Tag: crime

Rape allegations and the inversion of the presumption of innocence

Posted on by foluke.adebisi

By Dr Michael Naughton, Reader in Sociology and Law (University of Bristol Law School and  School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)).

Michel Foucault’s methodology for understanding the contemporary moment was to conduct what he termed histories of the present; forms of genealogical analysis that examine the operation of the ‘truths’ peculiar to ‘the societies within which we find ourselves’, the ‘truths’ of ‘what we are’, the ‘truths’ that we live by; how we arrived at where we are Today; our present situation. Moreover, for Foucault, if we want to understand present-ness, we should problematise accepted and presentist thinking by looking for defining moments in history when the problematic under analysis was different; when things changed. (more…)

Resisting Rape as Revolutionary Praxis

Posted on by foluke.adebisi

by Yvette Russell*, The Law School, University of Bristol

In this seminar I argue for the need to think resistance to rape as part of a much broader feminist decolonial revolutionary praxis. I approach feminist anti-rape praxis in view of the consistent failure of criminal justice but also with an eye on the political present, which is characterised by profound inequality, state violence and repression, and the outright breakdown of many aspects of the social contract. To fully comprehend what the harm of sexual violence means and why it happens, we need to insist on a critical continuity between the diagnostic aspect of feminist philosophical scholarship on rape and a theoretically robust strategy for resistance.

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