What Sexual Ethics Can Learn From the Queer Community with Yana Stoykova
As part of our LGBTQ+ History Month campaign, we caught up with DPhil candidate Yana Stoykova to hear about her current research and how it relates to Queer academia.
What does your research output explore in a way that contributes to Queer academic discourse?
My research explores the role of the queer community in sexual ethics. In modern Western history, this role has been marginal, marginalized. Sex between two men, for instance, has been branded as morally reprehensible in the same way as extramarital sex or bestiality. According to a popular myth about Queen Victoria, sex between two women was thought of as impossible. With the advancement of liberal thought, the language has shifted - if two adults do something willingly together and are in their right minds, what they do is permissible regardless of their genders. This is the logic of consent. However, the consent discourse has recently being problematized by feminists.
If the patriarchy, the system of male domination, constructs women as passive participants in sex and men as the initiators, as active; if men's superiority is established through the sexual subjugation of women and therefore this subjugation is crucial to the maintenance of the patriarchy; if women's preferences and desires are shaped by media, which often depicts acts of refusal as indicative of willingness; if being heterosexual is an imperative to being a good representative of the kind woman - then can we really say that women enter sexual relations with men freely and willingly? What is the force of women's consent under patriarchy? These questions have animated and indeed dominated the literature on consent and sexual ethics in the last 20-30 years, in various disciplines - moral and political philosophy, legal theory, feminist theory.
However, in building a body of literature that serves as canon, which has as its starting point the problem of women's consent in heterosexual relations, the queer perspective fades out. My mission is to not only bring it back, but to position it front and centre. If the main problem in sexual ethics is that a gendered power imbalance weakens the power of one's autonomy, then what about relationships with two men or two women, or two people who are neither/in between/ have the lived experience of both? I explore and defend the position that the queer life does offer a refuge from the patriarchy and in fact can serve as the model for ethical conduct. The contribution of my work to Queer academic discourse is then to “queer[YS1] ” academic discourse – to dethrone the heterosexual heteronormative model as starting point and ideal; and replace it with a queer one. Hence the title of my thesis, "Queering Consent".
How does it build upon LGBTQ+ history, particularly academic history?
My research builds upon LGBTQ+ academic history in what some might find to be a rather niche and mundane way. Questions about the relationship between sexuality/sexual orientation/queerness, on the one hand, and power and politics on the other, have been historically addressed in academia in the discipline of Queer Theory. Queer Theory, of course, proudly and deliberately avoids categorisation. Despite that, it is undeniably rooted in the methodologies of literary theory, psychoanalysis and critical theory, to name a few. This invites criticism from academic disciplines that take themselves very seriously, such as philosophy, to reject Queer Theory as [real, legitimate, serious, worth-pursuing, valuable] philosophy. Disheartened by such backlash, many LGBTQ+ scholars retreat in the disciplines that do welcome them.
However, I think this is a shame. Analytic philosophy – often perceived as the "real" or "legitimate" kind of philosophy - has a lot to offer us, chiefly in the form of its rich and rigorous methodology which leaves no stone unturned, even if it is nit-picky and and a bit too obsessed with logical coherence. Achieving precise understanding of a phenomenon at hand allows us to better theorise how to handle it. Yet applying the analytic method to questions specifically about sexual orientation has not been undertaken a lot. Thus, my work builds upon LGBTQ+ academic history by taking insights we've gained through disciplines such as Queer Theory, and applying them to debates in analytic philosophy. It is thus supposed to further the nascent discipline of queer philosophy, and queer political philosophy specifically.
Why is this topic important for you to research as a member of DPIR at Oxford?
Aside from why sexual ethics is an important topic to research in itself given the magnitude of sexual violence that happens in the world, there is a further reason why the study of this topic particularly from an institution like the DPIR, at the University of Oxford, and particularly from the lens of queering, is vital. My research engages with the dominant position in sexual ethics, the so-called "liberal orthodoxy", and tries to confront it with notions from Feminist Theory and queer practice. By now it is not controversial in the field to assert that this mainstream position has been averse to taking on board the suggestions of feminists. It is written in a way that can read as sneering on such “fringe” ways of doing theory. This is a matter of what is taken as academic authority.
Philosophy has tacitly (or explicitly) favoured the position "from above": the fictional positionality of the unaffected observer who is supposedly best able to write objectively. Of course, this position coincides with privilege. Yet knowledge produced from the position of privilege is biased at best and, fundamentally flawed at worst. For this reason, it is imperative that marginal epistemologies be given the opportunity to interact with, and hopefully productively displace, the status quo. The DPIR's status as one of the best institutions for the study of politics is an excellent place to be doing such subversive research. It gives me access to rub shoulders with my interlocutors, who have historically also come from similar, if not the same, institutions. It is easier to debate with someone if you are both on equal ground.
To find out more about Yana and her work, you can refer to her DPIR profile page here. For further information on LGBTQ+ History Month at DPIR this year, please see our launch article.
