MixedNew Left ReviewThe first, third and fifth chapters are diligently researched, expertly synthesized accounts of the events, theories and materials which have formed the primary interests of much of the last decade’s popular feminist writing on sexual power and consent ... Srinivasan’s great strength is to condense and arrange these arguments in ways that make their juxtaposing assumptions evident, to highlight particularly the tensions between calls for the regulation of sex, the punishment of sexual violence and the harmful social consequences of carceral legal systems ... She risks assuming that there is such a thing as sex devoid of power. But even outside the rigid hierarchies of institutional pedagogy, do we not imbue those we desire with a form of power over us? ... Srinivasan compares the misidentification of sexual desire for the teacher to Adrienne Rich’s theory of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’...Srinivasan’s inversion does the opposite, and discredits (mostly straight) sexual desire – because it is the wrong type – as an errant act of transference. Where Rich aims to add to the volume of desire visible in society, Srinivasan tries to detract from it ... Srinivasan’s book...generalises outwards from the university to diagnose morbid symptoms in a culture that is not bound by the para-legal ethical frameworks of the campus ... The methodology on which Srinivasan’s insights are based is often dubious: why should the opinions of a group of Oxford students, self-selectively interested already in feminism, be taken as representative of the mores of the general young adult population?
Amia Srinivasan
MixedThe New Left ReviewThese essays provide a useful introduction to contemporary feminism, its permutations and positions, for those who may, somehow, have missed the debate ... Srinivasan’s great strength is to condense and arrange these arguments in ways that make their juxtaposing assumptions evident, to highlight particularly the tensions between calls for the regulation of sex, the punishment of sexual violence and the harmful social consequences of carceral legal systems ... Sexual authority ought, in this model, to rest with the individual subject, their freedom realised by thinking and imagining outside the set of social practices within which they have been raised. As a conception of freedom, this is high liberalism, offering up in place of social power the utopia of the blank slate, the unquestionable priority of autonomy ... The risks of this manoeuvre are evident in Srinivasan’s book, which generalises outwards from the university to diagnose morbid symptoms in a culture that is not bound by the para-legal ethical frameworks of the campus...The methodology on which Srinivasan’s insights are based is often dubious: why should the opinions of a group of Oxford students, self-selectively interested already in feminism, be taken as representative of the mores of the general young adult population?
