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This article traces the evolution of the feminist “sex wars” in contemporary debates about campus sexual violence reform in Canada and the United States – what Emily Bazelon calls the “return of the sex wars” at American colleges and universities. The "return of the sex wars" has been characterized by many of the same unproductive hostilities and painful acrimony as the original fight between feminist sex radicals and anti-pornography feminists over three decades ago. This article focuses on a particularly controversial issue in these debates: the role of consensual dispute resolution (i.e., negotiation, mediation, and restorative justice) in addressing campus sexual violence. Employing a two-person counter conversational methodology, the article stages a negotiation between two feminists with competing and representative views on this issue. Feminist concerns about consensual dispute resolution raise challenging questions about the rise of informal justice and its implications for the rule of law in campus sexual violence cases. The article concludes by arguing that the intense polarization and politicization of the "return of the sex wars" has led to a hollowing out of the feminist critical discourse in this area, which has prevented some feminists from engaging with consensual dispute resolution as a potentially viable and redemptive means of sexual regulation on campus.
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Negotiating Feminism traces the reflection of the feminist “sex wars” in contemporary debates about campus sexual violence reform in Canada and the United States – what Emily Bazelon has called the “return of the sex wars” on college and university campuses. Negotiating Feminism focuses on one issue in the return of the sex wars – the role of interests-based, consensual dispute resolution processes, including mediation and restorative justice, in changing the conditions that foster campus sexual violence on the ground. The political polarization of the return of the sex wars has prevented some colleges and universities from engaging with policy models that challenge the primacy of campus adjudication and other rights-based options. Complainants of campus sexual violence should be empowered to access any form of dispute resolution under law, whether rights-based or interests-based, that accords with their personal conception of justice. Empowering complainants in this way does not mean that colleges and universities should be willfully blind to the reality of substantive inequality that campus adjudication is intended to address. Yet acknowledging this reality should not require colleges and universities to essentialize about the nature of women’s injury or overdetermine the role of gendered power imbalances in producing the content of women’s interests in resolving their complaints otherwise. Feminist law and policymakers should negotiate between these competing imperatives and come together by instituting what Negotiating Feminism calls the “plural process” model of campus sexual violence reform. The plural process model recognizes that both rights-based and interests-based options can promote substantive equality for women and other historically marginalized groups – and it seeks to bring about that change.