Frances' earrings

Or, Responding to Everyday Heterosexual Domination

Bibliographic Data

ID4367170
AuthorsAlexandra Kogl (0000-0001-9045-9920, University of Northern Iowa, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume26
Issue1
Pages184-202
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001241258066
OpenAlexW4399618063
LanguageEN
References cited29

Women practise agency even under circumstances of heterosexual domination, but the meanings of such practices are not always clear. Specifically, what do women's denials that they have been victims, despite sexual mistreatment, tell us about their experience of embodied power? A phenomenological approach to women's responses to their experiences of 'grey sex' expands our possible interpretations of the relationship between agency and victimisation. Such an approach highlights a specific power dynamic that often plays out in grey sex: a kind of domination in which the man treats the woman as if she were not a distinct subject but an extension or appendage of his own subjectivity. In response to such treatment, women's denials of victimisation may be tantamount to the assertion, 'I am still a person', which in turn may be a kind of testimony. The implied content of that testimony may include a rejection of the dominator's interpellation of her; a rejection of the social meanings of being dominated; the unavailability of the discourse of victimhood to many women; and an experience of subjectivity that exceeds the ideal of the sovereign subject

Assertion · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Sociology · Subjectivity · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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