Sexual Agency and the Ethics of Erotic Experience

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Manon Garcia
• Subject Area: Practical Philosophy
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537438648

This project aims to build a comprehensive understanding of sexual agency in non-ideal conditions, thus developing a crucial yet under-researched aspect of sexual ethics. 1. The first objective is to formulate a normative definition of sexual agency both (a) adequate to the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and (b) responsive to the challenges posed by distorted sexual politics in a sexist, ableist and otherwise unjust society. 2. The second goal is to evaluate the role of psychoanalysis in understanding sexual agency under oppression. This involves exploring the intersection of psychoanalysis and feminism, and assessing their value in understanding agency under conditions of structural injustice. 3. The third aim is to articulate the difference between two types of uncertainty that affect sexual ethics. The first is the ambiguity inherent in sexual intimacy, and the second is the confusion about sexual agency caused by sexist and heteronormative ideologies. 4. The final objective is to establish a foundation for a broader, non-ideal approach to autonomy and agency. This involves critiquing and refining previous research on relational approaches to agency and autonomy, in order to account for the effects of oppression. The proposed method consists in bringing together continental and analytic approaches of feminist philosophy, critical approaches of phenomenology, and the contemporary literature on non-ideal theory. The researchers will pay attention to both personal lived experiences and broader sociopolitical structures in their analysis of sexual agency. The outcome of this project will hopefully provide a new normative framework for understanding action and autonomy under non-ideal conditions, with potential applications beyond sexual ethics, including areas like disability, reproductive justice, cultural displacement, environmental agency, and aging. The researchers aim to make their work accessible to a broad audience, alongside the traditional academic outputs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants