Many Mornings After: Campus Sexual Assault and Feminist Politics

• Author: Janice Haaken
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12227
• Published date: 01 February 2017
• Date: 01 February 2017

J H Portland State University

Many Mornings After: Campus Sexual Assault

and Feminist Politics

In 1994, the feminist journalist Katie Roiphe

published a book titled The Morning After in

which she argues that the women’s movement

had become obsessed with victimization. With

many of her case examples centered on campus

sexual politics, Roiphe laments college women’s

demands for the very forms of patriarchal pro-

tections that second-wave feminists fought to

overturn. In the two decades since the pub-

lication of this book, campus activists have

gained considerable ground in bringing sexual

assault into public awareness, insisting (contra

Roiphe) that victims have been all too silent.

This article presents an appraisal of this his-

torical legacy and draws out key lessons to be

learned from the history of feminist organiz-

ing around sexual assault on campuses. The

author explains how radical, liberal, and social-

ist feminist politics offer different lenses for

framing sexual assault and discusses the value

of a psychoanalytic feminist optics for think-

ing through dilemmas at the level of political

practice.

In her 1994 polemic on campus sexual poli-

tics, the journalist Katie Roiphe reected on

the decade following second-wavefeminism and

argued that college-aged women had become

obsessed with victimization. Provocativelytitled

Department of Psychology, 317 Cramer Hall, Portland

State University, PO Box 751, Portland, OR 97207-0751

(haakenj@pdx.edu).

Key Words: Campus sexual assault, date rape, psychoana-

lytic feminism, sexual politics, socialist feminist politics.

The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism

on Campus, the book claimed that young fem-

inists were inadvertently reinforcing the very

patriarchal protections that second-wave femi-

nists fought to overturn. The picture she drew

is one of pitched anxiety and collective hyste-

ria. Although she acknowledged how the broad-

ening of what constituted rape sensitized young

women to everyday forms of sexism, she argued

that this category expansion also resulted in

a heightened sense of perceived dangers and

female vulnerability. In the two decades since

the publication of this controversial book, cam-

pus activists have gained considerable ground in

bringing sexual assault into public awareness.

Activists suggest that the collective afiction

young women have suffered is better described

as denial rather than hysteria, that rather than

self-righteous outrage, women have been far too

silent.

In this article, I look back on the legacy

of feminist sexual politics and draw out some

lessons to be learned from the heated cam-

paigns around campus sexual assault, focusing

specically on their narrative strategies. Much

of my work as a scholar centers on the role

of storytelling in feminist politics and dilem-

mas that arise when enlisting conventional

cultural scripts to subvert the patriarchal social

order (Haaken, 1998; Haaken & Palmer, 2012;

Haaken & O’Neill, 2014). I have been interested

in how feminist campaigns carry surplus social

symbolic loadings and how morally charged

issues around sexuality invoke less readily

articulated grievances. Traditions of feminist

theory approach the problem of sexual assault

Family Relations 66 (February 2017): 17–28 17

DOI:10.1111/fare.12227