ABSTRACT
In this chapter I undertake three tasks. Firstly, I review social contract theory, giving some flesh to the ideas briefly flagged in the introduction; secondly, I outline Carole Pateman’s theory of the ‘sexual contract’, and thirdly, I map an alternate theoretical and political trajectory for the sexual contract than the one developed by Pateman. In brief, I argue – contra much feminist social theory – that Pateman was ‘right about rights’: women’s exclusion from the category of ‘the individual’ was both foundational and instrumental to the theory and practice of liberal democracy. However, unlike Pateman, I argue that this is not the end of the story. Her dire warnings about contract do not, in my view, sustain their explanatory power into the late modern age where female individualisation is the norm (although they do explain the problem of contradiction still puzzled over in sociology). In other words, the sexual contract does not remain static but continues to unfold, like all historical processes, in directions unforeseen by its original architects.
