Intersectional and Anticarceral Approaches to Sexual Violence in the Academy

Author(s): GRACE KYUNGWON HONG

Source: Academe , NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018, Vol. 104, No. 6, Gender on Campus
(NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018), pp. 22-25
Published by: American Association of University Professors

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26606291

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Intersectional
and Anticarceral
Approaches to
Sexual Violence
in the Academy
BY GRACE KYUNGWON HONG

A working group at UCLA considers new models for campus policies

on sexual violence and harassment.

////////////////////////////////////////
GRACE KYUNGWON HONG is
professor in the Department of
Asian American Studies and the
Department of Gender Studies
at the University of California,
Los Angeles. She is also a senior
faculty research associate and
the chair of the faculty advisory
committee of the Center for the
Study of Women at UCLA.
W
hat might responses to sexual and gender-based
violence and harassment on campus look like
if we truly took intersectional and anticarceral
approaches? How might we best bring decades
of feminist research, scholarship, and activism
to bear on our responses to sexual violence and harassment?
These are the questions that animate the Sexual Violence Work-
ing Group, which operates under the aegis of the Center for the
Study of Women (CSW) at the University of California, Los An-
geles. Our approach complements and extends the analysis and
recommendations of the AAUP’s 2016 report The History, Uses,
and Abuses of Title IX.

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ILLUSTRATION BY KATERINA SISPEROVA/iSTOCK

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 CSW’s mission is to initiate and support feminist
research on women, gender, and sexuality, with an
explicit focus on social justice. Toward that end, CSW’s
research projects have institutional as well as scholarly
goals. The Sexual Violence Working Group embod-
ies this dual mission: we aim to highlight existing
research and support new research projects on effec-
tive approaches to curbing sexual violence and sexual
harassment on campus.
The working group came into being as a response to
student organizing around sexual violence and sexual
harassment. We quickly realized that CSW needed to
play a more active role in the campus conversation on
sexual violence. CSW’s contribution to this conversa-
tion would derive from its strengths in feminist research
in particular, something that we found has had less
impact on existing campus policies than one might
assume. We established the working group in fall 2017
and have spent the last year facilitating conversations
both within CSW and in coordination with the office
of the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclu-
sion. Because policies on sexual violence and sexual
harassment are coordinated across the University of
California system, we also facilitated a discussion at
the yearly meeting of UC gender and women’s stud-
ies chairs and faculty. Based on these conversations,
we have identified several key priorities: promotion of
intersectional approaches, or analysis of how gender
is always mutually constituted by race, sexuality, class,
disability, and other systems of power and precarity;
opposition to carceral systems, not only by working to
dismantle literal prisons but also by challenging a cul-
ture that imagines punishment and imprisonment as the
main responses to societal problems; and sex positivity,
an approach to Title IX that does not compel scholars
of sexuality and gender to censor themselves.
NEW APPROACHES
The term intersectionality was coined by UCLA profes-
sor of law Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, but
the concept, developed by feminist women of color
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has long
existed. The concept of intersectionality is complicated,
nowhere more so than when it is applied to sexual
violence on campus. Taking an intersectional approach
to sexual violence means understanding that the notion
of a universally experienced “campus rape culture” is
inadequate because it flattens out the very different hier-
archies of power that are animated by and contribute to
sexual violence. That is, we must contextualize sexual
violence differently in relation to racism, homophobia,
and other structures that already constitute the univer-
sity as an institution. Sexual violence happens within
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the context of an institution that is inaccessible, hostile,
or violent to communities of color, impoverished com-
munities, and immigrant and refugee communities.
Such structures already render certain students, staff,
and faculty vulnerable to various forms of violence.
This does not mean, of course, that we focus on viola-
tions against certain populations more than others.
Rather, it is to say that an approach that assumes that
all experiences of sexual violence have a common
denominator or follow a universal narrative implic-
itly gives priority to those who fit that narrative best
and marginalizes those who are already vulnerable.
Likewise, rather than assume that the university is a
neutral institution, we seek to understand how sexual
violence is not an aberration but instead a predictable
effect of the university’s functions.
This approach borrows from analyses by femi-
nist women of color that deindividualize sexual
violence. For example, in her foundational essay
“Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,”
Angela Davis observes that enslaved women were
routinely subjected to sexual violence by those who
owned them as property. This ubiquitous viola-
tion was not simply the result of individual owners’
lack of sexual restraint; rather, the entire institution
of slavery was dependent on the dehumanization
produced by routine violence. She thus calls the rape
of enslaved women a form of “counterinsurgency.”
Indigenous studies and legal scholar Sarah Deer
argues that sexual violence has been and continues to
be a cornerstone of the elimination of Native com-
munities under settler colonialism. For example, the
lack of jurisdiction of tribal police and courts over
non-Native perpetrators of sexual violence against
Native American women on reservation lands under-
mines tribal sovereignty and fortifies violence against
Native American women. Following this structural
and intersectional line of thought, and consider-
ing the university’s historical role as a guarantor
of class stratification and a producer of imperial-
ist knowledge, how might we contextualize sexual
violence against white women and women of color,
queer people, working-class people, immigrants, and
refugees? With such an analysis, we would have to
think of anti-sexual-violence measures in concert
with organizing around campus policing, homeless-
ness and hunger, affirmative action, undocumented
students, tuition increases and financial aid, and
unionization—particularly of precarious and under-
paid workers or those who do dangerous work—as
well as a host of other issues.
Our anticarceral approach also relies heavily on the
work of feminist women of color and immigrant rights
Many of the policies instituted by colleges and universities
to address sexual and gender-based violence emphasize
a legalistic process of evidence and proof and offer only
the punishment of individual perpetrators as remedy,
often in ways that exacerbate existing structural inequalities.
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
activists and scholars, who have long observed that
responses to sexual and gender-based violence that rely
on criminalization and policing render their communi-
ties and the women within them more, rather than less,
vulnerable to harm. Many of the policies instituted by
colleges and universities to address sexual and gender-
based violence emphasize a legalistic process of evidence
and proof and offer only the punishment of individual
perpetrators as remedy, often in ways that exacerbate
existing structural inequalities. As the AAUP notes in
The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, individual
sexual harassment and assault claims are not under-
stood “as embedded within the broader social dynamics
on and off campus.” “This segmented approach to
sex discrimination,” the report continues, “promotes
partial and legalistic analyses of the nature and scope of
the problem, obscuring how biases or discrimination on
the basis of race, sexual orientation, or gender identity
may be ignored or even perpetuated by a narrow view
of gender equality.”
At the same time, impunity is not the opposite of
a culture of punishment but instead is its constitu-
tive corollary. We can understand the universalizing,
mandatory tendencies of more recent Title IX policies
as a reaction to the pernicious culture of impunity that
has allowed predatory sexual harassers and abusers,
particularly those in positions of power as professors,
administrators, and medical staff, to operate without
consequence for years, sometimes decades. Impunity
in this case is not the lack of action on the part of
the university; the university is not absent when such
conditions of impunity are allowed to occur. Rather,
impunity is the policy that structures institutional
response. The solution here is not simply to refortify the
university as a punitive institution—particularly when
such refortifications are implemented as a means of
managing liability rather than in the pursuit of justice.
As we have often seen, the reorganization of the univer-
sity around punishment puts the burden of proof on the
survivors and often does not even manage to punish the
perpetrators. An exemplary case is that of Geoff Marcy,
an astronomer at UC Berkeley who was accused of
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sexual harassment by four women. Berkeley’s internal
investigation found that he had engaged in inappropri-
ate behavior, but the institution claimed it was unable
to mete out any punishment for past violations. Our
critique of punishment-based models is not a call for
impunity; instead, following transformative and restor-
ative justice models pioneered by antiviolence activists,
we call on institutions to rethink and reimagine what
deindividualized and community-based accountability
might look like and how it might be instituted on a
university-wide level. While the AAUP’s Title IX report
does not adopt a fully anticarceral approach, it does
recommend that “colleges and universities should
consider adopting restorative justice practices for some
forms of prohibited misconduct.”
Finally, our working group advances a model of
accountability that does not define a safe workplace
as somehow entirely evacuated of sex and sexuality or
resort to a politics of respectability. We are concerned
about how feminist and queer teachers and researchers
are rendered vulnerable by such approaches. These fac-
ulty members often teach courses and conduct research
on gender, sexuality, and sex and institute pedago-
gies and methodologies that undermine conventional
teacher-student and researcher-subject hierarchies. As
the AAUP recognized in its Title IX report, “Faculty
members who teach and present their research in
sexuality studies, gender studies, and related disciplines
are in essence being asked to self-censor or risk running
afoul of Title IX. To safeguard academic freedom when
faculty members stand accused, the AAUP’s long-
standing recommendations on academic due-process
standards must be maintained.” How might we not
only allow nonnormative, queer, and feminist scholar-
ship, pedagogy, and mentoring within the academy but
indeed look to and learn from them as we build alterna-
tive models of accountability? Such models would not
impose a queer exceptionalism to ethics but instead
take into account the structural hierarchies that inhere
in, for example, faculty-student relationships, and work
to undermine those hierarchies rather than exploit
them.
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