Sexual Politics in the Twenty-First Century: Practices of Silencing

Abstract

This paper examines the spectrum of sexual violence that permeates women's lives, among others, often unnoticed by most of society. To do so, I revisit arguments from Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), which to a large extent gave rise to the theoretical contention that under conditions of patriarchy there is a constant coercive factor in sexuality, which is a hostile sphere for women. I go on to examine current practices of silencing that can be seen as surreptitious ways of perpetuating this continuum of sexual violence: testimonial epistemic injustice, hermeneutical epistemic injustice, the legal discourse of gender-based violence and the naturalistic discourse of sexuality. I conclude that current legal feminist scholarship has the imperative challenge of imagining new frames of reference that allow us to collectively and socially interpret this entire spectrum of violence outside the legal framework.