Lighting a Spark, Playing with Fire: Feminism, Emotions, and the Legal Imagination of Campus Sexual Violence

Abstract

Feminist law and policymakers have been inspired by collectively generated experiences of emotion that help to shape what counts as justice and injustice in campus sexual violence cases. Focusing on events surrounding the Dalhousie University Faculty of Dentistry in 2014–2015, this article explains how emotional incitements in the case contributed to an infrastructure that supported formal and specifically carceral responses to campus sexual violence. Correspondingly, this article explains why alternative modes of legal and political formation that challenged the premises of the formal law, including restorative justice, were misread by some commentators as a form of “weak justice” and therefore outside the bounds of feminist action. The central claim of the article is not that particular emotional reactions are right or wrong, but that feminist law and policymakers should reflect on and assess their political force. Considering the ways that emotions are mobilized reveals the benefits and drawbacks of engaging with law in ways that feel emotionally gratifying and therefore politically necessary, but which can lead to harmful consequences that contradict feminist goals.

Keywords: Feminist Legal Theory, Restorative Justice, Campus Sexual Violence, Law and Emotions, Carceral Feminism,