RESEARCH | Madeleine Kenyon

Current Research (In-progress)

"Saying (True) Things About Sexual Consent" ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that within the current North American context, appropriately risk-averse sexual consent education often requires the use of Galilean idealizations – models which make use of deliberate distortions. However, unlike in other instances of idealization – for example, in physics and economics – idealizations of consent often cannot be revealed qua idealizations without undermining their intended educational value. This opacity, I ultimately suggest, is the result of both the immediacy with which many audiences of sexual education are likely to engage in sexual activities, and the minimal sexual “scaffolding” (Kukla 2025) currently available to young people to support their development of a nuanced sexual ethic.
"Unmaking The Rapist: Racism and obfuscation in operative concepts of violence" ABSTRACT: I offer an account of what are, I argue, seriously morally fraught concepts relating to sexualized violence, including rapist and criminal. I suggest that these concepts are inextricably intertwined with the ‘moral monsterhood’ (Jenkins 2017; Kenyon 2024; O’Hara 2012; Yap 2017) that ideologically attaches to perpetrators of sexual violence. These concepts – “implicit, hidden, and yet practiced,” to borrow Haslanger’s phrase (2005, p. 14) – create such a monolithic identity for perpetrators of sexualized violence that it becomes nearly impossible to make sense of the many instances of sexualized violence committed by complex people who are decent, even good, in some respects, while being terribly harmful in others. Understanding instances of sexualized violence through the caricaturized and distorted operative concepts of rapist and criminal makes violent sex more difficult to identify, and the experience of it harder to process, for victims, perpetrators, and onlooking communities alike, though the nature of the harms to each of these groups certainly varies. The racial, class, and gendered dimensions of these two operative concepts, I argue, more readily assimilate non-white men into moral monsterhood of perpetrators, especially Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic men in the North American context (Buiza 2019; Innes 2015; Melson-Silimon, Spivey, & Skinner-Dorkenoo 2024; Patton, & Snyder-Yuly 2007; Taylor, Guy-Walls, Wilkerson, & Addae 2019). These aspects of the rapist and criminal concepts make instances of violence especially intelligible to a dominant cultural perspective, and its associated entertainment and news media, when perpetrated by men whose bodies correspond with widespread stereotypes of ‘threat’ and ‘aggression’. My argument ultimately suggests that current usage of rapist and criminal often wrongs survivors of violence and perpetrators alike, and I close by gesturing at a possible way forward which better serves normative and pragmatic anti-violence ends.
“Abandoning the fraught concept of rapist"
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I argue that the concept of rapist is so worrisomely culturally and racially loaded that it ought not be reconfigured or ‘ameliorated’ (Haslanger 2000, 2006), as any revised concept(s) of rapist threatens to revive current racist and caricaturizing connotations of the label. In order to make my argument that the concept of rapist ought to be eliminated rather than re-engineered, I will use Joshua Habgood-Coote’s work (2019; 2022) on conceptual abandonment as linguistic resistance. In this work, Habgood-Coote notes that "we ought also to be interested in taking away conceptual tools from bad political projects, and in kinds of conceptual engineering that facilitate resistance to linguistic (and non-linguistic) oppression"(2022, pp. 489-490). Following Habgood-Coote’s argument (2019, p. 1034), I show that the concept of rapist is unnecessary, as it fails to add useful descriptive resources to our language, and is propaganda, since rapist is used to forward racist and oppressive stereotypes about sexualized violence, which uphold worrisome White supremacist and misogynistic ideology.

Published Research

“'Do you like that?' Demonstratives and unclarity in sexual communication,” https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/anae092, Analysis, July 2025.

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that use of demonstratives is indispensable for effective sexual communication, as demonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’ can sidestep complexities around distinguishing and naming acts during sex. However, in light of the baked-in unclarity of demonstratives, advocating for their continued use in sexual contexts yields the uncomfortable result that sexual communication can never be fully explicit. This is a real concern for the study of sexual ethics and consent, and an important starting point for further investigation into linguistic limitations of sexual consent

“Non-Ideal Theory and Critical Prison Studies” Co-authored with Dr. Andrea Pitts,
In Hilkje Charlotte Hänel & Johanna M. Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, 2025, New York, NY: Routledge.

ABSTRACT: This chapter explores approaches to critical prison studies through non-ideal methodologies, with an emphasis on the liberatory political potential for such research. It uses three approaches from a non-ideal perspective. The first section highlights the kinds of methodological practices that facilitate responsible critical prison scholarship, and we argue that such approaches largely begin from the experiential, existential, and phenomenological aspects of incarceration itself. Specifically, we discuss the methodological importance of prioritizing the first-person experiences of incarcerated peoples and their communities within critical prison scholarship. The second section surveys potential pedagogical practices that traverse barriers to the exploration and understanding of carceral experiences, including inside/outside curricula, letter-writing projects, art programming, and more general educational reforms that are proposed as potential sites for doing critical prison studies through a non-ideal lens as well. The third section then turns to what we describe as insurrectionist and abolitionist approaches to critical prison scholarship. We likewise explore the ways in which, as liberatory in their scope and content, insurrectionist and abolitionist approaches to critical prison studies operate on a different set of socio-political aims than the two previous methodologies explored.

“Speaking of ‘Violence’: Figleaf use in sexualized violence contexts”
https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqae047, The Philosophical Quarterly, October 2024.

ABSTRACT: In this project, I develop the concept of a sexualized violence figleaf, a speech mechanism often used in sexualized violence discourse to dismiss or characterize assault as some other kind of thing: a misunderstanding, a change of heart by the victim, a mischaracterization of the perpetrator, or any other number of things which are not rape, or violence. Sexualized violence figleaves are an extension of Jennifer Saul’s work on racial and gender figleaves, as the underlying mechanics of the utterance track those of Saul’s figleaves. In other words, I am developing a figleaf variant, showing that this conceptual tool is useful for analyzing utterances beyond racist, sexist, and conspiracist speech, upon which Saul focuses. Rather, bringing figleaves into the realm of sexualized violence discourse illuminates features of the discourse which are often obscured by the prevalence of strong social intuitions about rapists and their corresponding character.