First look: new paper in Feminist Theory

I have just had a paper accepted by the journal Feminist Theory, entitled ‘‘Holding on’ in a crisis: theorising campus sexual violence activism within precarious labour relations.’ I have decided to share the accepted manuscript ahead of time with readers of this blog – it can be accessed at https://genderate.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/phipps-holding-on-in-a-crisis.pdf. Please share onwards freely, as the paper is available under a CC-BY licence.

The abstract is below and the paper will be officially out in 2024.

‘Holding on’ in a crisis: theorising campus sexual violence activism within precarious labour relations

Alison Phipps

A ‘rape crisis’ has been identified in universities in the Anglophone North, and responses usually take the form of institutional discipline and governance despite well-established assessments of the failings of both carceral and procedural approaches. In these responses, institutional reputation and risk management overdetermines, elevates, and captures particular types of white feminist activism. This paper theorises these dynamics, using precarity as a lens on the relations within which campus sexual violence is addressed. I trace the material connections between sexual violence and precarious labour, and the intersecting narratives of crisis focused on both issues in contemporary higher education, which reflect ‘genres of crisis’ in the wider politico- cultural sphere (Berlant, 2011: 26). In this context, persistent attachments to discipline and governance within the campus sexual violence movement can be theorised at least partly as a political flight from vulnerability, a ‘holding on’ to whatever one can find, that is ripe for exploitation by liability-focused institutional agendas. Such procedural enactments of security are possible because bureaucracy is the institutional ‘water in which we swim’ (Graeber 2015: xii), which creates a strong impetus to reduce politics to paperwork relations. This is especially manifest in risk-averse and compliance-driven ‘safeguarding’ modalities, securitarian regimes (Butler in Lorey, 2015: 8) that serve mainly to interpellate the dangerous Other and safeguard the institution. Following Butler (2004), I argue for the cultivation of more susceptible relations which are difficult to achieve within disembodied bureaucratic codes and which require a retreat from both narratives of crisis and procedural attempts at calm.