Sexual Ethics and Politics
My writing on sex and intimacy is grounded in the value of agency over our sexual lives, a commitment deeply rooted in feminist movements historically. Yet, moral philosophers tend to describe responsibility in sex based on sexual consent. I argue that consent is an inadequate proxy for agency for both phenomenological and political reasons. As phenomena, our feelings, desires, and will can be ambiguous, and sexual communication is nuanced and dynamic. Politically, sexual agency is often unjustly distributed, which distorts our moral perceptions. People often consent to sex out of embarrassment, a sense of obligation, or concern that refusal might jeopardize other interests. My research program articulates and remedies these limitations to consent-based sexual ethics.
John Stezaker, Pair XXVI, 2016
Publications on Sexual Ethics and Politics
“The Ethical Significance of Being an Erotic Object”
with Ellie Anderson, in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics, ed. David Boonin (Palgrave, 2022), 55–71
This chapter uses phenomenology to argue for a shift in how we theorize sexual ethics. Drawing on Beauvoir, the paper argues that agency and the will are shaped by being an erotic, bodily object for others, and this undermines prevalent assumptions about sexual consent and objectification. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. They must also grapple with how an unjust society distorts our sexual perception.
“Agency, Responsibility, and the Limits of Sexual Consent”
PhD Dissertation, Stony Brook University, 2020
My dissertation argues that moral obligation in sexual encounters is far more demanding than the commonly articulated duties to solicit consent and respect refusal: those duties follow from a more fundamental obligation to acknowledge and respond to the agency of another. I develop an expansive account of agency as socially situated, relational, and temporally extended across a person’s ongoing life projects. In a sexual encounter, we can signal our agency in expressions of consent and refusal, but we also do so in a wider range of communicative behaviors: utterances, glances, postures, and movements. Sexual ethics must attend to politics because pernicious social structures and unjust power relations distort the ability to recognize and adequately respond to the agency these behaviors express. The upshot is that ethically good sex requires more than the skills of interpreting the conditions of another’s consent: we need practices of hesitation, listening or asking questions, examining and communicating our own desires, and, most importantly, recognizing when intentions should be changed.
“Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics”
Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, no. 4 (2020): 463–482
While this article primary develops my research stream on Audre Lorde, it also presents an exploratory argument about agency and sexual consent. Lorde’s thought shows how, where daily life is shaped by oppressive social norms and discourses, agency in resistance to those norms requires continual reinvention of possibilities for relationship. After sketching the structure of Lorde’s oppositional agency, I argue that taking seriously such expansive conditions of agency poses a challenge to assumptions about the permission-giving moral power of sexual consent.