Respond and Resolve: A Critical Feminist Inquiry for Technologies of Sexual Governance

Abstract

From higher education to workplaces, institutions are increasingly adopting data-driven and semiautomated technologies to facilitate, manage, and arbitrate sexual affairs. These largely US-based systems, which I term “technologies of sexual governance,” are encoded with and reify particular ideologies about sexual (mis)conduct, and thus call for a critical feminist inquiry about their cultural, political, and moral implications for advancing a feminist sexual politics. Drawing from Halley et al.’s “governance feminism” framework, this article makes the case that a critical feminist inquiry into technologies of sexual governance must take into account the co-constitutive nature of feminist sexual politics and technology. Specifically, I argue that critical inquiries must begin by interrogating which feminist ideologies about sex and power gain purchase with and through particular computational logics and form. To demonstrate this approach, I offer two ways of reading feminist scholarly and popular responses to “antirape technologies” that capture both readings’ shortcomings, and I propose a third approach that captures the cultural work that particular feminist ideologies and technologies mutually perform. This article concludes by demonstrating how the third approach can advance a feminist analysis of workplace misconduct management softwares.