LOOKING BACKWARD: BARNARD AND ITS LEGACIES

摘要

On April 24, 1982 the IX Scholar and the Feminist Conference: Towards a Politics of Sexuality was held at Barnard College in New York City. The conference was organized by a diverse, interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars, both faculty and graduate students, who wanted to broaden and complicate feminist thought about female sexuality. Conference organizers argued that since the mid-1970s feminist work on sexuality had been increasingly dominated by feminist critiques that focused almost exclusively on the relationship between sexual danger, male aggression, and violence against women. They wanted to move beyond what they viewed as a limited analysis of sexuality and power, which more often than not, conflated sex with violence and relegated women to the status of sexual victim, thus constraining the kinds of questions that were asked and the types of theories that were produced. Feminism's preoccupation with sexual harm and danger, organizers contended, made it difficult for many women to speak openly about, as well as theorize, the complex relationship between sexual pleasure, choice, autonomy, and desire. Their goal for the conference was to develop a more nuanced and theoretically useful framework for thinking about sexuality in all its complexity, as both danger and pleasure. What might a version of feminist sexual politics divorced from moral prescriptions and the labels "good" and "bad" look like?