Sexual Politics in the Twenty-First Century: Practices of Silencing and the Continuum of Sexual Violence

This paper examines the spectrum of sexual violence that permeates women's lives, often unnoticed by most of society. To do so, I revisit arguments from Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), which to a large extent gave rise to the theoretical contention that under conditions of patriarchy there is a constant coercive factor in sexuality, which is a hostile sphere for women. I go on to examine current practices of silencing that can be seen as surreptitious ways of perpetuating this continuum of sexual violence: testimonial epistemic injustice, hermeneutical epistemic injustice, the legal discourse of gender-based violence and the naturalistic discourse of sexuality. I conclude that current legal feminist scholarship has the imperative challenge of generating frames of reference that allow us to collectively and socially interpret this entire spectrum of violence.