RESEARCH | Madeleine Kenyon

Current Research (In-progress)

“Abandoning the fraught concept of rapist"
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I offer an account of what I argue is the predominant concept of rapist, according to which being a rapist is inextricably intertwined with being a more general ‘moral monster’ (Jenkins 2017; Kenyon 2024; O’Hara 2012; Yap 2017). Understanding instances of rape and other sexualized violence through the caricaturized concept of rapist makes violent sex often unintelligible for victims, perpetrators, and onlooking communities alike, though the nature of the harms to each of these groups certainly varies. I proceed to 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.

“Incarceration and Vulnerability: Exploring (il)legitimate domains of domination"
ABSTRACT: Incarceration – the long-term confinement of an individual, usually in a correctional facility – is increasingly a topic of controversy among those concerned with public safety and the promotion of social good. The discourse surrounding the ethics of incarceration takes up questions like, “What treatment of wrongdoers is most likely to improve overall levels of public safety?” and “What kind of treatment of wrongdoers is morally acceptable in redressing harms to others?”. More and more, empirically-informed (Q1) and normative (Q2) responses to these questions suggest that the multiplicity of harms done to those incarcerated qua incarcerated is ethically impermissible. These critiques of incarceration as a socio-judicial practice often raise concerns about the vulnerability of the incarcerated, both outside and inside the confines of detention centres. In this paper, I marry these two discussions of i) the ethics of incarceration and ii) the relationship between vulnerability and autonomy. I use Joel Anderson’s work on “surplus vulnerability” and Catriona Mackenzie’s work on “pathogenic vulnerability” to articulate one meaningful source of the wrongness of incarceration: that it reliably negatively impacts offenders’ autonomy in domains which are not the legitimate focuses of detention. Even if, within a carceral framework, incarceration can permissibly impede autonomy of offenders in certain ways, current carceral practices regularly go far beyond this permissible threshold, making offenders excessively and unjustly vulnerable.

Published Research

“'Do You Like That?': Demonstratives and unclarity in sexual communication,” Forthcoming in Analysis.

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, 2024, 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.