Fear and feminine lived experience: a phenomenological investigation of women’s fear of sexual violation and its effect on their lived experience.

Abstract

In this thesis, I conduct a phenomenological analysis of the feminine subject’s fear of sexual violation and its impact on her lived experience. The feminine subject is any subject deemed not masculine, and thus feminine, according to patriarchal social norms and values, and so includes, but is not limited to, cisgender women, transgender women, non-binary persons and homosexual men. In Chapter 1, I argue that feminine subjects are socialised into femininity, and this process of feminisation involves learning that they are vulnerable to sexual violation by masculine subjects and thus that they should fear them, Moreover, because their world is one inhabited and controlled by masculine subjects, the world itself is fearsome. In making this argument, I draw from the work of de Beauvoir, Bartky, Cahill, du Toit and Gqola. In Chapter 2, I develop a phenomenological framework which can be used to analyse emotions in general, and fear in particular. This framework is developed through a critical analysis of Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger and Sartre’s phenomenological theories of affectivity. In Chapter 3, I supplement the analysis of the phenomenological experience of fear conducted in Chapter 2 with an account of how fear is experienced as an embodied emotion. In doing so I draw from Merleau-Ponty and Young’s phenomenological theories of embodiment. Finally, in Chapter 4 I apply the framework developed across Chapters 2 and 3 and used to analyse the experience of fear in general to the feminine subject’s fear of sexual violation, informed by the analysis conducted in Chapter 1. I show through the analysis of the feminine subject’s fear of sexual violation that this fear negatively impacts her bodily comportment and spatiality and her perception and experience of the world. Moreover, I argue that this fear has socio-political implications and works to keep feminine subjects passive and submissive. Thus, the feminine subject’s fear of sexual violation negatively impacts her lived experience.