Sexualized violence is a citizenly issue. It is a phenomenon that, in the Canadian context, is formed and informed by the settler-colonial nation-state. Yet, as the spike in attention to instances of sexualized violence in news media suggests, sexualized violence is also a sociopolitical ill, one that causes harms to persons who experience it and those who care for them. How, then, might we ensure that sexualized violence is no longer a possibility? Feminist anti-sexualized violence advocates have created or contributed to several identifiable approaches to sexualized violence prevention: education about consent, teaching self-defence, and implicating bystanders in the continuation of sexualized violence. In this dissertation, I focus on two of these approaches to sexualized violence prevention – consent discourse and fighting strategies – and consider how their amenability to a normative form of rationality that governs conceptions of citizenship – neoliberalism – might not only limit the preventative efficacy of such approaches, but also work to (re)produce the very conditions that allow sexualized violence to occur in the first place. Analyzing these prevention approaches through close readings of academic theories of prevention and practical mobilizations of these approaches (i.e. a poster campaign, a short independent film), I ultimately argue that while neoliberalism’s idea(l)s of individualism, personal responsibility, and normative interpretations of ‘equality’ function to potentially limit or contradict a feminist anti-sexualized violence goal of emphasizing the structural causes of sexualized violence, it is also the case that these theoretical and practical projects can produce alternative understandings of what it means to be ‘human’ and to ‘live together.’ / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Today, one can scarcely turn on a television, open a newspaper, or visit an online news source without some mention of a case of sexualized violence. What are we doing to prevent this social ill? In this dissertation, I analyze two approaches to sexualized violence prevention: strategies that encourage the import of communication during intimate encounters (consent discourse) and strategies that encourage persons most vulnerable to sexualized violence to engage in defensive measures (fighting strategies). Through an investigation of academic theories and practical mobilizations of these prevention approaches, I consider their connection to dominant conceptions of the human and what it means to ‘live together.’ From these analyses, this dissertation ultimately argues that we must be attentive to the ways we think about, talk of, and implement prevention strategies so that we do not inadvertently reproduce the very oppressive conditions that enable sexualized violence to occur in the first place.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/24889 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Shewan, Kascindra Ida Sadie |
| Contributors | Dean, Amber, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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