ABSTRACT
“Subjectivity, sexual violence, and sexual humiliation” provides accounts of both humiliation generally and sexual humiliation more specifically and shows that sexual violence humiliates. Marking a distinction between humiliating conditions and treatment on the one hand and the experience of humiliation on the other, I show that humiliation manifests within the self-relation by means of and subsequently intensifies definitive, normalizing features of subjectivity. As a redoubling of that intensification, sexual humiliation generates a deeply damaging relation of self to self that threatens to foreclose victims’/survivors’ critical and creative capacities, the resources upon which they need to draw in order to engage in counter-action. Drawing upon the work of contemporary feminist philosophers, I elucidate the damaging and normalizing character of sexual humiliation through analysis of recent cases of rape and sexual assault. To conclude the chapter, I acknowledge that and explore possible reasons why some victims/survivors of sexual violence do not, at least not initially, experience humiliation. By illustrating the importance for feminism of loosening attachments to subjectivity, this chapter opens onto analysis in subsequent chapters of contemporary forms of feminist anti-sexual violence protest that reflect such loosening and thereby offer insight into alternative modes of self-relation.
