El jueves, 18 de marzo, a las 12:30, en la Sala de Grados de Psicología, tendrá lugar otra sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. En esta ocasión nos acompañará Maddy Kenyon, University of Waterloo (Canadá). Más abajo tenéis el título y el resumen de su charla, así como una breve nota sobre la trayectoria de Maddy.
Title: Unmaking The Rapist: Racism and obfuscation in operative concepts of violence
Abstract: I offer an account of what are, I argue, seriously morally fraught concepts relating to sexualized violence, including rapist and criminal. I suggest that these concepts are inextricably intertwined with the ‘moral monsterhood’ (Jenkins 2017; Kenyon 2024; O’Hara 2012; Yap 2017) that ideologically attaches to perpetrators of sexual violence. These concepts – «implicit, hidden, and yet practiced,» to borrow Haslanger’s phrase (2005, p. 14) – create such a monolithic identity for perpetrators of sexualized violence that it becomes nearly impossible to make sense of the many instances of sexualized violence committed by complex people who are decent, even good, in some respects, while being terribly harmful in others. Understanding instances of sexualized violence through the caricaturized and distorted operative concepts of rapist and criminal makes violent sex more difficult to identify, and the experience of it harder to process, for victims, perpetrators, and onlooking communities alike, though the nature of the harms to each of these groups certainly varies.
The racial, class, and gendered dimensions of these two operative concepts, I argue, more readily assimilate non-white men into moral monsterhood of perpetrators, especially Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic men in the North American context (Buiza 2019; Innes 2015; Melson-Silimon, Spivey, & Skinner-Dorkenoo 2024; Patton, & Snyder-Yuly 2007; Taylor, Guy-Walls, Wilkerson, & Addae 2019). These aspects of the rapist and criminal concepts make instances of violence especially intelligible to a dominant cultural perspective, and its associated entertainment and news media, when perpetrated by men whose bodies correspond with widespread stereotypes of ‘threat’ and ‘aggression’. My argument ultimately suggests that current usage of rapist and criminal often wrongs survivors of violence and perpetrators alike, and I close by gesturing at a possible way forward which better serves normative and pragmatic anti-violence ends.
Bio: Madeleine Kenyon Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Philosophy at the University of Waterloo. Her main areas of research are feminist philosophy of language, social epistemology, applied ethics, and critical prison studies.