Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Casey, Edward S | Craig, Megan | Kittay, Eva | Vera-Gray, Fiona.
Date
2016-12-01
Keywords
Appropriation, Colonialism, Consent, Feminism, Misogyny, Rape | Philosophy -- Metaphysics -- Ethics
Department
Department of Philosophy
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/76602
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
As Rebecca Whisnant has noted, notions of “national…and…bodily (especially sexual) sovereignty are routinely merged in rhetoric and metaphor.†(2008:155) Departing from this observation, this project explores the ‘existential infrastructure’ of the ‘logic of sovereign integrity’ in which personhood is thought as analogous to jurisdiction over a bounded territorial enclosure. It traces the philosophical history of this logic, and unfolds the post-Heideggerian French critique of sovereignty as an analysis of how sovereign imperatives are animated by a drive to deny the vulnerabilities of constitutive ontological relation, and are thus implicated in violent cycles of disavowal and appropriation. It then applies this analytic to the question of women’s sexuate personhood, suggesting that while sovereign invocations are an understandable response to attacks on women’s bodily self-determination, the logic of sovereign integrity is implicated in undermining the possibility of penetrable sexual subjects and in producing proprietorial notions of sexual interaction which confound our ability to successfully prosecute rape. Moreover, I argue that the imperative toward sovereign invulnerability itself issues in a drive towards appropriation, and is an animating impulse of the misogynist rage and aggrieved narcissistic entitlement that propel acts of sexual violence. Sovereign logics, that is, both undermine women’s sexuate personhood and are implicated in generating the acts of violent appropriation they are frequently deployed to resist. | 398 pages
Recommended Citation
Jones, Jane Clare, "Sovereign Invulnerability: Sexual Politics and the Ontology of Rape" (2016). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 2493.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/2493