The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and (...) discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism ‘lite’, rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have identified a political formation that mobilizes the emancipatory energies of feminism in the service of the expansion of the carceral state. ‘Carceral feminism,’ as it has come to be known, is often portrayed by these scholars as a product of feminist-conservative convergence. Here, I argue that the rise of the SlutWalk movement suggests a more complex genealogy for carceral feminism. By situating SlutWalk in the historico-theoretical context of feminism’s sex wars, I reveal the (...) carceral–feminist impulses roiling beneath its progressive ‘sex-positive’ surface. With its tendency to reduce sexual freedom to expressive freedom, valorize conventional forms of femininity and sexuality, and promote a fundamentally carceral paradigm of sexual freedom, the SlutWalk movement, I argue, is descended from anti-censorship/pro-sex feminism, a liberal-feminist hybrid that emerged out of the convergence of sex-radical feminism and liberalism during the sex wars. When viewed in this light, SlutWalk no longer appears as a sign that feminism’s ‘pleasure’ and ‘danger’ factions have negotiated a long-awaited ‘sex-détente.’ Rather, it stands as a testament to the extent to which feminism’s once radical aspirations in the domain of sexual politics have been supplanted by a tepid, heteronormative, and disquietingly carceral liberal project. (shrink)

This paper uses an intersectional analysis to look at contemporary forms of women's popular protest in the hopes of raising questions about the explicit use of the gendered body in struggles for women's emancipation. Specifically, it explores the protests of SlutWalk and FEMEN to suggest that such body protests exemplify a problematic interface between third-wave and postfeminism. This interface or junction is most noticeable and problematic in relation to uncontested auto-sexualisation or ‘femmenism’. I argue that any subversive potential these (...) recent mobilisations might offer is limited through their reproduction of patriarchal, hegemonic norms. This piece is theoretical in the main, though it does include some preliminary qualitative research by way of drawing on websites, news reports, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and other online content produced by or about SlutWalk and FEMEN. The hope is to raise questions about the value of this increasingly pervasive use of sexualised, gender protest for feminist organising, not merely as an academic exercise but for its utility in practice. (shrink)