Resisting the binary

Reconciling Victimhood and Agency in Discourses of Sexual Violence

Bibliographic Data

ID4367451
AuthorsPallavi Raghavan (0000-0003-2040-5278, Institute of Development Studies, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume25
Issue3
Pages417-435
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/14647001231201059
OpenAlexW4387307113
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited44

Queer, post-colonial and Black feminist scholars and activists have long cautioned against the dangerous exclusions and complicities entailed in even the best-intentioned efforts to counter sexual violence. The rhetoric of protecting women from sexual violence is frequently and effectively invoked in order to rehabilitate old colonial projects and justify new ones that persecute sexual dissidents, police gender, sexual and caste transgressions and re-inscribe neoliberal and neo-conservative rationalities across the globe. This article argues that many of the exclusionary, violent and coercive consequences of efforts to protect women from sexual violence are rooted in mischaracterisations or mis-descriptions of the subject of sexual violence, and enabled by particular (mis)orientations towards this subject. Specifically, I suggest that the imagination and representation of the subject of sexual violence is subtended by a politically dangerous and conceptually untenable victim/agent binary. Mediated by rationalities of caste, race, class and religion, women are imagined either as vulnerable victims in need of protection, or as capable (even culpable) agents, but never simultaneously both. The failure to reconcile victimhood and agency within discourses of sexual violence is precisely the condition of possibility for a range of violent, exclusionary and regulatory outcomes. This article tracks the effects of the victim/agent binary in dominant responses to sexual violence, before assembling the foundations from which to rethink victimhood and agency away from their binary orthodoxy, drawing centrally on the radical subjectivity of pain

Criminology · Heterosexuality · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Queer · Sexual revolution · Sexual violence · Social science · Sociology · Subjectivity · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Sex work and related issues

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