the essays trace the progress of the conversations between different activist groups, and between the authors of the pieces, Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, creating a bridge between feminists, gay activists, those in politics, and those in the law.
Focusing on the public face of the federal government's anti-human trafficking project during the presidential administration of George W. Bush, this book explores how the religious values of Protestant Christianity regarding sexual morality and gender propriety intersected with and shaped the United States' federal initiative to eliminate human trafficking. From perceptions of what human trafficking essentially is, to the understanding of the moral harm human trafficking causes, to a normative conception of what freedom from trafficking substantively entails, the way human trafficking has been understood and addressed is shaped by and reflects the religious heritage and moral imagination of American Protestantism. Contending that conceptions of freedom that reflect and enact such a religiously and culturally particular moral imagination of freedom are not universally applicable in a religiously, culturally, and politically plural world, the book aims to create theoretical space and moral necessity for considering ways of thinking about and organizing freedom from trafficking that are not rooted in the moral sensibilities and forms of social relation that characterize American Protestant Christianity.
Are you ripped? Do you need to work on your abs? Do you know your ideal body weight? Your body fat index? Increasingly, Americans are being sold on a fitness ideal - not just thin but toned, not just muscular but cut - that is harder and harder to reach. In Body Panic, Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs ask why. How did these particular body types come to be "fit"? And how is it that having an unfit, or "bad," body gets conflated with being an unfit, or "bad," citizen? Dworkin and Wachs head to the newsstand for this study, examining ten years worth of men's and women's health and fitness magazines to determine the ways in which bodies are "made" in today's culture. They dissect the images, the workouts, and the ideology being sold, as well as the contemporary links among health, morality, citizenship, and identity that can be read on these pages. While women and body image are often studied together, Body Panic considers both women's and men's bodies side-by-side and over time in order to offer a more in-depth understanding of this pervasive cultural trend.
This study seeks to understand the ways in which men who pledge sexual abstinence until marriage negotiate and assert masculine identities before and after marriage. Using longitudinal qualitative data, this work traces the ways in which men who pledge abstinence until marriage manage a tension between both “sacred” and “beastly” discourses surrounding sexuality. The situational and interactional gendered practices of these men highlight their attempts to resolve the incongruity between practices of sexual purity and hegemonic definitions of masculinity. I argue that a decision to pledge sexual abstinence until marriage is an example of hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014) in that the postmarriage transition to a more hegemonically masculine status suggests that such practices are not challenging current gendered systems of power and inequality. These findings underscore the potential fallacy in using cross-sectional data to illustrate changes in gender relations, and demonstrate the importance of incorporating life course perspectives when theorizing masculinities.
This book seeks to analyze the issue of race in America after the election of Barack Obama. For the author, the U.S. criminal justice system functions can act as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it adheres to the principle of color blindness.
Young women’s sexuality traditionally has been marked along a gendered moralist continuum of sexual activity, ranging from virtuous (virgins) to licentious (sluts). However, this one-dimensional model cannot easily accommodate substantive changes in the norms that influence girls’ sexualities. Contemporary scholarship generated across the Anglophone West includes many signs that such a shift has occurred, ushered in by the cultural and ideological suffusion of neoliberalism. I enlist interdisciplinary and international evidence of neoliberalism’s influence on constructions of girls’ sexuality to argue that in the U.S., girls are now judged on their adherence not only to gendered moralist norms, but also to a neoliberal script of sexual agency. In addition to reviewing conceptual and empirical grounds for this claim, I consider the multidimensional normative field created by the intersection of this Agency Line with the long-standing Virgin-Slut Continuum. The primacy of agency within neoliberal discourse seems to legitimize women’s sexual autonomy and its subjective nature may permit them some control over their position above the Agency Line. But upon critical inspection it becomes clear that young women remain confined to a prescribed normative space that divides them from one another, compels self-blame, and predicates their worth on cultural appraisals of their sexuality.
This article explores two different discourses of sexuality among female gang members. Homegirls have long been associated with stereotypes about their sexuality—they are usually portrayed as either too sexual or not (hetero)sexual enough. Yet, in spite of these stereotypes, we know little about how female gang members themselves talk and think about sexuality. In this article, using data from the authors’ ongoing study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay Area, the authors trace two very different discourses of sexuality among female gang members. The first discourse centers on a modern-day variation of the classic dichotomy between “good” and “bad” girls. A second discourse of “sexual autonomy” stresses the female gang members’ own sexual needs, choices, and actions. Both discourses are not solely about sex per se. They express concerns about a homegirl’s place in the social world of which she is part.
This article considers the turn to punishment in neoliberalism, and the hardening it marks in the criminal justice system, education, and public life. Examining tensions between neoliberalism’s doctrine of equality before the market and its actual reproduction of racial disparities, I specify a concept of violation, as a principle of both material and symbolic domination, that can respond to these tensions. Considering influential analyses of the turn toward punishment, I argue that the historic legacy of racism is a crucial determinant of the excesses of current regimes of penality, and that racialized repression figures in a contemporary recomposition of political economy. Furthermore, in the neoliberal moment the disciplinary repertoire of racism is extrapolated to new populations and terrains. I recontextualize the current carceral turn within a broader logic of violation that links moments of social production and decomposition, and fuses processes of material exploitation with racialized injury and subjection.
This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.
Saartjie Baartman's story has become central to black feminist theory and politics, serving as the primary analytic vehicle for explaining the violence that the dominant visual field inflicts on black female bodies. The re-telling of Baartman's story has also provided black feminists with tools for grappling with racialized pornography, which is thought to re-enact Baartman's violent exhibition by rendering black women objects for white male spectators' consumption. This article argues that the constant invocation of Baartman's story has allowed an anti-pornography formation to flourish within black feminism, masked as racial progressivism. Ultimately, this strain of anti-pornography politics has promoted a black feminist sexual conservatism which systematically ignores questions of black women's pleasure, sexual agency, and desires, and has generated a normative – rather than analytical – engagement with racialized-sexualized imagery. In place of normative readings of racialized pornography, this paper offers a new reading practice – racial iconography – which examines the ways that pornography mobilizes race in particular social moments, under particular technological conditions, to produce a historically contingent set of racialized meanings, pleasures, and profits.
How should feminist theorists respond when women who claim to be feminists make “choices” that seemingly prop up patriarchy, like posing for Playboy, eroticizing male dominance, or advocating wifely submission? This article argues that the conflict between the quest for gender equality and the desire for sexual pleasure has long been a challenge for feminism. In fact, the second-wave of the American feminist movement split over issues related to sexuality. Feminists found themselves on opposite sides of a series of contentious debates about issues such as pornography, sex work, and heterosexuality, with one side seeing evidence of gender oppression and the other opportunities for sexual pleasure and empowerment. Since the mid-1990s, however, a third wave of feminism has developed that seeks to reunite the ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom. Inclusive, pluralistic, and non-judgmental, third-wave feminism respects the right of women to decide for themselves how to negotiate the often contradictory desires for both gender equality and sexual pleasure. While this approach is sometimes caricatured as uncritically endorsing whatever a woman chooses to do as feminist, this essay argues that third-wave feminism actually exhibits not a thoughtless endorsement of “choice,” but rather a deep respect for pluralism and self-determination.
This paper begins from the understanding that women's empowerment is about the process by which those who have been denied the ability to make strategic life choices acquire such an ability. A wide gap separates this processual understanding of empowerment from the more instrumentalist forms of advocacy which have required the measurement and quantification of empowerment. The ability to exercise choice incorporates three inter-related dimensions: resources (defined broadly to include not only access, but also future claims, to both material and human and social resources); agency (including processes of decision making, as well as less measurable manifestations of agency such as negotiation, deception and manipulation); and achievements (well-being outcomes). A number of studies of women's empowerment are analysed to make some important methodological points about the measurement of empowerment. The paper argues that these three dimensions of choice are indivisible in determining the meaning of an indicator and hence its validity as a measure of empowerment. The notion of choice is further qualified by referring to the conditions of choice, its content and consequences. These qualifications represent an attempt to incorporate the structural parameters of individual choice in the analysis of women's empowerment.
This report describes among 360 family planning clients in an HIV epicenter, women's HIV/STD risk characteristics, the barriers and facilitators of condom use within the context of relationships, and the use of alternative strategies for protection. Women attending the clinic were recruited for an HIV/STD preventive intervention and interviewed at baseline. At least 1 risk factor was reported by 77%, including a diagnosis of an STD within the last year for 30%. Recent STD diagnosis was associated with having a risky partner, but not with number of current partners. Women reporting consistent condom use had higher quality of couple communication, stronger intentions to prevent pregnancy, more positive reactions to condoms themselves and from their partners. Alternative risk reduction strategies, including using a barrier method other than condoms, refusing sex, engaging in nonpenetrative sex, leaving a relationship due to STD concerns, or undergoing mutual HIV testing had been used by 39% of women in the past 3 months.