Philosophy & Literature (370-0-20)
Topic
#MeToo Trials: Consent, Doubt and Punishment in La
Instructors
Micol Maddalena Bez
Meeting Info
Online: Mon, Wed, Fri 2:00PM - 4:30PM
Overview of class
What does the law have to do, if anything, with justice and truth? Does its purpose lay in establishing true facts and punishing individuals accordingly (whatever that may mean), or in creating a more just society? And what about epistemic injustice —i.e. injustice committed against somebody precisely with regard to their capacity to say the truth?
In this seminar, we will situate these large questions by looking at a specific, if still precarious, canon: that of the literary occurrences of trials for sexual violence. As feminist legal scholar Aviva Orenstein argued, trials serve a pedagogical function: "part melodrama, part morality play, and, for the layperson, part inscrutable lawyer talk, recent rape trials have introduced serious questions into public discourse about the legal process, rape law, and […] how and when we know things to be true." Now, in the aftermath of the #metoo and of its journalistic and literary reverberations, we come to raise some questions about the role that literature plays in the mediation of the trial's pedagogical function: does literature, and specifically literary trials (within and without the walls of the tribunal), teach us something about our collective relationship to consent and sexual violence, but also to accusations, testimonies, character evidence, reasonable doubt, prejudice and punishment?
By carefully reading theorists and philosophers alongside a selection of literary works, the class will explore four main theoretical knots: (1) the complicated relationship between law and justice, especially with regards to the question of intimate violations; (2) the problems of testimony, confession and prejudice; (3) the problem of epistemic partiality and loyalty towards our family and loved ones; (4) the interrelated problems of doubt and punishment, and truth and reconciliation.
I think of this class as an occasion for thinking in community and solidarity around some thorny contemporary problems of sexual ethics, legal and political philosophy. These are, of course, serious topics, but we will approach them through nice movies (some as pop as Promising young woman and Girls, season 6 episode 3, "American Bitch", some more serious like the French film The accusation) and works of literature. I will tinker with the syllabus a bit more, based on our initial discussion of your preferences and collective interests in the first class meeting, but this is the list of fundamental texts that we will be choosing from (obviously, for the books, we are talking about selected passages):
Christoph Menke, Critique of Right
Amia Srinivasan, The right to Sex and "Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism"
Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: how the law creates wealth and inequality
Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice
Linda M. Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.
Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden
Camille Kouchner, The Familia Grande
Ruth W. Gilmore, Golden Gulag and/or Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Sara Ahmed, Complaint!
Patricia Lockwood, "Rape Joke,"
Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa
Sarah Deer, "Decolonizing Rape Law: A Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty", January 2009, 24/2."No Bad Men! A Feminist Analysis of Character Evidence in Rape Trials
"No Bad Men! A Feminist Analysis of Character Evidence in Rape Trials."
For the validation, I will accept argumentative philosophical essays, personal reflections and creative compositions, as well as alternative non-written projects (videos, podcasts, visual projects, plays etc.). I want this to be a place of personal expression and collective intelligence.