Lerum And Dworkin's Essay

Improved Essays
Sexual Agency is not a Problem of Neoliberalism: Feminism, Sexual Justice, & the Carceral Turn is an essay written by Kari Lerum and Shari Dworkin in response to Bay-Cheng 's production of the Agency Line. Within their essay they critique the limitations and presumptions that Bay-Cheng makes in their own work, and suggest routes of deeper examination and possibility towards a more inclusive ideology. I will first summarize Lerum and Dworkin 's essay, and then position myself in dialogue with them in order to expand upon these limitations and possibilities in the hopes to showcase the room for voices that might otherwise be erased by dominant narratives. Lerum & Dworkin contest the agency line on three different aspects. They state in their abstract, “while we find the model interesting and …show more content…
Lerum and Dworkin (2015) pinpoint that “Nowhere is there any mention of how the Agency Line might differentially impact individuals in the U.S. who are born into and/or identify with the female sex category across a range of gender and sexual identities (e.g., cisgender, lesbian, bisexual, femme, butch, transfeminine, genderqueer or transmasculine individuals). In a paper attempting to create and model of young women 's sexuality in the the contemporary United States, the omission of gender and sexual diversity alone is striking, especially given existing critiques of GLBTQ absence from mainstream feminist psychology theories” (p. 327). I personally feel that a discussion about sexual agency that does not acknowledge those who fall outside of the cisgendered, heterosexual sphere is almost not worth having. Particularly because the sociological pressures and normalization ideologies that queer folk encounter on a day to day basis are dramatically different from those faced by able-bodied, cis-gendered and sexed, usually white

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