Madeleine Kenyon

This paper argues that use of demonstratives is indispensable for effective sexual communication, as demonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’ can sidestep complexities around distinguishing and naming acts during sex. However, in light of the baked-in unclarity of demonstratives, advocating for their continued use in sexual contexts yields the uncomfortable result that sexual communication can never be fully explicit. This is a real concern for the study of sexual ethics and consent, and an important starting point for further investigation into linguistic limitations of sexual consent.

This chapter explores approaches to critical prison studies through non-ideal methodologies, with an emphasis on the liberatory political potential for such research. It uses three approaches from a non-ideal perspective. The first section discusses the methodological importance of prioritizing the first-person experiences of incarcerated peoples and their communities within critical prison scholarship. The second section surveys potential pedagogical practices that traverse barriers to the exploration and understanding of carceral experiences, including inside/outside curricula, letter-writing projects, art programming, and more general educational reforms that are proposed as potential sites for doing critical prison studies through a non-ideal lens. The third section turns to what the authors describe as insurrectionist and abolitionist approaches to critical prison scholarship.

In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul's work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track those of Saul's figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analysing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character.