Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis

285 Pages·2018·4.867 MB·English

by  Chloë Taylor

Foucault, Feminism and Sex
Crimes
Taylor’s powerful scholarly intervention uses Foucault’s work—
while being critical of it—to problematize feminist conceptions of
the relation between sex and justice and promises to be a landmark
work in the debates around Foucault’s relation to feminism.
—Mark G. E. Kelly, Western Sydney University
Chloë Taylor has written an exciting critique of feminism’s responses
to sex crimes. Even in the face of atrocious sexual violence, the usual
calls for more police, harsher sentences, and sustained mass impris-
onment are thoroughly mistaken. Instead, Taylor demonstrates that
we need to respond without criminalizing or pathologizing sex of-
fenders, and gives concrete examples how we can so.
—Frieder Vogelmann, University of Bremen
This book brings together Foucault’s writings on crime and delin-
quency, on the one hand, and sexuality, on the other, to argue for an
anti-carceral feminist Foucauldian approach to sex crimes. The author
expands on Foucault’s writings through intersectional explorations of
the critical race, decolonial, critical disability, queer and critical trans
studies literatures on the prison that have emerged since the publication
of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
Drawing on Foucault’s insights from his genealogical period, this
book argues that those labeled as sex offenders will today be constructed
to reoffend twice over, once in virtue of the delinquency with which
they are inculcated through criminological discourses and in the crim-
inal punishment system, and second in virtue of the manners in which
their sexual offense is taken up as an identity through psychological and
sexological discourses. This book includes a discussion of nonretributive
responses to crime, including preventative, redistributive, restorative and
transformative justice. It concludes with two appendixes: the original
nineteenth-century medico-legal report on Charles Jouy and its English
translation by the author.
Foucault, Feminism and Sex Crimes will be of interest to feminist
philosophers, Continental philosophers, Women’s and Gender Studies
scholars, social and political theorists, as well as social scientists and
social justice activists.
Chloë Taylor is an Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the author of The Routledge
Guidebook to Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (Routledge 2017)
and The Culture of Confession from Augustine to Foucault: A Geneal-
ogy of the ‘Confessing Animal’ (Routledge 2009). She is also the coed-
itor of Feminist Philosophies of Life (2016) and Asian Perspectives on
Animal Ethics: Rethinking the Nonhuman (Routledge 2014).
Foucault, Feminism and
Sex Crimes
An Anti-Carceral Analysis
Chloë Taylor
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
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© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Chloë Taylor to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taylor, Chloèe, 1976– author.
Title: Foucault, feminism, and sex crimes : an anti-carceral
analysis / by Chloèe Taylor.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Taylor & Francis, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031820 | ISBN 9781138367319 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984. | Feminism. |
Sex crimes.
Classification: LCC B2430.F724 T39 2018 | DDC 194—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031820
ISBN: 978-1-138-36731-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42986-6 (ebk)
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Producing Recidivism 1
A Feminist-Foucauldian Approach to Sex Crimes 11
PART I
“Bucolic Pleasures”? Feminist Readings of Foucault 23
1 The Case of Charles Jouy and Sophie Adam 25
The “Simple-Minded” Farmhand 25
Feminist Responses to the Jouy-Adam Case 31
2 Revising Sex Crime Law 43
Foucault on Sex Crime Legislation Reform 43
Feminist Responses to Foucault’s Proposals for
Legislative Reform 53
3 Infamous Men and Dangerous Individuals 59
Infamous Men 59
Dangerous Individuals 64
Pierre Rivière 67
Conclusions 72
PART II
Disciplining and Punishing Sex Offenders 75
4 Feminism, Crime and Punishment 77
Sex Crimes, History and the Politics of Sexual Trauma 77
viii Contents
Carceral Feminism 94
Prisons and Sexual Violence 108
5 Foucault’s Prison Abolitionism 115
Foucault’s Genealogy of the Prison 115
“Complete and Austere Institutions,”
40 Years Later 124
6 Criminal Queers 135
Grotesque Power 135
Vile Sovereignty and the Administrative Grotesque 142
Vile Police, Grotesque Correctional Officers 149
Conclusions 152
PART III
Perverse Implantations 153
7 The Perverse Implantation and Sex Work 155
The Perverse Implantation 155
Commercial Sex and the Construction of Identities 162
Problematizing Sex Work 170
A Foucauldian Approach to Sex Work 173
8 Zoosexuality and Interspecies Sexual Assault 175
From Bestiality to Zoosexuality 175
Queer and Posthumanist Defenses of
Zoosexuality 182
The Demographics of Zoosexuality: Why is the Zoo Full
of White Men? 189
Resisting the Perverse Implantation and
Retributive Justice 196
9 The Social Construction of the Serial Sex Killer 199
Toward a Genealogy of Sexual Murder 199
Inventing the Serial Killer 205
Conclusions 212
Conclusion: Transforming Justice 217
Preventative Justice 217
Redistributive Justice 219
Contents ix
Restorative Justice 220
Transformative Justice 230
Summing Up 235
Appendix 1: Rapport Médico-Légal sur l’état mental
de Charles-Joseph Jouy 237
Appendix 2: Medical Legal Report on the Mental State
of Charles-Joseph Jouy 246
References 255
Index 269