Give a Woman an Inch, She’ll Take a Penis: The Expanded Version

Abstract

Women speaking out against sexual violence is nothing new, but institutions firing the male perpetrators or those accused, is novel. This article integrates and builds upon a blogpost written about #MeToo and various explorations of community-based practices and strategies to decrease and address sexual violence within colleges and psychoanalytic institutes. Community-based interventions are more complex ways of disrupting institutional responses to sexual misconduct, and as such, hold a potential to disrupt institutional betrayals that fuel, and are often plentiful in the wake of, sexual misconduct. However, this shift from the guilty individual to the corrupt or at least culpable institution, requires a more complicated theory of subjectivity, one that speaks to the coemergences of the human in relation to not just other humans but the nonhuman—institutions. Assemblage and theories of new materialisms can be integrated to help us deconstruct our narcissism around human exceptionalism as well as the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal responses to vulnerability and shame that seem to fuel much of the sexual (and other forms) of masculinized violence and the justifications for it.