Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities ROUTLEDGE Routled Taylor & Francis ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20 REFRAMING HONOUR IN HETEROSEXUAL IMAGINARIES Millicent Churcher & Moira Gatens To cite this article: Millicent Churcher & Moira Gatens (2019) REFRAMING HONOUR IN HETEROSEXUAL IMAGINARIES, Angelaki, 24:4, 151-164, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2019.1635834 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2019.1635834 Published online: 09 Jul 2019. Submit your article to this journal C Article views: 80 Q View related articles C View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20
Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Check for updates ROUTLEDGE ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 24 number 4 august 2019 1 introduction The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in very large part on their understanding of honor. (Adrienne Rich, "Women and Honor" 193) O ver four decades ago, feminist scholar Adrienne Rich foregrounded the impor- tance of honour to women's political struggles and freedom. She argued that prevailing con- ceptions of what it is for women to be honour- able needed radical revision if women were to liberate themselves from structures of social and sexual oppression. Although Rich was con- cerned primarily with honour between women, and only secondarily with honour between women and men, we aim to extend her insights to heterosexual relationships. Within contem- porary discussions of heterosexuality, the focus on consent-based frameworks to address unethical sexual practices can lead to a discount- ing of the effects of the background conditions under which consent is given or withheld. It is precisely these background conditions that an honour-based approach to sexual ethics aims to foreground and address. The general absence of treatments of honour from main- stream accounts of heterosexual ethics is perhaps unsurprising: notions of honour are likely to conjure up visions of male aggression and revenge, honour killings, and female chas- tity. Central to this paper is the deliberately pro- vocative claim that whether we know it or not - and whether we like it or not - the concept of honour plays a crucial role in structuring hetero- sexual relations in contemporary societies, and that we ignore this fact at our peril. We criticize existing implicit and explicit codes of sexual honour that are grounded in social imaginings millicent churcher moira gatens REFRAMING HONOUR IN HETEROSEXUAL IMAGINARIES of sexed subjects, and argue for the construction of new codes of conduct between the sexes. Indeed, as we will show in the latter part of the paper, these novel codes are already rewrit- ing aspects of our social and sexual imaginaries. In turning our attention to honour, we seek to offer an alternative framework for thinking through the ethics of heterosexual sex (or "het- erosex") that does not hinge solely on the elusive notion of consent. The task of addressing unethical or unjust sexual conduct is particu- larly important given the growing body of evi- dence, to which we will turn shortly, that shows that unwanted, non-reciprocal sex is com-