Gender and Cultural Studies

2026 Paul Priday Annual Lecture

Rethinking Sexual Economy

Professor Melinda Cooper (Australian National University)

Friday, 25 September | 5:30pm doors for 5:45pm start

The persistence of sexual violence against women, both in and outside the home, confounds expectations of political progress. Sexual assault statistics reproduce themselves with law-like regularity, in spite of every advance in women’s economic and political freedoms, while annual tabulations of women murdered by their partners appear as shockingly archaic, yet somehow entirely predictable. The fear of sexual violence continues to shape women’s experience of public and private space in ways that are both pervasive and taken for granted. To make any sense of this inertia, we need to assume the existence of a shadow economy of sexual property interests that continue to be enforced despite their absence from the formal text of the law.

In common law countries such as Australia, this regime of sexual property interests enjoyed formal recognition up until the late nineteenth century. Under so-called seduction and criminal conversation laws, husbands and fathers could pursue tort actions against anyone who infringed on their property interests in the sexual and reproductive services of wives and daughters. These rights were one dimension of the law of coverture, the doctrine according to which a woman’s legal existence was subsumed under that of her husband upon marriage. Yet while the Married Women’s Property Rights Acts of the mid-nineteenth century are commonly thought to mark the end of this doctrine, in reality, coverture’s regime of specifically sexual rights endured much longer. Indeed, coverture’s last legal redoubt—the idea that married women, on the one hand, and sex workers, on the other, could not be raped—survived up until the last decades of the twentieth century. 

Taking my cue from this history, this paper seeks to explain how property interests that are no longer recognized in law may still be priced into heterosexual relations, only becoming explicit when the prevailing hierarchy between men and women is disturbed in some way. The paper proposes a unified systems model of patriarchy and capitalism which posits the private sexual economy of heterosexual relations as continuous but not homologous with the formal economy of market exchange and paid labour. This model makes it possible to understand how women’s gains in one sphere may be purchased at the expense of freedoms in another; or why the threat of sexual violence might be wielded as a literal payback for men’s declining economic status. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Melinda Cooper is a social and political theorist whose work focuses on the recent history of capitalism and its intersections with the politics of class, gender and race.

Please join us for refreshments after the lecture.

ABOUT THE PAUL PRIDAY ANNUAL LECTURE
The Paul Priday Lecture is the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies’ annual public lecture. It was established through a generous donation from the late Dr Paul Priday whose PhD was supervised by the late Professor Elspeth Probyn.


Image: Ethan Gregory Dodge