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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alison PhippsORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
A ‘rape crisis’ has been identified in universities in the Anglophone North, and responses usually take the form of institutional discipline and governance despite well-established assessments of the failings of both carceral and procedural approaches. In these responses, institutional reputation and risk management overdetermines, elevates and captures particular types of white feminist activism. This article theorises these dynamics, using precarity as a lens on the relations within which campus sexual violence is addressed. I trace the material connections between sexual violence and precarious labour, and the intersecting narratives of crisis focused on both issues in contemporary higher education, which reflect ‘genres of crisis’ in the wider politico-cultural sphere. In this context, persistent attachments to discipline and governance within the campus sexual violence movement can be theorised at least partly as a political flight from vulnerability, a ‘holding on’ to whatever one can find, that is ripe for exploitation by liability-focused institutional agendas. Such procedural enactments of security are possible because bureaucracy is the institutional ‘water in which we swim’, which creates a strong impetus to reduce politics to paperwork relations. This is especially manifest in risk-averse and compliance-driven ‘safeguarding’ modalities, securitarian regimes that serve mainly to interpellate the dangerous Other and safeguard the institution. I argue for the cultivation of more susceptible relations which are difficult to achieve within disembodied bureaucratic codes and which require a retreat from both narratives of crisis and procedural attempts at calm.
Author(s): Phipps A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Feminist Theory
Year: 2024
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 26/02/2024
Acceptance date: 23/01/2024
Date deposited: 26/02/2024
ISSN (print): 1464-7001
ISSN (electronic): 1741-2773
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001241232260
DOI: 10.1177/14647001241232260
ePrints DOI: 0
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