Abstract

Political theorists are certainly familiar with violence, an ever-present spectre of disorder in every major text. And while The Republic raised the sex issue more than two millennia ago, it has taken considerable feminist effort in recent years to get this re-centred again so that it is not just an issue about women, but an issue debated and expanded from women's perspectives on power relations in social relationships. Today this covers critical engagement with the ways that sex itself is constructed as knowledge about anyone's body, the gendered hierarchies of power through which women and men are perceived and constrained, and the modes through which diverse sexualities are experienced within and projected upon the foregoing.