Amia Srinivasan

The Sunday Times Bestseller

The Right to Sex

Taira Robles

Except that once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down. Feminism’s embrace of carceralism, like it or not, gives progressive cover to a system whose function is to prevent a political reckoning with materiel inequality. (…) Some opponents of carceralism think that no one deserves to be punished, that violence must never be met with more violence. But feminists need not be saints. They must only, I am suggesting, be realists. Perhaps some men deserve to be punished. But feminists must ask what it is they set in motion, and against whom, when they demand more policing and more prisons.

The history of US feminism, which for some time has been the most globally powerful form of feminism, is a history of women - some women - wielding, to great effect, state power, and ultimately supranational power. But it is also a history of the capitalist state channeling the power of women in ways that are conducive to its own sustenance - ways, ultimately, that do little to threaten the ruling class.

’Intersectionality' - a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to name an idea first articulated by an older generation of feminists from Claudia Jones to Frances M. Beal, the Combahee River Collective, Selma James, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez and Cherrie Moraga - is often reduced, in common under-standing, to a due consideration of the various axes of oppression and privilege: race, class, sexuality, disability and so on. But to reduce intersectionality to a mere attention to difference is to forego its power as a theoretical and practical orientation. The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement - feminism, anti-racism, the labour movement - that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed. Thus a feminism that deals only with 'pure' cases of patriarchal oppression - cases that are 'uncomplicated' by factors of caste, race or class - will end up serving the needs of rich white or high-caste women. Likewise, an anti-racist movement that deals only with 'pure' cases of racist oppression will end up primarily serving the needs of rich men of colour. Both of these movements will, in turn, produce an assimilationist politics, aimed at securing for the best-off women and men of colour the right to be treated on equal terms with rich white men.

Non-Indian commentators, looking on, tended to see Singh's murder as a symptom of a failed culture: of India's sexual repres sion, its illiteracy, its conservatism. It is undeniable that the specificities of history and culture inflect how a society regulates sexual violence. The realities of caste, religion and poverty, and too the Jong legacy of British colonialism, shape India's regime of sexual violence, just as the realities of racial and class inequality, together with the legacies of chattel slavery and empire, shape the corresponding regimes in the US or UK. But the brutality of the attack on Jyoti Singh was cited by non-Indians as a way of disavowing any commonality between the sexual cultures of India and their own countries. Soon after the murder, the British journalist Libby Purves explained that 'murderous, hyena-like male contempt [for women] is a norm' in India? A first question: why is it that when white men rape they are violating a norm, but when brown men rape they are conforming to one? A second question: if Indian men are hyenas, what does that make Indian women?

Karolina

Amia Srinivasan strikes me as a VERY careful writer and thinker, and I think her ideas incredibly nuanced - she does a good job of problematising notions of sex and desire esp popular neoliberal feminist rhetoric and talking points. Overall really poignant but I think some of her essays (‘Talking to My Students About Porn’) feel more like literature reviews, and sometimes she doesn’t quite engage with the discourse rather than simply present / summarise it.

Stand out essays for me include ‘The Politics of Desire’, which was a follow up to the titular essay ‘The Right to Sex’ + directly responds to the criticisms of the original and  ‘Sex, Carcealism, Capitalism’ where she does a v good job of problematising the relationship between the law and sex and the implications of policing the body n its relations.

Amia Srinivasan strikes me as a VERY careful writer and thinker, and I think her ideas incredibly nuanced - she does a good job of problematising notions of sex and desire esp popular neoliberal feminist rhetoric and talking points. Overall really poignant but I think some of her essays (‘Talking to My Students About Porn’) feel more like literature reviews, and sometimes she doesn’t quite engage with the discourse rather than simply present / summarise it.

Stand out essays for me include ‘The Politics of Desire’, which was a follow up to the titular essay ‘The Right to Sex’ + directly responds to the criticisms of the original and  ‘Sex, Carcealism, Capitalism’ where she does a v good job of problematising the relationship between the law and sex and the implications of policing the body n its relations.

jiaqi kang

"on not sleeping with your students" is for sure the strongest essay, and "sex, carceralism, capitalism" is the second strongest. i agree with some others that srinivasan's tone still feels too measured and respectful, even when it comes to people/ideas that she explicitly wants to condemn. the fact that catherine mackinnon is undoubtedly the most-cited thinker in this book but that srinivasan doesn't really go into/confront mackinnon's anti-sex worker stances feels like an intellectual failure when the entirety of this book is about considering/exploring, and then countering, ideas in feminism that srinivasan disagrees with. i also think that, as a UK-based cis feminist, she should have been more clear about who in her citations is trans-exclusionary (eg what is the point of simply name-dropping julie bindel -- whom srinivasan lists as an "anti-prostitution feminist" and leaves it at that?). overall, i felt that srinivasan spent a little too much time describing/summarising and a bit less time engaging in thorough critique - I would have loved to hear more of her very interesting ideas and point of view. for instance, in the porn essay, srinivasan perfunctorily mentions chinese yaoi (which is called danmei, actually) being "porn by women for women" yet completely fails to mention that the porn DEPICTS MEN, which you'd think would actually be very interesting to her arguments on the depiction of women in porn - if she didn't want to get into it, then why mention it in the first place? anyway, perhaps the smaller flaws/issues are an editorial fault rather than srinivasan's. i really enjoy and respect her work and i look forward to reading more from her

The Right to Sex The Sunday Times Bestseller

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