Essays

Feminist Guerilla Tactics: Resisting Gender-based Sexual Violence

Authors

  • Dianna Taylor John Carroll University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.45.2.41564

Keywords:

Gender-based Sexual Violence, Feminism, Embodiment, Resistance

Abstract

This essay argues that gender-based sexual violence (GBSV) underpins and is reproduced through gendered relations of power. Characterized by structural and institutional disadvantaging of femininity and women (trans and cis) and privileging of masculinity and men, gendered power relations are oppressive. In the first part of the essay, I show that because women’s oppression is sexual and violent, GBSV and the sexual humiliation it produces are particularly effective at enforcing women’s oppression. The second part of the essay argues that given the character of women’s oppression, practices which directly oppose their reduction to sexually humiliated bodies are key components of effective feminist resistance. I refer to these embodied, oppositional practices as guerilla tactics. This essay was presented as the 2023 Hypatia Lecture of SW*IP-NL, the Society for Women* in Philosophy for Flanders and the Netherlands.

Author Biography

Dianna Taylor, John Carroll University

Dianna Taylor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s
Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland Ohio, USA. She is author of Sexual Violence and Humiliation:
A Foucauldian-Feminist Perspective (Routledge, 2020) editor of Michel Foucault: Key Concepts (Acumen, 2010), and co-editor of Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference, Agency (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and Feminism and the Final Foucault (University of Illinois, 2004). Her current research focuses on the theory and practice
of feminist opposition to and prevention of all forms of gender-based sexual violence.

Cover Krisis 45.2

Published

2026-04-07

How to Cite

Taylor, Dianna. 2026. “Feminist Guerilla Tactics: Resisting Gender-Based Sexual Violence”. Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 45 (2): 34-45. https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.45.2.41564.

Issue

Vol. 45 No. 2 (2025)

Section

Essays

Copyright (c) 2026 Dianna Taylor

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.