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Showing posts from 2011

Sexual Consent: Exploring the Personal

Writing about sexual consent is never easy. Enthusiastic and articulated consent, of course, is clear, as is enthusiastic and articulated refusal. Between those two ends of the spectrum though, lie an entire range of possibilities which run through many shades of grey, and which touch the legal, political, religious, social, and personal spheres. It is precisely because those spheres exist, and because they intersect, that any academic account of sexual consent must necessarily be nuanced, to satisfy the demands of a multitude of disciplines, some of which may be entirely inconsistent with each other. And therein lies one of the greatest challenges which those people required to deal with consent, from a disinterested position, face: to find a way in which to reconcile a number of often divergent theories on consent, ranging from those addressing personal healing (if need be) to the legal attribution of culpability (if so required). Personal accounts of consent to sexual activity, thou

Of SlutWalks and Stereotypes

Delhi is apparently having a SlutWalk. A city which displays a tendency to treat all women as sluts, regardless of age, attire or figure is apparently having a SlutWalk. Unsurprisingly, the Walk has been at the receiving end of a great deal of flak whether it be from persons who can’t conceive of what would possess women to want to organise a SlutWalk to start off with, or from persons who are avowed feminists and think that a SlutWalk is inappropriate for India. The first question is, of course: Do we really need to reclaim the word ‘slut’ in the manner contemplated by a SlutWalk? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to the question. The attempted reclamation of the word could be deeply problematic, just as the attempted reclamation of the word ‘nigger’, attendant with all its historical and social implications, has been deeply problematic. That being said, the word ‘slut’ is an attention-grabber, particularly in a society which simply does not use the word ‘slut’ in polite conver