One noteworthy feature of heightened public discussion of sexual victimization in the US is that it calls for a broadening of responsibility with respect to both the parties involved and the forms of sexual victimization for which people are held to account. The expansion of who is deemed responsible was evident in the much-publicized case of Brock Turner, convicted in 2016 of three counts of sexual assault, which garnered attention partly because of the perception that the judge, Aaron Persky, was too lenient in sentencing Turner to just six months in prison. Outcry over the sentencing coalesced in a campaign to recall Persky, which succeeded in a county-wide referendum on June 5, 2018. The #MeToo movement initiated by Tarana Burke in 2006 reemerged online in 2017 as an incitement to speak out in empathy and solidarity about experiences of sexual victimization concerning which people, especially women, have long felt silenced and been silenced. The public nature of the disclosures and the high profile of many involved also translated into a push for accountability. Although the actions brought to light by #MeToo are in many cases too varied to produce a uniform set of demands or reforms, these declarations have generated widespread discussion, spurred prosecutions, resignations, apologies, severing of business ties, as well as proposals for systems of anonymous workplace reporting of sexual misconduct and an unprecedented interest in the complicity of bystanders. The #MeToo movement, along with campaigns to hold judges accountable for judgments perceived as supportive of sexism and rape culture, signals a recognition that responsibility regarding sexual victimization extends beyond individual perpetrators.Footnote 1
Around the same time that Brock Turner was on trial in California, Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was found guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual battery. Holtzclaw had repeatedly targeted poor Black women, especially those using drugs or with outstanding warrants and police records. He frequently drove them to deserted areas and threatened them with jail in order to compel them to submit to sex. Thirteen women testified that Holtzclaw had harassed, stalked, assaulted, and/or raped them. The case garnered media attention mostly because of the lack of attention that it initially elicited. That inattention is an injustice, as is the fact that Holtzclaw's actions were enabled by his victims’ all-too-reasonable, deep-seated distrust of the police: their knowledge that reporting him to the police would be futile since he was the police, their fear of a criminal justice system that would separate them from their children, and their sense that their lives and safety were a matter of indifference to authorities.Footnote 2 These sexual injustices are bound up with other injustices challenged by the Black Lives Matter movement: oppressive police surveillance of poor and nonwhite neighborhoods, persistent police violence, and the financial imperatives of the criminal justice system as revealed by the Justice Department report on Ferguson, Missouri (which are, not incidentally, a product of neoliberal disinvestment in public services). This case highlights that a more “macroscopic view” (Frye Reference Frye1983, 5) is imperative to understand and take responsibility for sexual injustices. Such a perspective entails attention to not only institutionalized misogyny but also institutionalized misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy Reference Bailey and Trudy2018), not only sociocultural norms concerning gender and sex but also the far-reaching impact of history, including the legacies of chattel slavery and colonization in the US and their relation to racialized sexual injustices.
Narratives about responsibility significantly affect how responsibility is practiced: who is held responsible, by whom, how, and why; who takes responsibility, for what, how, and why; which stories are told, heard, receive uptake, and so solidify into hermeneutic frames, shape habits, acts, and practices, and vice versa. #MeToo has publicized alternative narratives about sexual victimization, presented them to a broader audience, and challenged flaws of some common narratives. Yet, even as discussion of sexual victimization has amplified the voices of many who have been silenced, the stories told about responsibility have not changed much. Not only did Holtzclaw's case receive little publicity until activists drew attention to it, but further, the systemic connections between the oppressive circumstances that enabled his attacks and sexual injustices are often downplayed or ignored. The dominant story about responsibility remains largely individualizing and penalizing; it is simply extended to encompass specific others besides the immediate perpetrators. A lengthy prison term or other penalty still appears to be the sole sign that sexual victimization is taken seriously enough. This litmus test for whether sexual injustices are taken seriously might seem a reasonable one given that the alternative to incarceration amounts to a proverbial slap on the wrist. Criticism of carceral logics, including carceral feminism, however, demonstrates the problems with this perspective, which compounds injury rather than enabling any form of repair.Footnote 3 An individualizing, penalizing approach to responsibility belies the recognition of the complexity and breadth of responsibility, a recognition that may be one of the most important of the advances in recent responses to sexual injustices.Footnote 4
For the nascent recognition of the complexity and breadth of responsibility to translate into new stories and practices, critical analysis of existing practices and the most common dominant narratives is needed. This essay thus takes stock of the myriad failures of responsibility for sexual injustices in dominant practices and narratives. Practical failures include the refusal to perceive the problem as a problem, the inability to grasp the problem adequately or fully, straightforward refusals of responsibility, and attempts to take responsibility that do further harm such as disingenuous or uncomprehending apologies or statements. Conceptual failures undergird them, inhering in dominant narrative frameworks for thinking about and experiencing ourselves as responsible, sexual, and vulnerable beings. Such narratives and concepts are conditions that make possible unjust or just responses to sexual injustices.Footnote 5 Understanding the failures in dominant articulations and practices of responsibility—how they exacerbate injustice—enhances the ability of communities, scholars, and activists to develop and assess alternative theories, stories, and practices. This essay begins the work of reframing responsibility in a way that intentionally undermines the harm-producing tenets of neoliberalism, one of the most dominant narrative frames in US culture.Footnote 6
The first two sections analyze these narratives: first, I present a brief synopsis of philosophical objections to liberalism's common ways of thinking about responsibility. Then I extend those objections to analyze how the dominant neoliberal framework for responsibility intensifies liberal tendencies. I highlight how feminist critiques of neoliberalism, especially those of Black feminist theorists, illuminate the harms of neoliberal narratives about responsibility in relation to sexuality: they entrench pernicious assumptions about race, class, and sexuality by covering them over with a veneer of neutral individualism; they allow victim-blaming tendencies to persist in the form of complex, intersectional double binds; and so they exacerbate harms for members of already marginalized groups. Finally, I elaborate an alternative, intersectional, feminist account of responsibility for sexual injustices that holds the potential to redress these failures insofar as it is nonpunitive and takes responsibility to be an intentional practice of altering social relations.
I. Critiques of Liberal Responsibility
Responsibility is generally regarded as a positive value, and responsibility practices might accordingly be regarded as good and unproblematic.Footnote 7 Yet practices of responsibility-taking, assigning responsibility, and holding responsible contribute to oppression and inequality. As Margaret Urban Walker argues in Moral Understandings, assignments of responsibility that are intended to care for and protect vulnerable parties operate in a feedback loop: they can produce new vulnerabilities or worsen existing harmful vulnerabilities (Walker Reference Walker2007, 89). For example, in her analysis of the racial politics of reproductive technology, Dorothy Roberts observes that “[w]idespread prenatal testing has already generated greater surveillance of pregnant women and assigned them primary responsibility for making the ‘right’ genetic decisions” (Roberts Reference Roberts2009, 791); with this new responsibility come new vulnerabilities to self-blame and shame by medical practitioners and others for making the “wrong” decision. Responsibility practices are normative not only in the sense that they are often ways of acting ethically but also in the sense that attributions of responsibility express social norms, which intertwine with moral norms and can be variably coercive and constraining. As forms of relationship, responsibility practices coexist with existing relationships and the social norms orienting them. Thus, responsibility practices can create or exacerbate harmful vulnerabilities, especially when these practices reflect the unquestioned social norms and biases that comprise unjust background conditions. These practices affect people differently depending on how they are situated in terms of socially salient features such as gender, race, and socioeconomic class, among others, and the stories told about responsibility accordingly vary significantly.Footnote 8
Thus theorists from a range of traditions have questioned and sought to move beyond traditional notions of responsibility, namely the individualist liberal notion of responsibility dominant in legal, political, and moral theories. Iris Marion Young terms such a notion a “liability model” of responsibility, one that assumes 1) a direct and/or clear causal connection between one's actions and/or intentions and the outcome for which one is responsible, 2) that one possesses knowledge of the outcome of one's actions, 3) that the actions for which one is responsible are voluntary, 4) a backward-looking orientation (determining who's to blame for past wrong), and 5) the identification and isolation of particular agents as responsible (and so absolving all others) (Young Reference Young2011, 97–98). Rooted in Young's criticism and synthesizing it with those of others, I chart four overarching objections to this understanding of responsibility.
1. As many critics have noted,Footnote 9 it relies on an erroneous view of the human self, assuming the self is a rational and transparent isolated individual, independent and self-sufficient, and possesses autonomy understood as separation from others. Only this kind of self possesses the requisite traits to contract freely with others and assume responsibilities. The liberal model hence employs a form of circular reasoning: “[l]iberal responsibility mimics liberal property, presuming the individual sovereignty it purports to explain” (Levin Reference Levin2008, 13). Both theoretical feminist and empirical developmental analyses of the self have shown these assumptions to be mistaken; people are relational selves who depend upon one another to varying degrees and in myriad ways, and develop capacities for more sophisticated forms of thought and action—such as responsibility—through relations with others.
2. It relies on an erroneous view of the relation between people and their historical, social contexts: By “arbitrarily wrest[ing] actors and events from the historical contexts that enable them[,]” the liberal individualist model of responsibility construes the background conditions for peoples’ actions as neutral, normal, and effectively insignificant (Levin Reference Levin2008, xv). Background social conditions are presumed to be merely a neutral context in which people act rather than a set of complex, influential conditions that structure their actions and that they affect in a range of ways.Footnote 10 Charles Mills's critique of the liberal contract tradition trenchantly exposes the devastating effects of this error, namely enduring racist exploitation facilitated by detachment from history. The ostensible neutrality of contemporary liberalism, its color-blindness, means that “the long history and ongoing reality of exploitative nonwhite-to-white transfer . . . [is] obfuscated and occluded by individualist categories and by a sense of property rights in which white entitlement is the norm” (Mills Reference Mills2008, 1394). Erringly set apart from history by virtue of both time and social atomism, white people can deny their share of responsibility for the unjust social conditions to which history has led.
3. Following the first two points, it is too narrow in scope (doesn't hold responsible all those who should be): assuming a liberal model means narrowing the range of issues for which responsibility needs to be taken as well as limiting the range of possible responses to them (Levin Reference Levin2008, xv). For instance, Young objects to the liability model because it is unable to encompass responsibility for structural injustices, in which clear causal connections between the injustice and particular agents are often absent and agents frequently lack intent and knowledge of the effects of their actions. Although the liability model is often used to account for instances of sexual misconduct—the wrongdoer is usually a particular individual, and it is often reasonable to assume knowledge of the effects of sexual harassment or assault—there are reasons to think this model is inadequate even in these cases. Isolating an individual wrongdoer frequently entails releasing from responsibility others who are just as directly responsible as well as many who are indirectly so. If an aim is to extend responsibility beyond the most obvious, or most easily targetable, perpetrators of sexual misconduct, then a liability model is unhelpful since its individualizing bent absolves everyone else.
4. Finally, this model of responsibility has the cumulative effect of disinclining people from taking responsibility: in particular, it turns blame into the default affective and ethical response. On Young's analysis, the language and ethos of blame that accompanies this model of responsibility has three main pitfalls: first, it inappropriately divides people into innocent and guilty groups, simplifying the sources of injustice, creating passivity, and reducing the prospects for cooperative action to effect change. Second, blame centers on the past as a static moment rather than on the future, generating resentment and defensiveness, which lead to attempts to pass the blame. Third, blaming leads people to focus on themselves, their character and the judgments made about them, rather than on the unjust situation at hand and how it can be changed. Although ascribing blame is not always inappropriate, if an aim of practices of responsibility is the transformation of unjust conditions and not mere moral accounting, then a model of responsibility that centers on and intensifies blame is grievously unproductive.
This liberal “liability model” is one dominant way of understanding responsibility. Because it is highly individualizing, this model of responsibility readily becomes victim-blaming at the same time that it attributes all wrongdoing to “bad apples,” isolating perpetrators as if their actions were performed in a social vacuum. The next section considers how the neoliberal notion of responsibility amounts to an intensification of these harmful tendencies of the liberal model.
II. The Neoliberal Lens for Responsibility
As both a hermeneutic framework and a set of policies in myriad institutional contexts, the neoliberal lens holds sway over socioculturally dominant ways of understanding and practicing responsibility, especially in relation to sexuality, which is a domain of heightened vulnerability and is perceived as fraught with various dangers. Indeed, one hallmark of neoliberalism is preoccupation with security, insecurity, vulnerability, and danger. Another is advancing individual free choice and responsibility. Enacted in a context of historical oppression, social inequalities, and biases, however, neoliberal policies and practices—such as the privatization of public services—unequally exploit vulnerabilities that are themselves unevenly distributed. Further, neoliberalism shapes self-governance, manifesting in the myriad norms in relation to which subjects constitute themselves and, accordingly, self-discipline. By creating conditions that heighten insecurity and precarity, neoliberal governance makes individual preoccupation with threat, risk, and vulnerabilities seem rational. Therefore, in contrast to the classical liberal notion of responsibility, a neoliberal lens transforms responsibility into anxious self-maximization under conditions of precarity. Individual responsibility remains paramount but the conditions under which individuals exercise responsibility, and the ends to which their agency is directed, shift: the conditions are those of actual or perceived vulnerability and insecurity and the end is to achieve security for the self by warding off vulnerability.
Through this lens, the unavoidable vulnerability of being embodied and social, and so being affected and affecting others in turn, is reduced to an inherent risk that must be continually negotiated; vulnerability is “reductively negative,” framed simply as susceptible to harm and injury (Gilson Reference Gilson2014, 5).Footnote 11 When vulnerability is experienced as in itself threatening, the result is domination (Lorey Reference Lorey and Derieg2015). The perception of threat precipitates anxiety and fear that is often turned “towards others who cause harm, who have to be preventively fended off, and not infrequently even destroyed, in order to protect those who are threatened” (Lorey Reference Lorey and Derieg2015, 21). In a context of historically entrenched, ongoing oppression, reactive wariness and fear of vulnerability mean that attempts to protect people's precarious lives and vulnerable bodies are attempts to protect the relatively privileged. Attributions of vulnerability function to police the boundaries of victimhood, delineating who is and is not perceived as a legitimately vulnerable victim based on race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and nationality, among other variables. Dominant forms of protection (for example, military action, policing practices) deepen oppressive social relations. In what follows, I elaborate three specific, interconnected features of neoliberal responsibility that intensify the harmful aspects of the liberal model of responsibility.
First, responsibility becomes responsibilization: individuals experience “a seemingly paradoxical ‘compulsion to responsibility’” (McNay Reference McNay2009, 65). Although responsibility is thought of and felt by many as a paradigmatic free choice, contemporary practices of assigning and taking responsibility can, in contrast, be described as responsibilization: of being called to be responsible in the ways demanded by the institutions with which one interacts. Responsibilization is an “administered condition” (Brown Reference Brown2015, 133): beliefs about and practices of responsibility are conditioned by people's positions relative to institutional bureaucracies, regulations, and policies. Being responsibilized means that to take responsibility well, one has to “engage in a particular form of self-sustenance that meshes with the morality of the state and the health of the economy” (84). Roberts's analysis of genetic testing “as a form of privatization that makes the individual the site of governance through the self-regulation of genetic risk” (Roberts Reference Roberts2009, 794) also highlights how what it means to forward the “morality of the state and the health of the economy” depends on a person's social position: individual women are expected to make choices that mitigate the responsibility of the state, such as ending a pregnancy in which the fetus has Down Syndrome, but, given the simultaneously punitive and privatizing tendencies of neoliberalism, “the expectation of genetic self-regulation may fall especially harshly on black and Latina women, who are stereotypically defined as lacking the capacity for self-control” and whose reproduction has historically been stigmatized as irresponsible (798). Responsibilization orients and directs normative practices of personal responsibility, and does so inequitably.
Second, the main distinctive feature of neoliberal responsibility is that it is economized; as responsibilization, it becomes about self-maximization. Economizing responsibility has two main implications: first, to redirect concern away from normatively salient collective issues, depoliticizing responsibility, and, second, to moralize the economized pursuits that make up the bulk of that for which people are deemed responsible.Footnote 12 Neoliberal responsibility requires acquiescence to dominant standards because the narrow focus on individual activity and the moralization of what is seemingly amoral—such as how well one cultivates and utilizes marketable skills—occur in a context of (perceived and actual) deepening instability and insecurity. Such standards for moral assessment, including judgments of which ends are desirable, are not the subject's own, that is, are not the product of reflective assessment of aims and values. They emanate from elsewhere—the market, the state, society at large—and are perceived as incontestable, reified. Being responsible is thus a matter of fitting oneself to the market and of knowing how to do so, of undertaking cost–benefit calculations so as to develop oneself in accord with “the morality of the state and the health of the economy.” People are responsible for how well they calculate and for their “capital-ability,” to use Foucault's neologism, in a context of risk, competition, and uncertainty that is completely beyond their control. This context is felt as all the more insecure because of the pervasive hyperindividualism of the neoliberal hermeneutic.
Third, the foundation of the first two features is the privatization of the vulnerability for which people are held responsible. That is, the neoliberal lens on responsibility turns what is a shared condition—the unavoidable vulnerabilities of living as interdependent embodied beings—into a private burden. This shift to the privatization of responsibility makes possible economization and responsibilization, enabling responsibility to be depoliticized and economized pursuits to be moralized. Accordingly, the harmful dimensions of the liability model, such as the sense that the self is an isolated individual and social conditions a mere neutral backdrop, are exacerbated in the neoliberal framework. Privatizing shared vulnerability worsens a fearful orientation toward vulnerability: if one is isolated, alone responsible, then the stakes are higher and the costs greater. Rather than being recognized as simultaneously a fundamental part of the human condition and a politically and socially induced state, vulnerability becomes merely a condition to be managed individually, and is accordingly naturalized and depoliticized. To naturalize vulnerability is to privatize it. Vulnerability is privatized when a) it is perceived as internal, a quality or property of people (and of some people more than others), rather than as a condition generated by historical context and sociopolitical circumstances, and b) the social context of people's actions is regarded as not merely a neutral backdrop but a normative one, a set of demands to which they must accede.
The imperative for self-governance within a neoliberal framework, therefore, is to take responsibility for one's vulnerabilities. Responsibility-taking is motivated by an often anxious desire to secure oneself, economically, psychically and emotionally, socially, and corporeally by seeking a relatively estimable, stable status. As both reactive and proactive, expected forms of responsibility-taking amount to seeking invulnerability. Neoliberal responsibility-taking thus pits people against one another and precipitates eschewal of responsibility for anything that will not elevate status.
Neoliberal Responsibility and Sexual Vulnerability
What are the implications of this neoliberal orientation toward responsibility? How do neoliberal stories about responsibility for sexuality affect who is perceived as responsible or not, how, and why? Three main claims orient this analysis. First, neoliberal responsibility practices sustain victim-blaming tendencies through more complex double binds. Second, neoliberalism's neutral individualism simultaneously solidifies and obscures pernicious stereotypical assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, third, the neoliberal lens on responsibility exacerbates harms for members of already marginalized groups, alternately excluding them as subjects of justice, and framing their vulnerabilities as private burdens and/or public threats instead of as socially mediated and produced forms of precarity.
Since narratives and practices of responsibility are socially embedded, the form they take regarding sexuality involves interwoven assumptions about race, gender, sex, class, and vulnerability. Gendering and racializing vulnerability is one way of construing vulnerability as natural or inevitable, and so inducing precarity. Vulnerability is associated with female bodies and stereotypical femininity, and invulnerability with male bodies and stereotypical masculinity. Those gendered associations often work in conjunction with the collection of assumptions that compose binary, heteronormative, and cisnormative models of gender and sexuality: gender is stable; masculine and feminine are opposed and complementary; thus heterosexuality is normative, compulsory; masculine sexuality is intrinsically aggressive and dominant; feminine sexuality is intrinsically responsive or passive and submissive; women's bodies are weaker and inevitably sexualized; men are either aggressors or protectors, and so on. These assumptions construe women's vulnerability as specifically sexual, and sexual vulnerability as necessarily feminine, thus feminizing. In the US context of historically entrenched white supremacy, racist stereotypes align with the gendering of sexual vulnerability: women's vulnerability is racialized as white, Black women are defeminized (but also often hypersexualized) and cast as invulnerable, and the vulnerability of Black men is deemed as unimaginable.Footnote 13 This framing dispossesses Black women of the potential to be recognized as harmed by sexual violation and delegitimizes them as victims. Given these associations and vulnerability's reductively negative sense, sexualized and racialized feminine vulnerability is almost a synecdoche for vulnerability: to be vulnerable is to be susceptible to sexual objectification and violation, and to have a white feminine body is to be vulnerable in this way.
These assumptions structure perceptions of sexual vulnerability and danger, positioning normatively feminine women as paradigmatically sexually vulnerable to male sexuality. This framing of sexual vulnerability naturalizes sexual victimization for feminine women, individualizing and depoliticizing responsibility for it, while eclipsing the sexual vulnerability of others. Specifically, these assumptions obscure the vulnerability—and thus the need to address the sexual victimization—of masculine and nonnormatively feminine people, including transgender people, cisgender men, butch women, women whose race or class or other social position de-feminizes them, and so on. Cisgender feminine women, as potential victims, remain the primary subjects of demands for sexual responsibility-taking. Yet these assumptions affect sexual vulnerability and responsibility for people with marginalized sexual and gender identities as well. For instance, the transphobic opposition to access to facilities based on one's gender identity frequently superimposes on transwomen the specter of aggressive male heterosexuality, which is alleged to imperil the privacy and safety of “vulnerable” young cisgender women.Footnote 14 On the other hand, transwomen are also sexualized within this cis-, hetero- “predator/prey power dynamic” (Serano Reference Serano2007, 258): Julia Serano explains, “transwomen are hypersexualized within our culture because we are viewed as enabling our own sexual objectification . . . in much the same way that a woman who wears a low-cut dress is presumed to facilitate her own objectification” (258). Feminine presentation is assumed to be a gesture of sexual availability and a desire for male attention, thus centering heterosexual male desire but absolving “men of any responsibility for their own sexual actions” by displacing this responsibility onto transwomen (258). This shifting of responsibility belies the disproportionately high rates of sexual victimization against transgender people.
Patricia Hill Collins's and Angela Davis's analysis of the racist history of rape politics in the US further reveals how constructs of sexual vulnerability and norms for sexual responsibility-taking are racialized to exclude Black women as the subjects of sexual justice. Davis argues that historically, the racist “fictional image of the black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the black woman as chronically promiscuous” (Davis Reference Davis1981a, 42). Both images exemplify a “highly visible sexualized racism, [that] . . . reinscribes . . . Black men and women's alleged sexual deviancy” and that sanctions white supremacist violence (Collins Reference Collins2000, 130). The construction of the mythic Black male rapist after the Civil War reinforced white men's power by “draw[ing] attention away from their own sexual crimes against black and white women” and justifying “lynching, segregation laws, and disfranchisement of black men” (Feimster Reference Feimster2009, 5). Myths of Black women's promiscuity legitimize the white-supremacist “assumption that white men—especially those who wield economic power—possess an incontestable right of access to Black women's bodies” (Davis Reference Davis1981b, 175). These images enable and are enabled by the racialization of female sexual vulnerability as white.Footnote 15 This mythology aligns Black women with prostitutes and positions both as already having consented and/or as inferiorized in ways that make consent unnecessary (see Collins Reference Collins2000, 145). These pernicious stereotypical assumptions affect how people experience sexuality and sexual injustices differently. They form the unequal backdrop for normative expectations for responsibility-taking by producing inequity in assignments of responsibility and narrowly delimiting whose vulnerabilities are even perceived as such. As ways of naturalizing vulnerability, they individualize responsibility for sexual injustices and so rationalize the failure to take responsibility for oppressive social conditions and their historical roots.
What forms do normative expectations for sexual responsibility take? The neoliberal focus on self-management and self-actualization solidifies the mandate that potential victims take responsibility for themselves by protecting themselves from sexual victimization. Those deemed potential victims and those who are actually victimized are called to be responsible continually: prior to any possible victimization, during an event of victimization, and subsequent to victimization. These demands for responsibility are a series of double binds:Footnote 16 to be “good,” “true” victims, women must be vulnerable—weak and incapable—but simultaneously agential, perfectly rational, and calculating about how best to document and prove their victimization, yet never so rational as to be perceived as unemotional (contrary to normative gender expectations) or manipulative (aligning with tropes of “bad” femininity). As feminist critiques of neoliberalism highlight, however, the demands of normative femininity shift in a neoliberal hermeneutic.Footnote 17 In contrast with traditional norms of feminine purity, dependence, and compliance, normative feminine subjectivity is defined in relation to ideals of autonomy, self-actualization, personal responsibility, and meritocracy. This kind of normative subjectivity consists of a distinctive combination of toughness, free-spiritedness, savviness, and receptivity or willingness (especially to heterosexual sex) (see Phillips Reference Phillips2000; Gavey Reference Gavey2005; Gonick Reference Gonick2006; Rottenberg Reference Rottenberg2014). Laina Bay-Cheng argues that for young women in US culture, “sexual agency, as construed in neoliberal terms, is a key criterion in the differentiation between accepted sexual conduct (i.e., behaviors and experiences that appear to be freely chosen and self-determined) and that which is condemned, pitied, or both (i.e., behaviors and experiences that result from weakness, ineptitude, and/or irresponsibility)” (Bay-Cheng Reference Bay-Cheng2015, 282). The neoliberal distinction “agentic/non-agentic” overlaps the traditional distinction “active/abstinent” as part of a “cultural rubric used to appraise girls' sexuality” (282).Footnote 18 The ideal is to be simultaneously free-spirited and cautious, that is, in control and entrepreneurial. What is unacceptable is behavior that is out of control. Thus, victimization is construed as the result of individual choices and responsibility, as a “manifestation of one's ineptitude as an agent” (286).
These double binds result from assuming that the background conditions of the society—the standards for moral assessment, gender norms, and so on—are acceptable and must be accepted. A neoliberal construal of sexual responsibility assumes what Sara Ahmed terms “gender fatalism,” the sense that binary gender and the norms defining it are necessary and inevitable:
to become girl as becoming wary of being in public space; becoming wary of being at all. Indeed, if you do not modify your behavior in accordance, if you are not careful and cautious, you can be made responsible for the violence directed toward you. . . . You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable. (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2017, 26)
Girls and women are expected to take responsibility for themselves both through precautionary behavior, avoiding any circumstances that could be construed as dangerous, and by manifesting a spectacular form of resilience and overcoming when violation occurs. Both demands are exemplary of neoliberal privatization of responsibility: proactive, vigilant self-protectiveness in the former and, in the latter, entrepreneurial resilience that transcends injury and damage, making overcoming a vehicle for capital enhancement. Both render invulnerability aspirational, albeit in different forms, one spatial and the other temporal: the body as impervious fortress or the self as continually moving forward, unimpaired, unimpairable. This call for both precautionary responsibility and entrepreneurial resilience “normalizes traditional patriarchal damage (e.g., the damage of exclusion and objectification) as a systemic or background condition that individual women are then responsible for overcoming” (James Reference James2014, 120; see also Gill and Orgad Reference Gill and Orgad2017, 29). Damage is inevitable if one manages risk inadequately, but the conditions that give rise to harm cannot be altered.
Being agentic and responsible means acceding to dominant norms to ward off threats as well as to succeed. The broader neoliberal frame does not afford potential victims alternative “explanations for their lack of success [or their victimization] except for their own individual failing” (Gonick Reference Gonick2006, 17). The mandate to take full responsibility for one's body and sexuality thus can be experienced as reasonable. One seeks to shape “one's ‘own’ precariousness,” determining to whom and in what ways one is exposed and vulnerable, and these “ways of self-governing strengthen fantasies of mastering one's ‘own’ precariousness as adeptly as possible” (Lorey Reference Lorey and Derieg2015, 26). Thus, even the precautionary responsibility of warding off risks and managing vulnerabilities becomes entrepreneurial.
The background conditions that are presumed neutral also include racial hierarchy and norms of whiteness. For example, Rachel Hall contends that rape-prevention discourses often ignore race and class, such as how working-class women might not have “the option of staying in at night,” but engage in gender essentialism that “reinvest white and middle-class women with a sense of preciosity,” bolstering the connection between sexual vulnerability, victimhood, and normative white middle-class femininity (Hall Reference Hall2004, 4). The norm to be sexually agentic likewise creates an especial double bind for Black women: the “controlling image” of the promiscuous “jezebel” degrades Black women's sexuality as “out of control” and also represents it as a naturalized trait rather than an expression of agency (Collins Reference Collins2000, 129). Striving to retain status as agentic also means frequently punching down and, as Bay-Cheng notes, “[r]acialized and economically disadvantaged girls are made easy targets for such downward comparisons by race and class-based constructions of them as over-sexed and under-disciplined” (Bay-Cheng Reference Bay-Cheng2015, 287). Framed out of normative sexual responsibility-taking and more susceptible to disciplining assignments of responsibility, Black women are more likely to be shamed and blamed, as well as to self-blame, exacerbating their vulnerability.Footnote 19 As Kimberlé Crenshaw maintains, they experience heightened vulnerability because, on the one hand, they are made hypervisible within a neoliberal model as responsibilized subjects who are blamed for their failure to perform responsibility appropriately, and, on the other hand, they are rendered invisible as subjects of social justice (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2012, 1463).Footnote 20 In this way, responsibility-taking as a practice of successful, privatized self-management is frequently inaccessible for women of color, working-class women, and transwomen, among others. In contrast, privatizing responsibility benefits advantaged neoliberal subjects, already positioned so as to increase their human capital, who can present as agentic, self-responsible, and able to avoid victimization. Thus, normative responsibility-taking practices regarding sexuality support white privilege and white supremacy: sexual responsibility (read: respectability) may be perceived as a privilege of white femininity and, as moralized in a white-supremacist society, has often been a practice of maintaining white racial purity.Footnote 21
These harm-generating conditions, however, are dismissed through the presumption of neutrality with respect to race, gender, sexuality, and other social group differences. By maintaining that all success and failure can be chalked up to personal responsibility, “neoliberalism effectively masks racism through its value-laden moral project: camouflaging practices anchored in an apparent meritocracy, making possible a utopic vision of society that is non-racialized” (Roberts and Mahtani Reference Roberts and Mahtani2010, 253). Assumptions of neutrality and meritocracy serve as cover for persistent bias and inequality not only because they are erroneous, but also because they prevent norms, structures, and systems of meaning from being perceived as formative and so potentially harmful, and thus changeable. They obscure how neoliberalism demands fatalistic acceptance of the often oppressive status quo.Footnote 22
Crenshaw's critique of neoliberalism demonstrates how, in the absence of intersectional awareness, neoliberal ideas and practices of responsibility infiltrate antiracist and anti-violence-against-women activism. In a now well-known example, the feminist violence against women movement endorsed punitive measures, such as mandatory arrest in domestic-violence incidents and mandatory minimum sentences, to secure support from the state, specifically law enforcement (see Gottschalk Reference Gottschalk2006; Bumiller Reference Bumiller2008). On the other hand, antiracist Black politics embraced neoliberal discourses of individualized responsibility, in particular by targeting “Black men as the focal point of responsibility and uplift” (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw2012, 1458) and by advocating a return to a normative gender order in the home (see also Spence Reference Spence2015). Although the first instance involves a turn to the state and the second to the private sphere, both exemplify neoliberal responsibility: the feminist turn to the state involves a narrow focus on individual perpetrators, fueling retributive sentiments and practices in criminal justice politics,Footnote 23 whereas the antiracist turn to the home lends credence to the privatizing and moralizing neoliberal focus on self-management, making possible a depoliticization of racism.
By intensifying the decontextualization of liberal individualism, a neoliberal lens on responsibility compels acceptance of the social status quo, inhibits social transformation, and entrenches oppressive social relations. Not only are individuals divorced from broader social contexts and thus responsible alone, but they are induced to regard themselves that way and thus disempowered to change oppressive institutional and social relations. The decontextualization of neoliberal responsibility is especially harmful for people who are materially and symbolically disadvantaged by a misogynist, white-supremacist, xenophobic, transphobic, ableist status quo. Historical oppression has generated deep inequalities in access to the freedom, safety, and material resources with which to pursue practices of responsible self-management. Additionally, the extent to which people are responsibilized through discipline and correction, and the nature of that discipline and correction, depends on whether people are perceived as already valuable and “self-responsible” subjects, as potentially threatening, or as needing paternalist inducement to take responsibility for their sexuality.
Thus, the pervasiveness of the neoliberal lens on responsibility contributes to the harms of 1) widespread discrepancies in being heard, believed, and so achieving justice, and 2) the disproportionate exposure of people of color to the power of the state through disciplining, punitive responsibility assignments. As Crenshaw notes, for Black women these twinned harms stem from simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility. Kristie Dotson and Marita Gilbert term this condition “process-based invisibility” wherein “obfuscation, erasure, and indifference are enacted in public narratives according to [trackable] processes” (Dotson and Gilbert Reference Dotson and Gilbert2014, 874). Neoliberal responsibility practices fuel these processes and the accompanying “affectability imbalances,” discrepancies in the impact that people's narratives of their experiences have on others and on their own positions in reciprocal social relations (874). As Dotson and Gilbert demonstrate with the case of Nafissatou Diallo, who was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011, such imbalances result from both disregard for and villainization of people and their needs based on their complex social identities: “accusations of mendacious personal character and questionable sexual history serve to villainize Diallo's needs [for justice]. In this case, questions of credibility and an already persisting disregard of Black women's sexuality can be seen to facilitate Diallo's transition to the villainized, suggesting her needs, as a woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted, should not be met” (881). These harms—of indifference and lack of reciprocity and care—are exacerbated when the perpetrator is a powerful figure (such as Strauss-Kahn) and/or occupies a valorized social position (such as Brock Turner), and so is the object of disproportionate belief, concern, and sympathy.Footnote 24
These harms are evident in the experience in 2019 of Anjanette Young, a Black social worker in Chicago who was handcuffed and forced to stand naked while the police searched her apartment as she repeatedly told them they had the wrong person. Young's violation is one instance of what Yolanda Wilson describes as “a unique form of sexual violence experienced by black women. The convergence of race and gender in black women's lives has created the social conditions in which black women are coerced and often expected, under threat of punishment by the government, to suffer the exposure of intimate body parts” (Wilson Reference Wilson2018). Black women in the US face sexual injustices rooted in the historical violations of slavery, the continual deployment of state power against them, and the persistence of sexualized racist stereotypes that disregard, devalue, and villainize their sexuality. They are subjected to aggressive, humiliating treatment by authorities such as the police, prosecutors, judges, and the media. The callous disregard with which officers treated Young highlights the weight of that history.Footnote 25 These injustices are what Moya Bailey and Trudy theorize as misogynoir, the distinctive combination of “anti-Blackness and misogyny” (Bailey and Trudy Reference Bailey and Trudy2018, 2) that explains how their “vulnerability is exploited and how [their] strength is weaponized to deny Black women's humanity” (5).
The punitive responsibility-assignments made material in the carceral state are another harmful manifestation of the collision of neoliberalism and persistent inequality.Footnote 26 State violence exacerbates the precarity of marginalized people through policing, militarization, and incarceration that is rationalized as necessary for safety. Such punitive strategies of governing appeal to entrenched, legitimizing beliefs to frame poor people, people of color, and LGBTQ people as threatening. For instance, Black women are endangered by these strategies since even as victims “they are often (dis)positioned as the perpetrator of the crime of violence . . . [and] not permitted to conceptually occupy the moral status of victim of gendered violence” (Bierria Reference Bierria2014, 139). Carceral logics are not only intense expressions of individualized responsibility but also prime outlets for stereotypical, oppressive value judgments about others’ responsibility.
In sum, neoliberal responsibility obscures the feedback loops between assignments of responsibility and forms of harmful vulnerability. By privatizing vulnerability and economizing responsibility, it becomes impossible to undertake critical analysis of how people are held responsible or not in virtue of their social positions, how people's vulnerability is perceived and received differently, and how people's capacity for taking responsibility is both assessed differently and is actually different in light of the conditions they face and resources they can or cannot access. Instead, the neoliberal lens provides entrenched oppressive social structures and systems of meaning—such as white supremacy, binary sex/gender, and moralizing patriarchal, heteronormative approaches to sexuality—cover under its suppositions of neutrality and meritocracy. These presumptions enable racism and sexism to be recast as ostensibly postracial, gender-neutral judgments of failures of responsibility. That is, the neoliberal development of the liberal liability model of responsibility removes the ability to perceive and contest the normal and allegedly acceptable background conditions—such as unequal structural conditions and pernicious symbolic systems—that are conducive both to sexual injustices and to the misperception of these injustices. Downplaying these conditions and their historical legacies denies the structural, political bases for sexual injustice and individualizes responsibility, creating a cycle of actual failures of responsibility. These structuring conditions and systems of harmful social meaning are precisely what need to change to prevent and address sexual injustices. Responsibility is needed for precisely that which a neoliberal notion of responsibility cannot take into account, hence the import of an alternative, intersectional approach to responsibility.
III. An Intersectional Feminist Theory of Responsibility
A feminist theory of responsibility that can do justice to the complexity of sexual injustice thus needs to be rooted in the features of social ontology that liberal and neoliberal notions ignore, undermine, or deny; to attend to what victims/survivors need from systems of responsibility; and, as dimensions of the former, to be thoroughly intersectional. The erroneous presumptions of liberal and neoliberal models include an isolated self, vulnerability as a private burden, sexuality as a commodity to exchange or as a quasi-naturalized property of an objectified body, which all culminate in an economized, privatized notion of individual responsibility. In contrast, starting assumptions for adequate responsibility practices include that the self is shaped through relations with others and its sociohistorical context, that a fundamental level of vulnerability is unavoidable but often exploited inequitably, that sexuality is a matter of particular forms of relations with others, and thus responsibility takes complex, multilevel forms.
What does an intersectional feminist account of responsibility entail? And what does it entail with respect to sexual justice and injustices? Drawing from the work of activists and community groups who seek transformative justice provides a clearer picture of such an account of responsibility. Describing the work of GenerationFIVE, a transformative justice group devoted to ending child sexual abuse, Sarah Tyson notes that they approach this harm “as a problem that can only be addressed through transforming the ways we live together. . . . GenerationFIVE does not individualize violence, reducing an understanding of instances of violence to simplistic narratives of perpetrator and victim, but rather they understand violence as something that occurs within, affects, and is perpetuated by communities of people” (Tyson Reference Tyson2014, 4). This approach strives to be nondichotomizing and nonpunitive, and aims in a forward-looking manner to alter harmful and oppressive social relations. What follows are four premises based on these insights, each with a negative and a positive dimension, to guide thinking about and practicing responsibility from an intersectional feminist perspective.
1. To foreground transformation, the ethos guiding responsibility practices should be neither punitive nor dichotomizing, but reparative. A nondichotomizing model of responsibility refrains from construing perpetrators and those victimized as occupying antipodal social positions, aligned dualistically with opposing qualities (invulnerable/vulnerable, evil/good, impure/pure, masculine/feminine, abnormal/normal, and so on). It is based instead on the formative quality of social relations; this premise attends to the nature of relationships rather than the status of persons in those relationships (either victim or perpetrator), which may be presumed to be unchanging. Isolating wrongdoers undercuts this premise by treating them as if they are radically different from others and, accordingly, irredeemable. Although it is important not to conflate the two or assume that all perpetrators have likewise been victimized, dichotomizing ignores the reality that many people are involved in relationships in which they have been both victimized and victimizing. Because relationships are formative of persons, it is relationships that require repair (rather than, say, persons requiring redemption, penance, or punishment or needing to be healed or to overcome their trauma).Footnote 27 Thus, positively, responsibility must mean ethical and social repair, transformation of relations with others and oneself. Repair will of course mean different things for those who have been engaged in sexual misconduct and those who have experienced these injustices. Victims/survivors certainly do not need to undertake the work of repair alongside those who have engaged in misconduct,Footnote 28 but the broader communities to which both belong need to find ways to do so. Repair means social change, and social change means the work of conversation, communication, and undertaking projects together toward shared ends rather than simply resorting to exclusion through incarceration or other means.
Dichotomizing has further undesirable consequences: isolating perpetrators absolves others who participate in the sociocultural context of the injustice and fosters punitive sentiments. Although penalty may be warranted in many instances, an overarching punitive orientation hinders social transformation; it directs attention backward rather than forward, suggesting that retribution is more important than transformation.Footnote 29 Such an orientation can infect how sexual injustice is dealt with overall: the ethos that demands harsh punishment in the form of lengthy prison terms for offenders like Brock Turner is also the ethos that led a rape victim in Texas who was diagnosed as bipolar to be jailed to ensure that she would testify, an action that redoubled her victimization. Punitive and retributive approaches are all too often deployed against those who have been victimized, especially those whose vulnerability is disregarded, misunderstood, or villainized. Not only are punitive, carceral logics erroneously individualizing, they also generally fail to create genuinely safe conditions and create the illusion of safety for some at the price of violence to others.
2. Abandoning a dichotomizing approach provides an opportunity to theorize the complexity of responsibility more adequately rather than reduce it to an individualized behavior. Thus, the second premise is that responsibility occurs at various levels and modalities—responsibility in relation to self, particular others, communities, and a social world—that should not be disjoined. Responsibility in relation to the self is never just responsibility for one's self since one's self is constituted by and composed of the others, both intimate and strange, to whom one is related. Responsibility in relation to the social world is responsibility for and through participation in constituting the norms and conventions, structures and institutions, everyday habits and practices, and discourses and images that form, maintain, and alter that world. Young's social connection model of responsibility for structural injustice is one avenue for theorizing responsibility more thoroughly. Young proposes that responsibility be 1) forward-looking, aimed at transformation rather than retribution, 2) critical of background conditions that are presumed to be normal and ethically acceptable, 3) shared by all those who participate in the social structures that conduce to injustice, and 4) assumed through collective action (Young Reference Young2011, 111).
This account indicates that responsibility cannot be adequately conceived or practiced by focusing on isolated actions, detached from history and the broader sociocultural context in which they were performed, or on a certain domain isolated from other domains and systems. Just as persons ought not to be isolated in their responsibility, so harmful actions ought not to be isolated from the conditions that make them possible, including the histories that have produced those conditions. Instead, the different levels at which, and the different domains in which, responsibility can be taken must be put in relation to one another.
3. To challenge pernicious background conditions rather than accede to the forms they take in narrow and privatized neoliberal responsibility, which is very forward-looking, an intersectional feminist theory of responsibility should be forward-looking by seeking to alter oppressive normative social relations. Therefore, practices of responsibility need to counter narrow individualization. One way to do so is for individuals to understand and then re-form their constitutive relationships with one another and their broader sociocultural contexts. Critical feminist analyses of sexual and gender norms, including statements made as part of the recent #MeToo movement, have problematized the so-called normal conditions of coercive heterosexual sexual activity in that social world.Footnote 30 Norms of feminine socialization may make it more difficult for people who have internalized these norms to resist coercive sexual activity. A nondichotomous perspective involves the recognition that just as those who are victimized develop and are formed by relationships in the social world, and so learn patterns of choice, comportment, and ways of responding in the context of that unequal social world, so do those who victimize and cause harm. Norms for masculine socialization may likewise make it more difficult for people who have internalized these norms to recognize coercive sexual activity as injurious given its normalcy. Neither set of norms lessens responsibility but rather is that for which responsibility is needed.Footnote 31 Given how these norms position people differently in relation to power and privilege, cisgender heterosexual men generally bear more responsibility for altering them.Footnote 32
A historical perspective on how unjust social conditions have developed is crucial for adequate responsibility-taking and transforming normative social relations. There can be no adequate understanding of current sexual injustices, the depths of the harm they do, and the institutions and individuals who ought to take responsibility for them without understanding, for example, how Anglo-American law has treated rape as a crime of property, how rape was instrumental to the violation of Black women during slavery, and how sexual violence was perpetrated against Native women as an essential part of colonization (Deer Reference Deer2015). Only by taking history into account is it possible to understand current social relations, and so know which modes of responsibility-taking are likely to perpetuate oppressive social relations and which may undo them. So, in a context of pervasive state-sanctioned violence against women of color, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence emphasize the importance of transforming social relations by building communal resources that do not depend on the state. They call on activists and movements to “[d]evelop community-based responses to violence” and seek change within and across communities (INCITE! 2001). In her study of sexual violence against Native American women, Sarah Deer highlights examples of tribal court decisions that offer contrasts to the failure of US law to extend justice to Native women; in these decisions, “tribal jurists have resisted this patriarchal tradition [of Anglo-American law] and tapped into unique tribal conceptions of gender to resolve disputes” (Deer Reference Deer2015, 25). The decisions foster relationships between individuals and their tribal community, reflect the value of community relations, and so enable communal as well as individual responsibility. Deer's analysis demonstrates that not all normative social relations are oppressive: facets of precolonial gender relations can provide a better basis for responsibility-taking for gender and sexual violence when adapted to respond to contemporary problems and operating as part of “a unique ethic of decolonization” (30), challenging the colonial imposition of US law that leaves Native women and children without recourse. Thus community-centered responsibility practices and community-creating activity are key routes to de-individualizing practices of responsibility. Yet communities may be the site of injustices, may be too insular, or may not exist robustly enough to be a source of change. Thus, as INCITE! notes, the work of change includes “building communities where they have been fractured so that they are in a position to hold [their] members accountable” as well as questioning the definition of and boundaries demarcating communities (INCITE! 2003).
4. Therefore, a fourth premise is that altering oppressive social relations requires thoroughgoing critique of 1) the various legitimizing beliefs concerning sexual injustice, and their concrete ramifications for discourse, policies, and practices; 2) the immediate recourse to penalizing responses; as well as 3) self-critique of individual actions, beliefs, and attitudes, along with any new norms, prescriptions, or approaches that are developed and the contexts in which they arise. Critiquing legitimizing beliefs is a way of taking responsibility for the symbolic dimension of the social world and its impact on the material conditions of people's lives, and can pave the way for reformulating the relationships and standard practices that comprise institutions. Critique can also generate different, less punitive, conclusions about what responsibility looks like. Justified anger and frustration at the continual failure to respond ethically to cases of sexual injustice may lead us to denounce and condemn those involved: perpetrators, their complicit family and friends, biased judges, and other parties to injustice. Rage at injustice, however, is different from endorsing the institutionalized, bureaucratic punitiveness of the state, which has long been complicit in systemic racial injustice. It is possible to mobilize based on the former without succumbing to the latter. Doing so requires distinguishing between responses whose aim is punitive and responses that may have punitive effects but whose aim is institutional change. For instance, the successful campaign to recall Judge Persky need not be regarded as merely punitive: judges are often elected officials and it is within the rights of voters to remove judges whom they deem not up to the job.Footnote 33 Removing Persky may alter normative social relations, indicating that it is unacceptable for judges to allow racist, sexist, and classist legitimizing beliefs to affect their judicial reasoning and thus the pursuit of justice. In contrast, predominantly penalizing responses reinforce the status quo and enshrine punitiveness in procedure. Removing those who perpetuate injustice from their positions, however, should be accompanied by opportunities for change. Such change can occur only by maintaining and/or creating relationships with those who most need to reform habitual beliefs and relations to self, others, and the social worlds in which they participate. Maintaining these relationships is also key to self-critique, which is facilitated through relations with others. Feminists concerned with sexual injustice, especially cisgender white feminists, including this author, must undertake self-critique, which requires “not only to look and listen but also to check and question” our understanding of the realities of people who are differently situated from us (Ortega Reference Ortega2006, 60). We must question how sexual injustice in certain sites—such as the university in contrast with agricultural fields, factories, prisons, and detention centers—is noticed, documented, discussed, and addressed with disproportionate frequency, and how privileging these sites contributes to a stereotypical and exclusionary image of those who experience sexual injustices.
IV. Conclusion
The cases with which this essay began illustrate how these features are necessary for adequate responsibility-taking and how their absence is a failure of responsibility. Brock Turner attempted responsibility-taking in a presentencing statement to the court in which he argued that he should receive probation for his sexual assault of Chanel Miller (see New York Times Interactive 2016; Xu Reference Xu2016). Although he claimed to be the “sole proprietor [sic] of what happened[,]” he made no attempt to repair relations with or for Miller or others he victimized. Turner's account of the assault is preceded by four pages placing his actions in the context of a college culture of binge-drinking and “sexual promiscuity,” which might appear to be an attempt to consider the multiple layers of responsibility at work, just as it might seem a gesture at forward-looking responsibility for Turner to propose that the judge give him probation so he could try to educate peers about binge-drinking and promiscuity. The references to college culture, however, only displace responsibility and blame onto those social conditions while also misidentifying the harmful conditions as “promiscuity” rather than, say, misogyny and masculine entitlement. Turner severely curtails his individual responsibility for his actions and so refuses responsibility for his role as a participant and co-constitutor of his social world, seeking instead to use the normative background conditions of that world to excuse his actions; that deflection was enabled by his defense, which, as Chanel Miller observes, aimed to lead “Brock back into the herd, where he could blend into the comfort of [normative] community” while individualizing and isolating her (Miller Reference Miller2019, 271). Among other norms such as those for status and entitlement, Turner refuses to perceive his attitude and actions toward women and sex—as interchangeable, as objects of acquisition—as things that need to be challenged.Footnote 34 Thus, normative social relations are reaffirmed, not critiqued or challenged.
The stories of Holtzclaw's predations, and the myriad other cases of police abuse and assault of marginalized people, illustrate that the normative social relations in need of transformation extend beyond sex and gender relations, narrowly construed, and that the contexts in which actions are situated include the histories that have led to them. Justice for the women Holtzclaw victimized requires more than his conviction. It requires that the Oklahoma City Police Department take responsibility for allowing Holtzclaw to continue to abuse his power while investigating him and that other communities likewise hold police to account for systemic sexualized abuse of women of color (see, for example, LDF 2016; Hopkins Reference Hopkins2019; Levin Reference Levin2020). It requires addressing structural racism that facilitates tenacious but mutable racial bias, rampant income and wealth inequality, inequitable drug laws, as well as overthrowing a criminal justice system financed off the backs of the people subjected to its oppressive tactics.Footnote 35 Both cases indicate the importance of responsibility-taking at multiple levels, as well as the need for institutional responsibility-taking to take the form of institutional change especially when dealing with institutions like policing, courts, and media.Footnote 36 These stories are also structurally interconnected: Turner's privilege is had at the cost of the marginalization of the women Holtzclaw targeted; Judge Persky's leniency is permitted in relation to the harshness of the state bureaucracy and police that Holtzclaw's victims experienced.
Reflecting on her experience of the legal process, Miller observes, “[i]t had never occurred to me that the system itself could be wrong, could be changed or improved. Victims could ask for more” (Miller Reference Miller2019, 139). Reframing responsibility is one core part of changing this particular system and continuing the work of developing alternatives to it. Examples of more adequate practices of responsibility that extend beyond individual accountability are found in the myriad efforts to break with punitive institutions and institutionalized punitivity: movements for prison abolition and decarceration, drug legalization and/or decriminalization, defunding or reduced funding for policing, the accountability circles of transformative justice frameworks (Jashnani, Maccani, and Greig Reference Jashnani, Maccani, Greig, Chen, Dulani and Piepzna-Samarasinha2011), mutual aid (BigDoorBrigade 2020), and reparations or restitution to communities injured by legacies of oppression (Hannah-Jones Reference Hannah-Jones2020).
There may be reason to be hopeful given the now international conversation that is emerging, or recurring, about sexual and racial injustices, but there is reason to ask more of those conversations. To ask, as Angela Davis urges, that we recognize how “[t]he retributive impulses of the state are inscribed in our very emotional responses” and reevaluate these responses (Davis Reference Davis2016, 106); to demand accountability that is more than punitive, that requires more than resignation, dismissal, or the severing of ties; to formulate practices of responsibility-taking that involve learning about the experiences of others, about one's biases and normative social contexts, and about the workings of various sectors of one's world; to call for institutions not merely to restructure themselves (by replacing their board of directors or convening a task-force, for instance) but to reckon with how their normal imperatives (profit, fame, arrest and ticket quotas, the simple continuation of the status quo, and so on) are implicated in injustice; and to scrutinize sites where an absence of institutional oversight means sexual injustices go unnoticed and unchecked. To be responsible is to participate in altering social relations so as to prevent, mitigate, or challenge injustice. When responsibility is understood in this way it becomes more complex and perhaps more demanding—something is required of nearly all of us—but it also becomes more accessible, with more points of entry and ways to intervene.
Acknowledgments
I am particularly thankful for feedback on this work in its early stages from Debra Jackson, Qrescent Mason, Merritt Rehn-DeBraal, and Dianna Taylor during a 2017 NEH Summer Seminar on “Diverse Philosophical Approaches to Sexual Violence,” as well as to Ann Cahill for organizing the seminar. The support and community that Dianna has fostered since that seminar have also been invaluable. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for Hypatia whose constructive critiques and comments made this essay markedly better in many ways.
Erinn Gilson is Associate Professor of philosophy at Merrimack College. Her teaching and research deal with contemporary ethical and social justice issues, including those concerning food and agriculture, race, and sex and gender. The concept of vulnerability is at the center of her recent work, which considers its political and ethical significance, as well as how vulnerability is framed in popular and academic discourses. She is the author of The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (2014) and editor, with Sarah Kenehan, of Food, Environment, and Climate Change: Justice at the Intersections (2018).
