Abstract

Feminist and queer theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have given analyses of sexual violence and of sexually violent pornography that are generally taken to be in striking opposition to those defended by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon. In this commentary on Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, I suggest that these seemingly divergent analyses of sexual violence are more similar than they have appeared to be and I ask: Might this book help to bring an end to the so-called ‘sex wars’ between the Foucauldians and the MacKinnonites that have been raging since the mid-1980s?