Respond and Resolve: A Critical Feminist Inquiry for Technologies of Sexual Governance

From higher education to workplaces, institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven and semiautomated technologies to facilitate, manage, and arbitrate sexual affairs. These largely US-based systems, which I term “technologies of sexual governance,” are encoded with and reify particular ideologies about sexual (mis)conduct, and thus call for a critical feminist inquiry about their cultural, political, and moral implications for advancing a feminist sexual politics. Drawing from Halley et al.’s “governance feminism” framework, this article makes the case that a critical feminist inquiry into technologies of sexual governance must take into account the co-constitutive nature of feminist sexual politics and technology. Specifically, I argue that critical inquiries must begin by interrogating which feminist ideologies about sex and power gain purchase with and through particular computational logics and form. To demonstrate this approach, I offer two ways of reading feminist scholarly and popular responses to “antirape technologies” that capture both readings’ shortcomings, and I propose a third approach that captures the cultural work that particular feminist ideologies and technologies mutually perform. This article concludes by demonstrating how the third approach can advance a feminist analysis of workplace misconduct management softwares.

Fragmentation

Chapter 3 examines fragmentation and provides an analysis of the fragmentation of gender law reform: practically, within institutional apparatus, and substantively, through the segregation of diverse currents within feminist and gender theories from the developments that have materialised within international law. This is a departure from the existing feminist critiques of ‘governance feminism’, focusing instead on understanding of the structural limitations of international law as vital to any critique of feminist ‘successes’. Thus, chapter 3 demonstrates the need to appreciate the role fragmentation within international law and the global order plays in constraining the potential for inclusion of diverse feminist approaches in a system which mitigates against the very possibility of structural change at the level required. The chapter concludes by emphasising a diversity of feminist approaches as necessary for feminist dialogues and as leverage for a transformative feminist politics and ethics within international law.

Feminism Against Crime Control: On Sexual Subordination and State Apologism

Its critics call it ‘feminism-as-crime-control’, or ‘Governance Feminism’, diagnosing it as a pernicious form of identity politics. Its advocates call it taking sexual violence seriously – by which they mean wielding the power of the state to ‘punish perpetrators’ and ‘protect vulnerable women’. Both sides agree that this approach follows from the radical feminist analysis of sexual violence most strikingly formulated by Catharine MacKinnon. The aim of this paper is to rethink the Governance Feminism debate by questioning this common presupposition. I ask whether taking MacKinnon’s analysis of sexual violence seriously might, in fact, itself give us reason to be critical of political strategies that embrace the punitive state. By raising this question, I hope to persuade radical feminists to listen to critics of carceral politics rather than dismissing them as rape apologists, and critics of carceral politics to listen to radical feminists rather than dismissing them as state apologists.