Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Questions of speech, silencing and injustice have long been central to feminist understandings of sexual violence, and to activism around it. Listening, and its relationship to justice, in contrast, remains under-explored by feminist scholars and activists. In this article, I argue for a feminist politics of listening as an essential precondition for justice around sexual violence. I argue that feminist engagements with listening have tended to be limited to questions of belief but that this is inadequate for a just practice of listening. Instead, I call for the development of a feminist listening public that engages in active practices of both attentive listening in for the details and nuances of survivor speech and listening out to unheard and marginalised voices. It is only within the context of collective political labour around listening, I suggest, that we can begin to develop a just politics around sexual violence.
Source: Social & Legal Studies
Author: Tanya Serisier
Institution: Birkbeck, University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Leverhulme Trust
Award: G667584563
OpenAlex ID: W4402546644