The iconography of Asphyxiophilia: From fantasmatic fetish to forensic fact

This is a post print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below

Revisiting the Abject Phallus in a Post-#Metoo/ #BalanceTonPorc World

Keith Reader’s The Abject Object (2006) brought together the Lacanian concept of the phallus with the Kristevan notion of abjection to theorize representations of emasculated and failing masculinities across a range of modern French texts. This article brings Reader’s Lacanian-Kristevan model up to date with a discussion of recent developments in online cultures. The past twenty years are marked by the rise of the feminist movement known as #Metoo/ #BalanceTonPorc, the invention of the personage of the ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) in the misogynistic corner of the internet termed ‘the Manosphere’ and, latterly, a particularly high-profile French rape trial, the Pelicot case, in which the perpetrator sought other men online to abuse his drugged wife. The article examines whether the theoretical model of masculinity Reader proposed almost 20 years ago may offer generative ways of thinking about the new crises potentiated by contemporary digital sexual cultures

On Refusing to Care as a Feminist Ethic:A Response to ‘Reactionary Feminists’ Louise Perry and Mary Harrington

It is long established that care is a feminist issue, even as feminists of different philosophical and political stripes disagree regarding the value of care as a guiding ethic. Into the debate on care comes ‘reactionary feminism,’ a recent UK-based movement which argues that the technological advances of the sexual revolution have prioritized liberal freedom and alienated women from caring roles with deleterious effects. The most prominent ‘reactionary feminists’ are Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022), and Mary Harrington, author of Feminism Against Progress (2023). This article reads Perry and Harrington with and against feminist writing that offers radical ways of thinking about care and freedom beyond domesticity and heteronormativity. These include the Laboria Cubonix Collective’s manifesto, Xenofeminism (2018) and my own concept of ethical ‘self-fulness,’ propounded in my 2019 book, Selfish Women. Together, these constitute, respectively, collectivist and individualist ripostes to the reactionary feminists. <br/