While the tensions within radical 1970-80 feminism(s) are often articulated in the belligerent vocabulary of the Sex Wars, post-#metoo feminism seems to fish in another —more liberal— conceptual pool: that of consent, social contract, boundaries, autonomy, property and rights (eg. “the right to sex” measured against that to bodily autonomy, see Srinivasan 2021). Even those, like Brenda Cossman, who apply the language of struggle to the movement, eventually turn to more pacified notions of democratic dialogue: “We need to retreat from the language of war. (…) As Walters observes, ‘The language of war creates enemies rather than interlocutors’” (Cossman 2021, 197).

Specularly, post-#metoo literature seems all too often to loose its belligerent edge, when many survivors invest the literary of legal ambitions to articulate their accusations, or when even iconic punk authors discipline their writing to talk about sexual violence. While feminist fictions of sexual violence could open an extra-legal space —an outside or beyond the Law, in Kafkian terms—, our worry is that they end up reproducing a desire for the Law, or even an ambition to become the Law. We hear such longing in jurist Camille Kouchner’s #metoo novel La familia Grande, where she protests against French post-68 culture:

In unison, you've forced your theoretical dogmas on us: Foucault and punishment. Never accuse, never condemn in a society where punishment is everywhere. Know how to evolve, be flexible and hope for rehabilitation. Do not trust the law.

Here's the melancholia of the liberal juridical subject, a demand of protection by the nation-state, a longing for punishment. Here is, once more, the spectre of carceral feminism.

Outside of literature, the liberal discourse on sexual violence is constantly mobilised to reinforce various flavours of nation, empire, race, caste; spanning from the celebration of border violence and carcerality, to the justification of genocide.  

This panel, thus, begins with a worry: that the dominant discourse of injury and legal redress for sexual violence might signal a departure from the pursuit of freedom in so far as it bypasses fundamental critiques of liberal concepts. Such liberal sexual politics (and literature!) runs the risk of codifying and entrenching oppresive social relations, instead of aiming to contest or transform them (Wendy Brown 1995, 59)

But that is not the full story. Feminist literature has many more aces up its sleeve, or so we have to hope!


We invite interventions that aim to propose such alternatives, seeking feminist narrations of sexual violence (narrative, poetry, film, performance art etc.) that challenge the liberal paradigm.


We seek, in other words, possible answers to some hopeful questions: where are the contemporary Sex Wars being fought? Where is punk #metoo feminist literature? What possibilities for a convergence of struggles outside of liberalism?