030332 SE Sexuality and Freedom (2026S)

Our memory of the strangely remote age of sexual revolution or liberation is overshadowed by the sexual oppression and exploitation of women. It seems as though, in one way or another, women had been at the receiving end of the emancipation from traditional sexual morals. This explains why feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin or Catharine MacKinnon, took issue with pornography and prostitution as practices that are essential to sustaining female subjugation. Their perspective suggested, strongly, that sexual oppression is political and that, conversely, political oppression is sexual (not merely ‘sexualized’ post factum, but inherently so). While MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s perspective, again, appear somewhat prudish in retrospect, the trias of sexuality, freedom and politics suggests that feminist theory has much to offer to political philosophy. Against this background, the seminar would like to peruse and to engage with two more recent feminist contributions to the topic: Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex and Manon Garcia’s The Joy of Consent. The latter work seems to suggest—in what must amount to a remarkable reversal of sexual liberation—that sex is not the valve of liberation, but that freedom is the stepping stone of good sex.