Sticky Work: "Good" Feminist Subjects and their "Survivor-Led" Politics

Increasingly, sexual violence scholarship, activism and sector-work emphasises the importance of "survivor-led" or survivor-centred responses to sexual violence. Such responses have emerged as a necessary correction to the historical and ongoing exclusion and silencing of survivor's voices, and to redress the attendant harms caused to many survivors as a result.

However, important questions remain regarding which survivors are able to speak and be heard, and what survivor speech 'does'. In this seminar event, we examine the politics of "survivor-led" responses, and the ways in which these may become both challenging to critique, and bound up in punitive, carceral responses to sexual violence.

Please join us for this free event with Dr molly ackhurst from the University of Greenwich, UK. Dr ackhurst will present her work on "good" feminist subjects and "survivor-led" politics, with Dr Tully O'Neill (LaTrobe University), Jess Oldfield (LaTrobe University/University of Melbourne) and A/Prof Bianca Fileborn (University of Melbourne) acting as discussants, followed by an audience Q&A.

The event will be held in-person at the University of Melbourne Parkville campus, with a Zoom option also available. Location and zoom link details will be emailed to attendees closer to the event date.

This event is free, but registrations are essential.

Sticky Work: "Good" Feminist Subjects and their “Survivor-Led” Politics (full abstract)

Dr molly ackhurst

This paper interrogates the ways in which feminism has become attached to a type of work and politics which is “survivor-led” due to the affective figure of the innocent wounded survivor (ackhurst, 2025). Being “survivor-led” is understood here as a type of work or politics that is moved to follow “the survivor’s” wishes without question or critique so that survivors everywhere are better able to “take back control” (Phipps, 2020: 77–78; see also Westmarland and Alderson, 2013). As I will contend, feminism’s wounded figure has produced an (often latently) punitive listening public which is experienced as being distinctly feminist in nature.

The paper begins with my memories of interviewing Parker – a homeless, queer survivor of sexual violence. Through these reflections I explore the ways in which I felt moved to a desire for punishment due to the same “survivor-led” politics that the paper both explores and critiques. An urge I argue to be due to my own affectedness by the figure of the wounded survivor and also by a related need to be a “good feminist” by giving those who embody this wounded figure whatever they want. Through engagement with empirical data I go on to explore the ways in which an attachment to a “survivor-led” way of working reverberates across Anglophone feminist work more broadly. Central to this “led-by” politics is a powerful, affective, carceral core narrative: that “because some survivors say they want carceral outcomes these mustn’t be abandoned”. In illustrating the force of this politics I show that being not only has being “led-by” survivors has become a foundational part of the feminist “we” and it’s “good” ear (Ahmed, 2017) but so too has an often-complicated attachment to this core narrative. I make sense of this through engagement with Sara Ahmed (2000), who contends important questions must be asked of the dwelling place feminism frequently finds itself within, and the operation of the “we” within it.

In exploring the risks of this politics the paper contends that, while the survivor-led “we” appears rooted in a solidarity with survivor speech, it in fact frequently morphs into what Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen (2021) refer to as ‘hostile solidarity’. This being a type of solidarity that is enforced through the punishment of others. For those I interviewed this hostility was often directed at perpetrators, however there are further consequences of this hostility when innocence ruptures. The paper concludes by considering what it may require to reorient to survivors and their speech, arguing it is essential to focus on facilitating life in a bearable way rather than solution-proffering to alleviate the awfulness of sexual violence.

Contact the host of Sticky Work: "Good" Feminist Subjects and their “Survivor-Led” Politics