Violence

The relationship between violence and sexuality is fundamental. Historically, violence is a core way of understanding the context and meaning of sexual practices. While violence and its presence and/or absence inform questions of consent, it nonetheless inhabits a somewhat ambivalent position in the history of sexuality. Discussions of violence often become polarized by the victim–oppressor binary, which eludes a concrete structural analysis of larger forces of power at play in how and why individuals engage in violence as a form of sexual practice and expression of desire. For when violence is used as a tool of pleasure or its extremely invasive opposite—unwanted sexual contact and physical suffering—both result in the destruction or making of the subject—two radically different outcomes of the same process. Often a means of social differentiation, acts of violence in a sexual context are always acts of power. In this sense, one person’s pleasure reaped from an act of violence can be another’s personal violation. And this is where the thorny issue of consent arises. Adrienne Davis states that consent is a major part of feminism’s regulatory discourse of gender and sexuality because it does not fully account for queer sexuality-based anti-subordination projects, including skepticism about the power feminists attribute to sex.¹ But the converse, which would be to theorize and historicize sexual interactions as always already traumatic, does not capture the full scope of violence’s impact on sexuality either. And while this entry on violence and its relationship to sexuality is indeed written from a feminist perspective, it does not mean that consent is the only or over-determining factor for discerning sexual practices derived from or resulting in violence. Instead, the chapter takes a historical approach to the intersection of violence and sexuality, suggesting that the forms and practices have changed over time.