This paper considers the relationship between institutions and the “sexual imaginary,” understood as the set of affective and imaginative resources that produce certain forms of sexual subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Moira Gatens, I argue that institutions play an important role in shaping sexual imaginaries. Historically, institutions have been sites in which unjust sexual norms have been reinforced and legitimized. I analyse the growing trend of consent education at Australian universities to explore how institutions may also (...) represent potential sites for contesting and reimagining these norms. Feminist critiques of consent suggest that consent education may in fact reproduce a narrow and conservative vision of sexuality, one that aligns with the neoliberal politics of the contemporary university. This paper contributes to these critiques by exploring how both the neoliberal university and consent theory are premised on a distorted vision of the subject as a rational, disembodied being. I argue that transforming dominant sexual imaginaries requires recognizing and interrogating both how desire permeates institutional spaces and the role of desire in ethical sexual relations. (shrink)

The idea that social and political institutions can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just city-state i...

As contemporary universities become increasingly deregulated and neoliberalised structures, how is grassroots student political organising to adapt? What role could student organisers, working in coalition with academics, unions and communities, play in shaping the Future University? We argue that student organising has an even more crucial place in the site of the neoliberal university, working against both the corporatisation of the contemporary university, as well as rising neoliberal conditions in the broader communities within which tertiary education is embedded. These conditions, (...) without doubt, have the potential to stultify student movements by burdening students with ever-increasing debt, and packaging degrees as a commodity with a market-determined value. However, we argue, the neoliberalisation of education also engenders an opportunity for students in shaping the Future University, through grassroots advocacy for staff working conditions, and for critical pedagogies that enable the integration of transformative social justice movements with academic theory. For us, the Future University is a space that nourishes critical and creative thinking, and produces students that are able to integrate theory with radical praxis. However, for this to be realised, the ideological function of the university, in justifying and naturalising hegemonic power structures, and the very meaning of public education, must be exposed and critiqued from the ground up. (shrink)