Desiring and Acting Differently: A Sketch Towards a Critique of Consent (Redux)

 

2022 Introductory note: This overly long and convoluted essay was originally published in 2016 on a different platform, which is sadly no longer online. I think it’s worth republishing here as my opinions have not changed much in the interim. Two things do come to mind as I’m reading this back.

1 – The almost feverish manner in which I repeatedly try to reassure the reader that I take consent seriously, and that the occasion of my critique isn’t some awful prelude to a full-on exultation of manosphere values. It’s amusing to see these little summaries at the end of each section, which I’ve put into italics, as if I’m saying to the reader ‘No matter if you skimmed the rest, at least concentrate on this!’, all of them couched in defensive terms, “it is important to be very clear”, “Let me emphasise again that in no way…”, etc. There was a lot of pick-up-artist, manosphere attention on consent at the time and to not be enthusiastic for Leftist consent discourse was to risk being lumped in with some very unsavoury individuals.

2 – Quite soon after I wrote this it dawned on me that the ridiculously convoluted route I’ve taken here to make what were at the time a series of unfashionable arguments could be summed up quite straightforwardly with the following: Consent does not turn violence into non-violence, it merely turns it into legal violence. I should caveat this by drawing attention to the very timely We Can’t Consent to This campaign which has done much to push back against the defence of “consensual violence” in cases where women have suffered serious injury or been killed at the hands of men. Nevertheless, the fact that such a campaign group needs to exist proves my basic point.

 That I made such effort to construct a series of arguments - some more plausible than others – reflects my inability at the time to take what would have been the short route, straight through values. For if violence is the actual matter at hand, then all that is needed is to point out the empty formal quality of consent as it is used in the contemporary legal/social context, and demand an ethic of substantial values set against the normalisation of violence. This, of course, is the illiberal path, but it is the one that was quite obviously signposted, which is borne out by the fact that in turning away from that path I was driven to take these colourful extended detours through everything from speech-act theory to Medieval law.  

I think section 5, which revolves around Jennifer Doyle’s book Campus Sex, Campus Security, has some of the strongest material, not least as little did I know that in thinking about risk management and the bolstering of State paternalistic authority I was sketching what would become the central mode of power during the pandemic. It is a short step from risk management around sexual freedom to risk management around freedom in toto. This passage, which quotes Doyle, is especially suggestive:

  The appearance of consent classes as well as safe spaces is "shaped by the affective economy of a security culture in which a sense of injury and exposure revolves around sexual possibility - a possibility with the organizing force of a black hole" (Doyle 2015 pg28). This discourse of protection Doyle claims not only re-enforces but actually produces the subjectivities it claims to protect. Ultimately it constitutes a particularly insidious apparatus for normalising and inscribing both the essential fragility of the student-subject and the policing power of the university in its Neoliberal phase. Within these regimes of risk management sex appears as a thing, as a dangerous property possessed by "sexual sovereigns" that someone else might try to take away, or that we may misuse, and which we demand the state and university protect.

Risk management is in the second rank – behind Decline – as an interpretive key for the present. As for understanding the metastasis of authoritarian yearning among the administrative classes, it is indispensable.

 

2016 Text

1.

As I write, the verdict in the retrial of footballer Ched Evans has just recently been announced. The verdict itself is a shock but what is even more disheartening are the facts of the trial; that the complainant's personal sexual history was used against her after the judge made a rare exception to allow it as evidence, and that the family and partner of Evans was known to have offered a cash reward for information leading to his acquittal. The repercussions of this verdict and the precedent that the judge's exception may set will undoubtedly be felt for years to come and is a huge blow for women who seek to bring their attackers to justice. Once again bringing prejudice to bear against the sexual history of women who report rape has become a legitimate line of defence. To put it simply, this trial in the way it was allowed to be conducted has made women less safe and men more secure in their ability to rape without fear of conviction.

Currently then a critique of the use of consent as an effective concept within the discourse of rape prevention seems inopportune. Shouldn't we be defending the sanctity of the notion of consent, since it was precisely the autonomy of the victim and her right to deny consent that was being undermined in the Evans retrial? On the other hand, the trial also demonstrates the fragility of consent as a legal principle which enables us to identify harm in sexual matters. Given the right conditions, the right amount of prejudice, enough money, and a legal system that still fails women time after time, a person's right to give or deny consent can be overthrown. 

It is for this reason that a critique of consent - and in the case of this article - of the development of so called 'sexual consent classes' in universities, is worthwhile. It is meant to be a sketch so my lines of argumentation are multiple but do not reach the depth that they would deserve in a fuller exposition. Also, given the climate, it will unavoidably appear as a provocation. What I wish to argue is that the concept of consent is inadequate due to its being imported from the legal discourse of property and contract and that as such it imprints a highly abstract and alienating form onto sexual relations that erodes the aspects of mutuality and reciprocal gift-giving which are at the heart of all worthwhile human intimacy.

2a.

"Not everyone has the privilege to feel enthusiastic about sexual consent but that doesn't necessarily mean that they lack the freedom and capacity to make that choice..." (NUS Women, I Heart Consent Workshop Guide 2015) - Link no longer available

Sexual consent classes are a phenomenon that began in universities in the United States, but have over the last two or three years become increasingly prevalent in the UK. Their implementation has been spearheaded by the NUS as one approach to tackling the high rates of reported sexual harassment on university campuses. Depending on the source those rates range from one in five to over 50% of female students experiencing some kind of sexual harassment or assault while at university in the UK. The NUS conceive of consent classes as part of the standard induction package all new students should receive along with more general health and safety material, and information about IT and library recourses. This mirrors the reception of such measures in the US where they have been integrated into universities as part of their obligations under Title IX of the US Higher Education Act. Title IX is an amendment that covers safeguarding and how universities deal with accusations of discrimination and assault. To this end the UK NUS have produced a standardised guide for those organising consent classes.

Their introduction has not gone unnoticed and there have been several stories picked up by the mainstream media over the last two rounds of admissions. Last year we had George Lawlor at Warwick (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34615631) who took offense at having attend the classes. He argued a common criticism of the classes that they imply all men are potentially rapists: "It's just that I feel if you need to be taught what consent is and what consent isn't, then you don't have respect for other human beings." This year as more student unions around the country introduced the classes there were even minor protests and walk-outs such as at York where third-year accounting student Ben Froughi encouraged a boycott arguing that the classes encouraged men and women to identify with the respective roles of potential victim and rapist. Interestingly the irked accountant also took issue with the implied contractual form of sexual bargaining: "There is no correct way to negotiate getting someone into bed with you. In suggesting that there is, consent talks encourage women to interpret sexual experiences that have not been preceded by a lengthy, formal, and sober contractual discussion as rape".

Despite increasing numbers of universities hosting such classes there is scant data either here or in the US, where they have run for many years, that the classes are effective in reducing the incidence of sexual assault. In fact, judging by the stats put out by the NUS, the reported rates seem to be increasing; although like such data produced by the police and government, this is often explained away by putting any increase down to the willingness of victims to come forward, and thus something in part to be celebrated. However, this is also an admission that there is no reliable data pertaining to the reality of the situation on the ground, or as yet any empirical means to assess the impact of the classes. Like those mysterious proclamations on the invisible war put out by security services we can well imagine NUS officers proudly counting up the number of potential rapists neutralised by their programs of prevention and countermeasures. It is important however to be very clear; my argument is not that the problem of sexual assault at Britain’s universities is trivial or overstated, nor is it that these techniques of management could never be effective (although as yet there is no evidence that they are). My claim is that their potential effectiveness carries with it a problematic discourse which undermines the good intentions from within.

2b.

The starting point for the NUS guide is the definition of consent from current UK legislation. In England and Wales a person consents if they agree "by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice". And in the Scottish sexual offenses act of 2009 consent is defined simply as "free agreement". Both these definitions are highly abstract renderings of basic principles from contract law emphasising notions of free agreement and the absence of force and fraud. Immediately in its legal form sexual relations are taken in part to be an instance of the exchange of goods or services involving the free contracting of the parties involved. 

Consent classes, the principal subjects of which are rape and rape culture, begin by reproducing this juridical and legalistic framework of sex crime legislation, as well as the vagueness of some clauses within those definitions. The classes tend however to expand on the legal definition to include examples of additional clauses while maintaining the contractual style already inherent in the legal definition. For instance, the NUS consent workshop guide includes “active, on-going conversation, and retractable” as attributes of consent while including “assumed, and previous consent” as examples of what genuine consent is not. Taken in isolation and as general pointers towards avoiding harm none of these examples is especially vexatious, although in practice some may be difficult to implement. Taken together they flesh out the vagueness of the current UK definition of sexual consent into a more concrete contractual form.

One of the difficulties both in the UK and US legal definition is that it admits the possibility of non-verbal consent, though the US code excludes that as a possibility in cases resulting from the use of force, threat of force, or placing another person in fear. Although the NUS consent class guide does not state consent should be explicit and verbal, the additional glosses on the UK and US legislation (especially that consent should never be assumed) and the overall contractual framework make the implication clear. Transparency and predictability of outcomes are key.

The clearest indicator of the abstract contractual nature of consent being put forward in the NUS guide is that it is explicitly separated from any notion of enthusiasm or enjoyment; surely the prime reason all things considered for having sex besides purely reproductive motivations. For the authors of the guide, consent functions seemingly as a purely formalistic concept within an exchange between two parties. The guide even goes so far as to describe enthusiastic consent (which we might translate as anticipating the possibility of actually enjoying the act) as a "privilege" and draws comparisons with the exchange between sex workers and their clients. This is a particularly striking comparison considering the continued "workerisation of sex" that I have drawn attention to elsewhere. 

In that case, guided by Neoliberal notions of entrepreneurship and human/erotic capital, advocates from the sex industry have argued against distinguishing sex-work from work in general, using a similar set of conceptual tools around consent and personal bargaining that they argue would reduce the dangers to sex-workers and combat prejudice. Paul Mason has argued in his book Post-Capitalism that this reflects a trend of contemporary Neoliberalism to capture "externalities"; aspects of our social lives that do not obviously conform to market or value generating transactions. (2022 note: In the wake of the pandemic this distinction has now almost entirely collapsed)

The direction this is heading in seems clear; human sexual relations are just like any other form of exchange within the economy. The fact that money may not actually change hands does not mean sexual exchange should be excluded from regimes of management where pleasure is rarely a significant factor. Ultimately sex is just another instance of one party wishing to obtain goods or services from another, fitting squarely within prevailing legal discourses of property and contract. Lovers become contracted partners in an amorous exchange and the estrangement of immanent human relations into the legal/juridical framework is further normalised. As so often in the most developed societies, security and risk management are the banners under which we are rapidly burying all possibility of a joyful form-of-life. Consent classes are potentially then a correlate to the reimagining of sex-work through the logic of work, contract, and entrepreneurship. And as such the sex-worker becomes the vector through which all sexual relations are being reconfigured along economic lines.

The consent classes, which would presumably be appropriate for anyone, are in fact part of a package from the US which includes the notions of “safe-spaces” and “trigger warnings” (both present in the NUS literature) which opponents argue have together contributed to infantilising an entire generation of students across the pond and is threatening to make relations between young people just as miserable and estranged over here. There has also been criticism of the use of safe spaces by some universities and interest groups to shut down legitimate criticism of Israel on the grounds that Jewish students felt threatened. This is however another issue entirely. Let me emphasise again that in no way am I suggesting that consent is an irrelevance for sexual relations (quite the opposite) or that one should casually reject the discourse around consent purely on the basis that it brings with it unforeseen consequences or types of language. Nevertheless, it is all too often forgotten that life and Law are fundamentally distinct realms and the assumption that the former might be contained and safeguarded by the later is a mistake that Western society in the modern period never ceases to repeat.

3.

"Our suggestion is that the presuppositions introduced by the pornographic conversations persist in the conversations with real women" (Langton 2009 pg187)

Consent, when referring to a verbal or other sign form of agreement is an example of a type of speech act called performative. Performatives are not like regular descriptive speech that report something about the world; the cat is on the mat, etc. Performatives do not merely describe a state of affairs but actually bring that state of affairs into being through their saying. When someone says "I promise" those words are not representing a promise but constitute the promise itself. Performatives do what they say. Similarly, J.L. Austin who first developed speech act theory in the 1960s uses the example of an umpire in tennis who when shouting "out" constitutes the ball 'as' out within the context of the game regardless of whether it actually was or not. Saying so 'makes it so'. This reality constituting aspect of performatives is central to American philosopher Judith Butler's queer theory and the possibility she sees of undermining prevalent norms of gender and sexuality; notably through the use of Drag.

Consent classes are not the first example of performatives being brought into issues around rape and sexual violence. Second wave feminists in the 1970s and 80s found Austin's work on performatives invaluable in building their case against pornography on the grounds that it depicted women in ways that caused "illocutionary disablement" of women in general. In short, the argument goes that the depiction of women in pornography as enjoying domination, as always available, as always saying yes - and critically when they do say no not really meaning it - meant that a women's capacity outside of pornography to refuse sex (refusal is also a performative) was negatively affected. Just as was the case during the Ched Evans retrial, consent is for all intents and purposes assumed. 

As Catherine MacKinnon put it in an influential essay: “pornography brings its conditions of production to the consumer, … establishing what woman are said to exist as, are seen as, are treated as, constructing the social reality of what a women is and can be in terms of what can be done to her, and what a man is in terms of doing it”(MacKinnon 1993 pg25). Pornography is said to make comparable pronouncements on the status of women as an umpire in tennis calling the ball out or a jury ruling a defendant guilty. As such it does not simply describe a state of affairs but continually constitutes and re-enforces that state of affairs.

Saying no is a refusal and like utterances of consent are speech acts that aim at a particular effect and are as such dependent on factors Austin called felicity conditions. These are particular conventions and references that allow a performative to actually have the effect it is intended to have, such as promising, accepting, etc. If, however, the one whom the refusal is directed to believes that women enjoy being coerced into sex, that for a woman to drink and enjoy herself is itself an invitation for sex, and that even when they say no they sometimes mean yes, the act of refusal can fail to count as an effective speech act. The felicity condition whereby the speaker’s refusal is taken to reflect genuine intention is absent or disputed, as such it fails to count as an effective illocution. Between the speakers, as Jennifer Hornsby has argued, there is a lack of reciprocity (Hornsby in Dwyer 1995 pg224).    

Although much of what MacKinnon and others argued about pornography at this time has been challenged, not least on the claim that it has a so-called power of 'divine performatives' that can socially construct women unchallenged, there was a sophistication to their critique that brought in ideas of how the wider discourse on sex within a society impacted an individual's sexual relations at a fundamental level. Consent classes however appear something of a step back from this insofar as they take the concept of consent in a more or less uncritical way, as if it were not also dependent on particular conventions and subject to the vagaries and dominant interests within the wider discursive environment in which it is used. 

Although these classes do address the influence of rape culture (a term retained from MacKinnon's era) it could well be argued that the claims made about refusal by second wave feminists apply equally to consent and that wider societal and ideological factors have a part to play in how such speech acts function and the sort of social relations they entail. The question we need to then ask is what are the felicity conditions that make consent intelligible in its contemporary form? I have already drawn attention to the legal economic influence which brings sexual consent into the realm of contract and exchange, but what about other historical sources?

4.

"When the ethical - and not simply cognitive - connection that unites words, things, and human actions is broken, this in fact promotes a spectacular and unprecedented proliferation of vain words on the one hand and, on the other, of legislative apparatuses that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect of that life on which they seem no longer to have any hold" (Agamben 2011 pg70-71)

The etymology of consent leads back to the Latin consentio/consentire; literally to ‘feel-together’ or to be of the same mind. For the ancient Romans however the word never had the status of a technicus terminus in legal or economic writing and is instead found across the literature in numerous contexts evoking the sense of being of common mind or shared sentiment. The development of consent as a concept in modern legal discourse and the caveat in the NUS literature excluding enthusiastic consent makes clear however that sentiment or mutual feeling are not significant factors in its contemporary use. The sex worker does not feel the same about the act as the client. It should not surprise us that the etymological shift towards an increasingly abstract form of agreement took place during the 13^th century when so much of the basic framework of modern systems of Law were being worked out across Europe.

In English law it makes a prominent appearance near the end of that century in the Statutes of Westminster where for the first time the notion of sexual consent is developed independently of whether a girl (such laws dealt solely with girls) were married. In Roman and Cannon law a girl's perceived capacity to consent was tied entirely to the age of womanhood and marriage. Consenting to marriage necessarily implied consent to sex and the two were more or less indexed to the onset of puberty and as such the physical capacity to bear children. As Victoria Bates writes recently "Consent in itself was not the focus of these laws, in which a man’s right to take a girl’s chastity – ideally, but not necessarily, with her consent – came with marriage". The marriage agreement was taken to give the husband a right in the use of the wife's body, ostensibly for child rearing; a perspective on the institution of marriage that lived on well into the 20th century.  

Bates also draws attention to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which gave us our modern two tier system of consent laws which set the felony age at 13 and misdemeanour age at 16. What is essential for our discussion is how the setting of the two ages reflected concerns about unruly sexual desire in young girls. "Before full maturity – physical and mental – girls were thought to need protection not only from men, but also from their own new and disorderly sexual feelings. This question of ‘capacity’ was a double-edged one: it complemented a child protection agenda, but also supported those who feared that girls (especially working-class girls) would ‘fall’ early and should not be given the opportunity to do so. 

This balance between protection and control ran throughout much Victorian legislation" (Ibid). In effect the raising of the age of consent to 16 reflected as much a desire to control young women as to protect children. I don't believe it is too much to suggest that today's discourse of consent as it plays out in the courts and social media and in particular how a woman's clothing, her choice to drink, her choice of company and lifestyle retain the signature of this desire to control and condemn female sexuality.   

Leading into modernity there have then been two distinct but interrelated discourses on consent which now find themselves united in the contemporary concept. On the one hand a notion tied to the institutions of marriage, childbirth and ethico/religious obligations; on the other an increasingly general and abstract notion tied to the development of the law of property and contract, and of the human being as an economic subject. It is clear that many aspects of the first discourse continue to influence the moral landscape around consent, with women bearing most of the negative consequences. 

It is also clear however that with the detraditionalisation of established sources of ethical norms, such as the church, the family and the local community, that it is the economic discourse of consent which now holds sway over the field. More broadly, as the aspect of reciprocal feeling inherent in the ancient usage has receded, the concept of consent has increasingly come to be associated with individuals embroiled in some form of negotiation. Its fate is like many other concepts in the Western metaphysical tradition; its character as an emblem of singular being-together, of common life, is hollowed out, abstracted and finally marooned as a mere statement representing the ascent of an individual to a matter present-at-hand.

5.

"Making oneself vulnerable: Is that not what we do in friendship, and in desire?" (Doyle pg49)

The continued failure of the judiciary to properly protect women, instead perpetuating prejudice; and the proliferation of discourses collapsing the distinction between sex and other forms of economic activity are not phenomena opposed to each other. Both rely on the efficacy of the performative ‘consent’ as a means to constitute harmless relations or identify harmful ones. As such consent relies on certain conditions of intelligibility, which Austin called felicity conditions, in order to function. These include the distribution of roles, responsibilities and rights, and obligations drawn from prevailing social relations. Or as Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato put it in a recent critique of the emancipatory potential of speech act theory: "Just as the performative codifies enunciations, utterances, and their effects, it also institutionalises speakers and listeners, their respective roles and ranks, and the public space of their acts. The "subjects" that emerge here take no risks and do not engage themselves "personally""(Lazzarato pg174).

As we have seen, the discourse of sexual consent is inseparable from its history as a means of managing female sexuality either in association with marriage and child rearing or the supposed dangers of precocious and disorderly female desire. Consent more generally is also inseparable from its development as a key concept in the history of property and contract law, and in the present era the generalisation of those discourses as models for all human activity as life continues to be marketized. It is for these reasons that I argue that making consent the foundational concept of any discourse dealing with sex will not help produce healthy, flourishing relations between people, nor ultimately prevent harm.

The situation in the courts and the continued prevalence of prejudice against women remain a salient example of how this historical baggage combined with legal exactitude are ensuring the failure to prevent or even identify that harm. Victoria Bates' reflections on the 19th century consent laws and their ambivalent motivation similarly allow us to understand this strange dual view of women as simultaneously 'at risk' and 'a risk'.

Returning to the situation in the universities Jennifer Doyle's recent book Campus Sex Campus Security (Doyle 2016) describes how concerns around sexual harassment have articulated with the university security apparatus in the US. Doyle claims that outmoded paternalistic myths about female vulnerability have been generalised in the contemporary era and are now captured within the ubiquitous discourse of risk management. The appearance of consent classes as well as safe spaces is "shaped by the affective economy of a security culture in which a sense of injury and exposure revolves around sexual possibility - a possibility with the organizing force of a black hole" (Doyle 2015 pg28). This discourse of protection Doyle claims not only re-enforces but actually produces the subjectivities it claims to protect. Ultimately it constitutes a particularly insidious apparatus for normalising and inscribing both the essential fragility of the student-subject and the policing power of the university in its Neoliberal phase. 

Within these regimes of risk management sex appears as a thing, as a dangerous property possessed by "sexual sovereigns" that someone else might try to take away, or that we may misuse, and which we demand the state and university protect. Just as pre-nuptial agreements were meant to protect the property of the rich in acrimonious divorce settlements, and modern sugar daddy agencies seek to formalise that type of relationship outside of marriage, here the juridical framework of contract is again called upon to smooth over precarious interpersonal relations, which in an atmosphere of cultural anomie and litigious anxiety, increasingly lack any other grounding. The historical unfolding of contract and consent, while always carrying with it the mark of freedom and individualism, has also - and always been - a way for life to be captured in Law.

6.

"We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. To make a truly unavoidable challenge of the question: What can be played?" (Foucault 1997 pg140)

This is meant to be a sketch for a critique, and I make no claim to any magic bullet for the problems of sexual violence and how Western societies are addressing them. However, to bring this to some sort of conclusion it may be worth reflecting on one kind of utterance that Lazzarato opposes to the performative. Michel Foucault's late work included extended reflections on the ancient Greek practice of parrhesia, a word with no direct translation but which is to do with truth telling or true speech. This is however not the kind of speech that merely describes a state of affairs. 

As Foucault put it in almost tautological fashion: "parrhesia involves the way in which by asserting the truth, and in the very act of this assertion, one constitutes oneself as the person who tells the truth, who has told the truth, and who recognises oneself in and as the person who has told the truth" (Foucault 2011 pg68). In such speech it is the speakers themselves who appear rather than in the case of performatives like consent, where what appears is merely the matter present at hand. The latter case brings in nothing that is not already decided upon or pre-assigned to accepted roles and responsibilities, of what can and cannot be said. Whereas in parrhesia it is the speaker’s freedom that appears and their courage.

In his writing on this "courage of truth" Foucault describes different situations where parrhesia is in play, several of which are political in nature such as Pericles speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war. Indeed, at times it is as if for the French philosopher the function of parrhesia takes on a significance for the wellbeing of a political community that surpasses even that argued by Cicero for classical rhetoric. For our purposes, on the interpersonal level it is also crucial to emphasise that this openness in truth is a deeply ethical one that always demands a reciprocal openness on the part of the other which Foucault describes as the "parrhesiastic pact". This is especially the case as the question of the free and moral subject “comes back to the question of the true discourse in which this moral subject constitutes itself, and the question of the relation of power in which this subject is formed“ (Foucault 2011 pg68). What is crucial to this argument is that for Foucault this kind of truth telling is the highest exercise of freedom, albeit a dangerous one.

Dangerous perhaps because unlike with performatives parrhesia does not produce a codified effect, rather it opens up an unspecified risk (Foucault 2011 pg62). As such it is entirely opposed to the contractual logic animating the contemporary discourse of consent with its emphasis on predetermined, predictable outcomes and risk management. Parrhesia as an eruption of truth means that the situation between the partners is open, no longer predictable and that consequences cannot be known in advance. A declaration of love or desire always carries with it great risk for both parties. 

However, clarity is essential here; parrhesia is not opposed to consent. On the contrary, at the very fundamental level (the level of not forcing people to do things they do not wish to) consent is presupposed by parrhesia. Within a parrhesiastic situation the will to dominate the other must be entirely absent for the play of risk and openness to function, and it is only through such an interplay that a break with the predictable, with the closed and cold logic of sexual exchange can be made, that love and sex might reach the level of an event.

This is admittedly a somewhat vague and certainly more difficult form of relationship to think compared to the familiarity of legal terms that increasing guide our public and personal lives. I hold however that it and other similar notions constitute a far better starting point for ethical sexual relationships than the limited and tainted discourse of consent. If there is any desire left in this world to resist the transformation of all social life into market transactions; any desire to resist human intimacy being subsumed under economic categories; or any imagination left to conceive of a break with the conditions of the past, then it will involve re-thinking sexual relations and sex education along these kind of lines.

References

Agamben,Giorgio 2011 - The Sacrament of Language (Cambridge, Polity Press)

Doyle,Jennifer  2015 - Campus Sex, Campus Security (Semiotext, California)

Dwyer, Susan (Ed.) 1995 - The Problem of Pornography (Belmont, Calif.:Wadsworth Publishing Company)

Foucault, Michel 1997 – Ethics:Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Vol 1 (London Penguin Books)

Foucault,Michel 2011 - The Government of Self and Others (New York, Palgrave Macmillan)

Langton, Rae - Sexual Solipsism (2009) (Oxford University Press, London)

MacKinnon, Catharine 1993 - Only Words (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press)

Lazzarato,Maurizio - Signs and Machines: Capitalism and Production of Subjectvity 2014 (Semiotext, California)

Excess Deaths, Grievable Death

Detail from Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

Excess deaths is a key figure which has been used over the past year as part of the government strategy to manage the Pandemic. The term "excess" implies something about the character of these deaths; that they should not have taken place; that they were avoidable. This is the tone in which the UK media has consistently used the term, encouraging shock and dismay, and emphasising the continual - indeed likely permanent - need to comply with biosecurity restrictions to avoid more unnecessary, excess deaths. In reality excess deaths is a purely statistical abstraction, devoid of explanatory content. The figure is the total number of recorded deaths above the previous five year average.

Accordingly the current estimates for excess deaths in the UK in 2020 (the figures for last year are still provisional according to the ONS) is in the region of 75 to 85 thousand. This will include all those registered as Covid deaths (which as we know has a very low bar) and also those that died prematurely as a result of the pandemic response. The government has not shown any interest in distinguishing between these two groups and so we are encouraged to think of every excess death as caused by Covid. However, Matthew Reed, of the end-of-life care charity Marie Curie noted in January that during the pandemic there had been a "silent crisis" of deaths at home, unrelated to the disease.

In isolation the figure of 75 to 85 thousand sounds appalling, and indeed the propagandistic use of such statistics is grounded on using them in the abstract. The greatest abstraction here is the hidden assumption in the notion of "excess deaths" of an acceptable rate of mortality. This is an illusion since the "excess" here is derived from a rolling five year average and does not contain any normative notion of mortality.  Quite what that mythical figure might be is never discussed. However the ONS data does at least afford us a historical comparison.

The UK Office for National Statistics makes most of its data sets publically available on easy to use Excel spreadsheets, which affords anyone the opportunity to dig into the numbers and find out the recent history of excess deaths and how that figure relates to other key death statistics such as Crude and Age-standardised mortality rate. The first thing that jumps out is that since the 1960s there had been a steady decline in excess deaths in the UK. Indeed since 1980 the figure was rarely above zero. That all changed after the Tories came to power in 2010 and began a decade of austerity which has gutted the public services - most notably those of health and social care - on which the nation's health depends. As a result the total number of excess deaths from 2010 to 2019 according to the ONS is 121,798. In the previous decade it was zero. Given that this number far exceeds even the worst estimates for 2020 could we not argue that the election of a conservative government is at least as great a threat to public heath as SARS-CoV-2? To bring the winter of 2020/21 into similar context the ONS report from 2018 highlights that in the 2017 to 2018 winter period, there were an estimated 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales alone. That figure was the highest recorded since the winter of 1975 to 1976. Where was the declaration of a public health emergency then? Indeed why was it not headline news in 2015 when excess deaths were the highest since the early 60s?

These excess deaths - which apparently were not worthy of massive state intervention or blanket media coverage - were not the result of a virus which until recently we had no treatment, but were the direct result of political decisions. In contrast, in January this year the media - which has never tired of making the analogy with a state of war - loudly exclaimed the highest number of excess deaths since World War 2. Now, remember, excess deaths is the total number of recorded deaths above the previous five year average. With this in mind it's hardly surprising that the transition from a state of relative peace to one of mass slaughter in the five years from 1935 to 1940 would yield such a figure. In fact the crude mortality rate for 1940 was 1457.9 (per 100,000 population), compared to 1016.2 for 2020. This latter figure is lower than the corresponding mortality rate for 2003. And what terrible events were happening in the UK in 2003 to account for such an awful mortality rate? Really, I'd like to know. If we take the more informative Age-standardised mortality rate - which we should given how much more lethal Covid-19 is to the elderly - we find the 2020 rate of 1043.5 is comparable with the figure recorded in 2009 (1033.8). In fairness the media haven't shied away from stating this counterintuitive fact, perhaps hoping for hazy memories of a Gordon Brown governed UK in the grip of the financial crisis; the countless dead going unburied.

None of what I've written here is "disputing" the facts. The numbers are what they are; the political significance, however, cannot be determined from these figures alone. What we can say is that in response to a mortality rate comparable to a decade ago we have abandoned all political and social life and voluntarily subjected ourselves to restrictions that surpass even the most invasive forms of totalitarianism.

In practice we've got used to being managed according to these statistical abstractions, viewing ourselves and our futures as tied to a mass of transmission rates, risk curves, and mortality figures. In doing so we evacuate our lives of all political and ethical significance and instead end up identifying with a purely abstract biological existence, one to which we are expected to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. It is on account of this logic that Giorgio Agamben has described the cultic practices associated with the religion of science, which he argues has superseded the previous religions of Christianity and capitalism in the West.

Critics would say that such statistics allow us to see the pandemic's real impact. I disagree. What they do is to efface the lives of the countless thousands that make up those deaths, all of whom are lumped into bare facts that we consume daily without any depth of understanding. Rather than encouraging us to identify with the individuals who make up those numbers, we end up treating them as faceless "generic" persons.

This has not been the case with one particular death this month. On a night in early March Sarah Everard was abducted from the Clapham Common area. Her body was recovered from woods in Kent a week later. A serving police officer has been charged with her kidnap and murder. If any death deserves to be treated as excess and avoidable in the fully ethical sense then it is this one. The murder has led to an outpouring of grief and of anger at the levels of gender based violence women are continuing to suffer at the hands of men. If anything, the apparently random nature of the attack has contributed to greater identification with the victim. As one caller to LBC radio said "she could have been any one of us".

On Saturday women and their supporters across the country defied police restrictions to hold vigils for Sarah, coming together in a show of solidarity and to demand an end to the epidemic of gender based violence. The vigil on Clapham Common was attended by several hundred people, diligently obeying social distancing regulations, wearing masks amid the flowers and tributes. The contrast with the way we have been encouraged to react to Covid deaths could not be more stark. Here, instead of abandoning our ethical and political responsibilities, the death of a single person was the catalyst for a spontaneous, politically engaged, and very public show of solidarity. The people who defied Covid regulations (which have effectively banned all forms of protest) did so because they recognised that there was something more important at stake, an ethical/political response to a single death that implicates everyone. 

It was an intensely moving scene, even when predictably the Neanderthals of the Metropolitan Police moved in to break up the vigil. The images of young women being dragged away in handcuffs from a peaceful event organised for the sake of a murdered woman have focussed attention on how pandemic restrictions are normalising the erosion of many rights; and also how that erosion disproportionately affects women, just as the lockdowns have contributed to a spike in domestic violence and domestic servitude. It couldn't be more timely as the government have submitted a bill which if approved would lock-in many of the restrictions on protest which were brought in to manage the pandemic. One can only hope that this Spring will finally bring the belated push back against the biosecurity state.

Intersectional Theory and Privilege Checking: On the Misuse of an Idea

1:

A specter is haunting the internet; the specter of unexamined privilege. Out there in the rarefied world of political commentary and op-ed journalism there is an increasing weight being placed on the concept of privilege. This is perhaps not surprising given our current predicament and the anger many feel at elite sections of society. But this seems to be something different from the familiar rhetoric of outrage at a time of recession and social unrest. The accusation that a speaker is privileged and especially the demand to ‘check your privilege’ isn’t just being aimed at wealthy politicians, businessmen and opinion makers but at individuals who ostensibly appear to be on the same side, debating similar issues, and coming from similar social backgrounds.  In recent months the use of the term has been particularly charged in online debates about feminism, racism, sexuality, and issues around transgendered people.

“Check your privilege!” This has become the rallying cry of the Mob when faced with a woman with whom they disagree. (...)(It’s) about playing an inverted game of Top Trumps where the real message is that it’s not who you are but how you were born that determines whether what you have to say is worth listening to”. - Sadie Smith

"Check your privilege", for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story. It is hard to imagine a more dishonest intellectual position than "check your privilege", yet daily I see intelligent women who should know better embracing it”. – Louise Mensch

The general premise underlying the demand to check one’s privilege is that certain speakers have a disproportionate advantage in getting their voices heard and as such need to attenuate their interventions into various issues in order not to impose their perspective at the expense of others. On the face of it there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that, it equates to a general recognition of the need for equality between speakers and to listen to all sides and viewpoints without allowing those with the loudest voice to drown out everyone else. However the reality is more complex. The idea of privilege checking is claimed to be deployed as a part of a family of theories described as Intersectional. Laurie Penny, one of the most prominent exponents of privilege checking, here responds to Louise Mensch:

  

"Intersectionality" is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years. All it means is that you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa. These things intersect – that's why we call them intersectional. (Guardian May 2013)

The claim that it’s not possible to say anything meaningful about class without taking race, gender and sexuality into account is a strong one. I’m not quite ready to throw out my Marx, and there are also plenty of good texts on race and gender which don’t accord equal weight to class, so perhaps we should break this down a bit.

2.

Roughly speaking intersectional theories are to do with the way in which agents in different social locations have differing perspectives owing to their experiences and subsequent status as knowers. Knowledge claims are as the theory goes always socially situated.  More specifically these theories build upon ideas from Marxism via feminist epistemology that agents in situations of oppression are in a position of epistemic privilege relative to others regarding the conditions of that oppression.  The standpoint of the proletariat is epistemologically advantageous on questions of capitalist exploitation compared to those of the ruling class for example. Feminist readings of this idea in the 1980s similarly emphasised its application to women’s experience of a world dominated by men. The dominated whether workers or women live in a world structured by others for their purposes – purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence (Hartsock pg241).

 Intersectional social epistemology further develops this insight by incorporating how other social divisions, say on race and sexuality, intersect with those of class and gender. The implication is that social researchers must recognize how multiple axes of oppression intersect and generate variations in knowledge claims on a variety of issues and society as a whole. In particular it emphasises the value of claims made from the margins of society, by those most disenfranchised and distant from the centre of power. The activities of those at the bottom of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought – for everyone’s research and scholarship – from which humans’ relations with each other and the natural world can become visible. This is because the experience and lives of marginalized people, as they understand them, provide particularly significant problems to be explained or research agendas (Harding in Alcoff & Potter, eds. pg 54).

Some of the most recent scholarship in the UK has attempted to ground an ethics of testimony by developing the notion of an epistemic or testimonial injustice. This analysis homes in on how social and identarian power can affect the legitimacy and credibility of a speaker’s testimony. Broadly speaking, prejudicial dysfunction in testimonial practice can be of two kinds. Either the prejudice results in the speaker receiving more credibility than she otherwise would have – a credibility excess –or  it results in her receiving less credibility than she otherwise would have – a credibility deficit (Fricker pg17). Paradigmatic cases of this kind include rape victims’ testimony to a trial jury, and the testimony of French Muslim women on their reasons for taking up the hijab.

So interestingly in the literature the concept of privilege is most often used when talking about the epistemic privilege of those marginal groups. Far less time is spent emphasising the material/social or whatever privilege of those at the top. This isn’t surprising as the goal of standpoint theory is to focus on the value for social research and possible avenues of resistance, of the knowledge resources of those at the bottom, rather than taking pot shots at perceived opponents. We can I think immediately refute Laurie Penny’s claim about the inability to say anything about class without including race, gender and sexuality. If I make the claim “people on lower incomes suffer a greater range of health problems relative to those on higher incomes” do I need to take race, gender, and sexuality into account for this claim to be true or meaningful? Seemingly not; although Penny might object that this claim does not differentiate between the specific sorts of health problems affecting say gay and disabled people on low incomes; that alone does not invalidate the claim. Nor again does the fact that I am a person on middle income affect the truth value of my claim.

Although this is quite a general claim it is I think still meaningful, not least in the potential to highlight inequalities in health predicated on economic inequality, and to engender possible demands for extra provision of healthcare to low income families or more general calls for social justice. There is arguably an important distinction to be made between these sorts of empirical claims and those which we might call more perspectival or subjective interpretations; though this distinction itself is a point of controversy. Quite how much objectivity is mediated by subjectivity is one of the big issues that separate both feminist and social epistemologists; although our privilege checkers don’t seem to waste much time considering this important detail. 

Perhaps the point to emphasise here is ‘scope’; the more detailed your analysis the greater need you may have to differentiate between social needs and perspectives, particularly if the aim of your research might be to provide guidance for healthcare provision to a diverse community. On the face of it though there is a great deal that can be said about class and similarly about race, gender, and sexuality without qualifying one’s claims ad infinitum along intersectional lines.

3.

So now let’s look at some examples of how intersectional theory/privilege checking is deployed in recent online discussions. There are literally dozens of blogs, Twitter streams, and articles on the websites of the Guardian, New Statesman and Independent which deploy the notion of privilege in the manner under consideration. For consistency’s sake I’m going to cite four examples from the recent writing of Laurie Penny, who as I stated above does it rather a lot.

“Beauty is about class, money, power and privilege – and it always has been.(…) Even the most stereotypically thin and beautiful woman will find herself dismissed as unattractive if what comes out of her mouth happens to threaten male privilege, which is why feminists of all stripes continue to be labelled “fat and ugly”.” (NS May 2013)

 

“I count myself extremely lucky to have grown up as a political writer in the age of the internet. Suddenly, where once there were only a few privileged pundits talking to each other and expecting the proles to listen, there are writers from all walks of life producing dazzling, meaningful prose and finding their audience.(…) the age in which middle-aged white men pontificated from rarefied platforms and expected to be listened to is over”. (NS April 2013)

  

“Whatever you choose to call it, practical equal rights for women will always be a terrifying prospect for those worried about the loss of male privilege. It’s no wonder that “feminism” is still stereotyped as an aggressive movement, full of madwomen dedicated to the destruction of the male sex and who will not rest until they can breakfast on roasted testicles.”  (NS March 2013)

“Privilege is not the same as power. Nor is it a game whereby only the least privileged people will henceforth be allowed an opinion – the last time I checked, the political conversation was still dominated by rich white men and their wives. These are the people who go into spasms of outrage at the very notion that a black person, or a woman, or a working-class person might have as much right to an opinion as they do on matters that affect them. I'd like to reassure these people that taking away their monopoly on opinions is the very opposite of censorship, and furthermore that their whining is distasteful”. (Guardian May 2013)

So here we have four quotes which together bring in class, race, sex, age, and physical attractiveness, all of which hinge on the articulation of an opposition between a purportedly marginal group and a dominant one.  The last quote is particularly worthy of note as it forms part of a defence of the use Penny makes of privilege in her writing. I think it’s important to distinguish the two things which are at work here: firstly, the use of intersectional theories as an analytic tool utilizing the potential epistemic resources of the oppressed; and secondly the practical deployment of the concept of privilege as part of that strategy. These two aspects - as I think should be obvious now- are quite separate issues, although commentators such as Penny often act as if they mutually entail each other. Moreover as these quotes demonstrate the approach taken here focuses primarily on the negative side of the discourse: the calling out of an opponent’s privilege, rather than making visible the lives of marginalized people. There is a great deal that could be said about the limitations of this kind of privilege discourse; it will suffice for me to highlight three at this point.

Privilege discourse does not accommodate the notion of achieved stance. In the tradition of standpoint theory from the 1980s it was customary to view the epistemic privilege of women as an ‘achieved stance’. That is to say that social location and perspective alone were not deemed sufficient to count as having an epistemically privileged standpoint. What was thought necessary was a practical political engagement centred on testimony which elucidated the shared experience of unequal power relations to the underprivileged group. The primarily negative and elitist approach taken by the privilege checkers does not maintain that tradition. There is no shared standpoint developed amongst the community of online commentators or their peers. Nor is there an emphasis on the testimony of the oppressed. If it appears at all it does so mediated through the lens of the journalist in opinion pieces or asides on the commentators own experience of the issue at hand. This absence of genuine testimony from the margins correlates well with the practice of dismissing the speech of some while valorising others without any reference to the content of the utterances in question. This is clearly a hypocritical or at least contradictory practice for anyone like Penny who sets herself up as a spokesperson on social issues while admitting her own privileged position in comparison to those she writes about.

Privilege discourse maintains an undifferentiated approach to social oppression.  Despite all the talk of multiple social positions the last word in all these machinations on privilege tends to be the overall hegemony of the white middle aged heterosexual male. As the above quotes demonstrate this point is made repeatedly by Penny, as it often is by other commentators who deploy privilege discourse. While certainly having more than a grain of truth to it, their insistence that this be the last word does nothing to provide a roadmap for social change in any of the cases of oppression they highlight. If it is indeed the case that these social hierarchies are multifaceted and structural then the calling out of white male privilege by a minority of well educated online commentators seems somewhat inadequate as a political strategy. Furthermore it entirely misses the advantage claimed for Intersectional theory which is to move away from theorizing domination in simple oppositional terms. There is little in the writing of the privilege checkers that deals with the more nuanced aspects of this work: for example how the interests and power of wealthy sections of minority communities affects those communities ability to accurately represent themselves in the media.   

Privilege discourse does not argue for the relative importance of the different social locations it highlights. Why should the testimony of “unattractive” people be considered especially valuable? One of Intersectional theory’s own internal limitations is to question whether the identities they highlight represent epistemically relevant categories of social location. This criterion would be met only insofar as the society under consideration is structured along the lines of the category in question. Beauty for example clearly confers considerable advantages to those who are considered to meet their society’s norm for it. Despite this fact though, it is questionable as to what degree western societies are actually structured along the lines of beauty or at least how significant to overall equality and social justice such a structuring might be. Penny’s brief comments on this issue don’t provide much clarity aside from counterpoising the suggested beauty hierarchy with the overarching dominion of male privilege. This is a good example of how privilege discourse does very little aside from noting a series of phenomena associated with difference, and reiterating the hegemony of the White Male.   

4.

The practical consequences of ‘checking one’s privilege’, of shutting up rather than trying to form a consensus is encapsulated by a recent spat on Twitter. The occasion was Penny’s suggestion (a quite correct one I think) that people should not rise to a race-baiting article written by Rod Liddle in the Spectator after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in May. However instead of arguing her position she fell into silence after having apparently had her privilege checked by a number of women including black comedian Ava Vidal. Ostensibly it was Penny’s ‘white privilege’ vis-à-vis someone suffering a racist attack that she was owning up to and subsequently being silenced by.

Now let’s go back to the Marxist reading on proletarian perspective to make some sense of this. Recall that the idea is that the bourgeoisie as a capital owning class have an interest in maintaining the status quo, whereas the proletarian sees more clearly the true nature of social relations as they do not share the bourgeoisies’ interests, are subject to their rule, and have direct experiential access to the reality of exploitation. The essential point here is the misalignment of interests combined with the difference in perspective potentially achieved by virtue of their experiences. It is unlikely that a CEO of a top company and a shelf stacker will have similar perspectives on economic exploitation owing to their different epistemic positions relative to the system as a whole, and their different interests in that system. As such if you wanted to know about the reality of working class life under capitalism you would go first to the shelf stacker not the CEO. I don’t think this is the situation with Penny and her Twitter row.

In her case while she may not have had direct experience of racism relative to the women she was conversing with, nevertheless it is likely they did share the same interest in combating racism. As such while the experiential difference may yield different approaches to achieving their goal there is nothing that should prevent them coming to a shared understanding of what might need to be done, or conversely they could just agree to disagree over the particulars. There was however no justification in this case for Penny to give way simply because the person disagreeing with her on a point of practice was part of a group who were more likely to have the experience in question. This form of self-censorship makes a united response to racism or any form of social oppression far less likely and may ultimately reinforce a feeling of separateness between agents who in fact share common aims.  It‘s also important to recognise that this censorship of self and others is an interventionist rather than structural approach to the problems of democratic speech. In effect what is being practiced here is a form of policing the public sphere, or at least that narrow avenue of the public sphere in which Penny and her privilege checking compatriots operate.

Let there be no mistake; there is a problem with marginal lives being suppressed or distorted by dominant discourses. One need only witness the demonization of benefit claimants and migrant workers to understand this. The question however is whether individuals like Penny who themselves are the product of and work within the framework of that dominant discourse have any legitimacy in playing the role of gatekeeper.

5.

It’s worthwhile reiterating that the discourse on privilege exemplified here doesn’t spend much time exploring the possible untapped resources of knowledge and experience offered by marginalized people. Instead, it spends much of its time weeding out the so called unexamined privilege of the purported dominant group or subgroup, and more often simply among the commentators own peers. This is done not by reference to what the speaker actually says but by appeal to the speaker’s nominal identity (being white, being male, being heterosexual, being able-bodied).  Penny as an Oxford graduate is no doubt familiar with the old Latin phrase ad hominem, which in footballing parlance is translated as playing the man and not the ball. Instead of appraising the statements of the speaker for signs of a partial or ideological perspective they simply appraise the speaker, resulting in what looks very much like a game of discursive top-trumps where the speech of some individuals is rendered invalid before it’s even heard.

To this ad hominem distortion there is I think a further fundamental problem with privilege discourse. Without adequately defining the scope and limits to the situated knowledge claims they highlight, the radicalised intersectional aspect of privilege discourse can begin to revolve in ever decreasing circles.  The idea of different perspectival and epistemic locations gets increasingly conflated with the concept of subjective identity itself, such that the multiplicity of possible identities results in a corresponding multiplicity of possible intersections which without qualification as to their specific epistemic characteristics produces a general demand to shut up about things you have not experienced yourself. Following this logic intersections thus multiply ad infinitum to the point of elevating the banal truism of ontological separation; i.e. that no two individuals can share the exact same experience. At this point radicalised intersectional theory collapses into an extreme form of scepticism where all statements are rendered invalid beyond the life-world of the individual, and thus all those claims pertaining to a shared world are foreclosed from the outset. All the world becomes bodies and opinions, the latter which of course is the domain of political commentators and op-ed writers like Laurie Penny.

The corrective is obviously that the statement itself must be heard and examined in order to make a judgement. It is not acceptable to dismiss the speaker simply on account of their position, nor is it valid to valorise the speech of the oppressed in-toto without examining the content of the statement and defining the scope of enquiry. Or, as Linda Martin Alcoff succinctly puts it: “the fact that judgement is sometimes correlated to social position does not yield relativist conclusions, because judgements from any location must still be subject to challenge and verification. (Alcoff in Sullivan & Tuana, eds. pg41)” It is precisely this properly democratic aspect of challenge and verification that is missing from the privilege checkers discourse. None of this reflective, nuanced approach is applied by Penny, or her fellow minor hacks and online commentators, who instead practice a kind of liberal interventionism within their online domain. Instead of the possibility of forming consensus between groups on issues of social domination there is just a multiplicity of incommensurate opinions, some of which require silencing, and others which can never be challenged.

Privilege checking I think is thus correctly characterised as a predominantly middle class game played by a tiny group of online activists, bloggers, and social media users, very few of whom appear to spend much time searching out the potential epistemic resources of those most underprivileged in society.  Or, at best they are happy to attempt representing them from afar. These commentators do however have a disproportionate influence on public opinion, at least that part of public opinion that wishes to align itself with “the left”. Their function as an all too visible mediating layer between full on political activism and undecided political audience is the sole reason I find their output of interest at all.

If it is the case as Penny claims in her response to Louise Mensch that schoolchildren have been using her brand of intersectional privilege checking for years, then perhaps that’s because it represents a particularly simplistic and juvenile idea of democracy. It is certainly one which I hope will be short-lived.

References:

Fricker,Miranda – Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Harding, Sandra – Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong Objectivity, in Alcoff,Linda & Potter,Elizabeth, eds. – Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993)

Hartsock,Nancy – The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essay (Westview Press, 1998)

Alcoff, Linda – Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types in S. Sullivan & N Tuana, eds. – Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (State University of New York Press , 2007)