Barbara Kraml

PhD Thesis (University of Vienna, 2016) 
http://othes.univie.ac.at/42864/

Unequal Protection of Sexual Autonomy: Sexual Penal Law figuring a Biopolitical Scene

Recent history of Austrian sex crime legislation has seen a move away from the protection of morality towards the protection of individual sexual autonomy and integrity. Yet, further inspection of the gradual decriminalization of homosexual acts (starting in 1971) and the criminalization of sexual violence within marriage (starting in 1989) reveals that the degrees of sexual self-determination that are allowed and protected follow along the lines of gender, age, sexual orientation and marital status. This dissertation examines the reasons for this unequal protection of sexual autonomy and reconstructs contingent problem presentations (Bacchi 1999; 2009) that were used for the political legitimization of particular amendments within parliamentary discourse. Isabell Lorey’s (2011) “figures of the immune” provide the basis for an analytical framework that illustrates how the unequal attribution of sexual autonomy and its legitimization are nothing less than the hierarchized and unequal distribution of the precariousness of life (Butler 2010). This political-immunological perspective offers the possibility to look upon the developments mentioned above as certain facets of the sexual dispositif (Foucault 1977) and to put them into a biopolitical context. Furthermore, a biopolitical contextualization illustrates how sexual practices are discursively positioned as non-reproductive and, therefore, as a danger to the population collective (Repo 2013). Such a positioning justifies legislative limits to individual sexual autonomy or its lack of protection. But results of the qualitative empirical analysis also show that the attribution of non-reproductivity is in no way a static one, but historically variable and thus depending on context: An ongoing normalization of sexualities finds its expression in their decreasing representation as a collective threat within political discourses in the course of time.

Kontakt: barbara.kraml [at] univie.ac.at