Frances’ earrings: or, responding to everyday heterosexual domination

Abstract

Women practise agency even under circumstances of heterosexual domination, but the meanings of such practices are not always clear. Specifically, what do women's denials that they have been victims, despite sexual mistreatment, tell us about their experience of embodied power? A phenomenological approach to women's responses to their experiences of ‘grey sex’ expands our possible interpretations of the relationship between agency and victimisation. Such an approach highlights a specific power dynamic that often plays out in grey sex: a kind of domination in which the man treats the woman as if she were not a distinct subject but an extension or appendage of his own subjectivity. In response to such treatment, women's denials of victimisation may be tantamount to the assertion, ‘I am still a person’, which in turn may be a kind of testimony. The implied content of that testimony may include a rejection of the dominator's interpellation of her; a rejection of the social meanings of being dominated; the unavailability of the discourse of victimhood to many women; and an experience of subjectivity that exceeds the ideal of the sovereign subject.