Research

Defended August 2025

This dissertation offers a theoretical intervention in feminist social epistemology, Foucauldian scholarship, and narrative hermeneutics, contributing to broader debates in anti-rape and prison abolitionist politics. I argue that several foundational concepts in feminist thought — including consciousness-raising, legal legibility, narrative selfhood, and testimony — have become entangled with carceral logics, even as they are mobilized in opposition to sexual violence. Thereby, I revisit the arguments that engage these topics in order to shed light on this entanglement, and offer a new way to conceptualize these concepts to disentangle this relation. In response, I develop a new narrative approach to subjectivity that seeks to disentangle survivor narration from carceral reliance. Drawing on a Foucauldian account of subject formation, I argue that survivor narratives do not simply describe individual harm but reflect back to us the discursive and genealogical conditions under which narratives become intelligible. Survivor narration through this lens offers resources for imagining a broader political emancipation offered by the prison abolitionist perspective.