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OF ‘SLUTS’ AND ‘ARSEHOLES’: ANTAGONISTIC DESIRE AND THE
PRODUCTION OF SEXUAL VIGILANCE
Alexandra Fanghanel, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, 01582
743662* Alexandra.fanghanel@beds.ac.uk
Jason Lim, University of Brighton, Brighton, Jason.lim@brighton.ac.uk
*Corresponding Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments on an earlier
version of this paper.
KEY WORDS
Sexual Violence, Agonism , Safety
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines a contemporary antagonism in gendered safety discourses; the imperative
to be free in public space against the obligation to be safe and ‘properly’ feminine. We argue that
this produces (and is produced by) contemporary rape culture, which might be contested through
recourse to an agonistic ethic.
Using qualitative interview data we examine how participants contest victim-blaming discourses,
whilst simultaneously limiting how far they will accept the female body’s right to occupy public
space.
This paper has significant implications for approaching social justice, in particular justice for
women and their right to occupy public space.
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INTRODUCTION
Woman is present in cities as temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also
as virtuous woman in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation and
tribulation. (Wilson, 1991: 6)
Jill Meagher was raped and murdered on the streets of Melbourne, Australia on 21
st
September
2012. A few days later, once her body had been discovered and the events of the attack
ascertained through the piecing together of CCTV footage, a Reclaim the Night march took
place on the street where Meagher’s image was last captured. The case – from Meagher’s
disappearance to the detainment, trial and eventual incarceration of her assailant, Adrian Ernest
Bayley – received world-wide media attention and comment. Sasha Chambers, a woman in the
crowd outside the court when Bayley was sentenced, explained how these events affected her:
‘What occurred to Jill, I thought that could happen to anyone … I wear flat shoes, I
don't wear high heels, I make sure I'm in a group when I'm wearing them. I don't drink
alcohol anymore … It has impacted my life’ (cited in Independent [Ireland], 2013)
These events, and the relationships between them, capture a contemporary antagonism
concerning women’s bodies in public space that we interrogate in this paper: the tension
between the imperative to be free – to reclaim the night – and the obligation to be safe in public
spaces. We examine how this tension emerges through discourses of personal freedom and
personal responsibility. We also situate this antagonism within a public sphere of political
contestation characterised by an agonistic ethic. Within liberal democracies, at least, we
suggest that one strategy for feminist challenges to the proper constitution of femininity lies in
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bringing these antagonisms into the public political sphere – not for debate, but for a more
thorough transformation.
The attack of Jill Meagher confronts us with the actualisation of a number of rape myths; a
violent ‘stranger-rape’ and murder of a woman in a public space, who was walking home alone,
at night, after drinking some alcohol. We are then confronted by a feminist protest march about
women’s bodies which proclaims their right to occupy public space, to participate in its
production, to transform what public space does, and to transform power relations therein
(Lefebvre, 1996). However, in Chamber’s response, above, we are equally confronted by the
established tropes and techniques of safety that are addressed to women’s bodies in public
space (Gardner, 1990; Stanko, 1996; Brooks, 2011). These confrontations – as Elizabeth
Wilson (1991) suggests above – inherit a nineteenth-century construction of women’s bodies
in urban public space as a problem without an easy solution.
In this paper, we argue that the problematic body of the woman in public – too often
discursively framed through idealised figures (the temptress, the whore, the virtuous) – is
produced through various interlocking dispositifs
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that construct appropriate femininity,
anxiety about who has the right to occupy public space, and contemporary preoccupations with
security that become enforced through ‘sexual vigilance’. Sexual vigilance, we argue, is a mode
of ‘active subjectification’ which organises how female bodies should appear, occupy and
travel in public spaces (Foucault, 1982). The form of sexual vigilance which is produced
through these interlocking dispositifs is forged through discursive imperatives to be properly
feminine, to adhere to established gender norms, to protect and safeguard the self and
constructions of the self. Such sexual vigilance is, we suggest, one way in which the problem
of the female body in public space is discursively ‘solved’. The apparent antagonisms that
accompany discourses about Meagher’s death provide us with a lens through which to
interrogate the work that this dispositif does and to consider what might be possible if this
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antagonism was to be conceptualised otherwise. As public responses to the Meagher murder
demonstrate, one of the key ways in which control over women’s bodies operates is through
the mobilisation of the imperative for safety and avoidance of risk in public spaces. Here, these
imperatives emerge through the production and reproduction of the female body as out of place
in public space.
The virgin/whore dichotomy is a well-established and much-critiqued construct within
contemporary discourses about (in)appropriate femininity (Brownmiller, 1975; Smith, 2013).
However, the dispositifs that police femininity and that construct and sustain this construct are
themselves reliant on the continued proliferation of this binary for their constitution. Within
this feedback loop, the female body becomes a site of scrutiny; the locus upon which judgments
of appropriate femininity are made. In the aftermath of Meagher’s rape and murder, much was
made of what she was wearing and what she was doing prior to her attack. As CCTV film
footage of the night of the attack demonstrates, Meagher can be seen walking alone on the
pavement of a deserted street at 1.30am
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. In numerous news articles and online commentary,
we are told she was on her way home; we are told she had been out drinking. We are also told
she was married, professionally successful, young and beautiful. Meagher’s decision to walk
alone, in high heels, late at night and after drinking alcohol were strongly scrutinised by some
members of the public posting comments on social network sites (Ford, 2012; Stockwell,
2012). Through discourses of the ideal victim (Christie, 1986; Walklate, 2011), the incident of
the rape and murder comes to serve as an allegory for other women about the importance of
avoiding risk, of staying safe and of taking measures to secure their safety. Yet both the
discourses about how women secure their safety in public space and the scrutiny of Meagher’s
body and performance were also accompanied by counter discourses which pointed to
Meagher’s ‘right’ to occupy public space at night – to dress and act freely in public. Indeed,
the decision to hold a protest march on the site of her disappearance was intended to contest