Slutwalk and Postfeminism

I am so sorry I missed hearing your insights on Slutwalk as you played the activism game. I keep getting invited to attend Slutwalk, but it always seems to happen during my vacation, when I am out of town. This is purely coincidental and at the same time fortuitous.  Like so many of you, I feel conflicted about Slutwalk. On the one hand, I have respect for the organizers of Edmonton’s Slutwalk and understand the feminist intentions of the march. On the other hand, however, I cannot simply ignore Slutwalk’s individualism and postfeminism.

From the unfortunate comments of one Toronto police officer, Slutwalk has grown into an international movement that has generated a new public conversation about rape and sexual violence. This is profoundly important and hopeful. I am someone who has critiqued the return of an official silence around sexual violence post-second wave. The disappearance of sexual violence had a great deal to do with the backlash against antirape feminism that emerged in the 1990s, as well as with the elaboration of neoliberal common sense in which systemic social problems like rape become individualized and decontextualized. 

Of course, this backlash and the context of neoliberalism are deeply interwined. The interventions of Roiphe and Paglia are decidedly postfeminist and postfeminism is neoliberalism’s official discourse on gender relations. We should pay careful attention to how the contemporary reconfiguration of sexual norms contructs us all as self-managing liberal individuals whose choices about temporally discrete encounters provide the basis for sexual autonomy and sexual freedom. As some critics have argued, in a world of post-feminist neoliberalism, the celebration of sexual agency and of “saying yes to sex” comes to stand in for the pursuit of gender equality. Women are offered autonomy and fulfillment through the exercise of sexual agency.  Is this a new sexual contract in which sexual choice, rather than representing freedom, instead constitutes a new form of inducement to (hetero)sex? 

Seen in this context, Slutwalk seems to be reflective of neoliberalism’s sexual contract, reinforcing, rather than challenging the reduction of a broader feminist agenda to sexual empowerment. I must admit a certain fatigue about the concept of sexual empowerment. It is a well-meaning concept that is at the same time prone to being coopted within a neoliberal postfeminist discourse. A key concern is the way it is cast as a property of individuals unconnected to the situation of their lives or the meanings ascribed to them, their bodies, and actions.

I can understand how some of you felt that Murphy’s critique went too far. And like many of you, I find myself persuaded by Friedman. Maybe, like Wallia I could march with Slutwalk against rape and victim blaming, while at the same time proudly wearing my resistance to the whiteness of this protest and its broader decontextualization of sexual violence from social power. Maybe next year I’ll try.