Amia Srinivasan was relaxing with a martini when she got the call that told her she had been appointed the Chichele professor of social and political theory, one of the most distinguished university positions in Britain. “I may have been on my second,” she says today, laughing. They were well deserved: only a few hours earlier, the feminist academic had sat through a gruelling panel interview at Oxford, discussing political philosophy and what she might do with the post, previously held by some of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century, Isaiah Berlin among them.
“For me, it’s very important that we don’t think of political theory as something practised by wealthy white men trained in institutions [she waves her hand at the grand wood-panelled room in All Souls College that is now her study] like this.” Srinivasan is the youngest person, the first woman and the first person of colour to hold the Chichele professorship; the 36-year-old is also about to publish her feverishly anticipated first book, The Right to Sex. It’s safe to say her star has ascended.
“You’re the first new person I’ve spoken to in a year,” she tells me. Her voice is measured and warm, and she chooses her words with precision – a trait made less intimidating by her frequent “you knows?”.
Across five searing essays, The Right to Sex takes on consent, pornography, sex work, student-teacher relationships, the women’s liberation movement and more. Srinivasan also probes “truisms about feminism” such as “believe women”, the clarion call of the Me Too movement – something that will, she knows, “raise a couple of eyebrows”. “If feminists aren’t willing to embrace the full complexity of questions about sexual justice, we will end up recapitulating,” she explains. “What you need is a feminist analysis that sees patriarchy as bound up with capitalist exploitation and racial domination. Otherwise we make very little progress, or make forms of progress benefitting only the women who are, in fact, already the best off.”
Her ambitious, magisterial work stands out in the ongoing tide of dull, girlboss feminism arguing for personal empowerment over collective liberation. “A truly inclusionary politics,” she writes, “is an uncomfortable, unsafe politics.” This is not a feel-good read that pats you on the back for doing the bare minimum for the sisterhood. Instead, she weaves together seemingly opposing strands of feminist thought and history to make them speak, even sing, to each other. In one essay, the histories of anti-prostitution feminism, and of military intervention in Afghanistan, together form a staggering portrait of how Western feminists colluded with “law and order” conservatism to exploit poorer countries and criminalise the worst off in society. It will challenge you. It certainly challenged me.
Srinivasan began writing The Right to Sex after her London Review of Books essay of the same name, about the 2014 university shooting in Santa Barbara by self-declared incel Elliot Rodger. The essay was classic Srinivasan – measured, but motivated most of all by a desire to question received opinion about who gets to desire who, and why it matters. She wrote the book over two summers in California; she’d wake up at 6am, wait for the mist to clear and head out on her surfboard, before writing all day and unwinding with a glass of wine. “You can’t print that,” she laughs. “People are going to hate me!”
The book is depressingly timely. A few steps from All Souls, flowers outside the Radcliffe Camera are a memorial to Sarah Everard, who disappeared in south London in March, her body discovered in Kent days later, a police officer accused of her murder. In the aftermath came scores of testimonies about abuses of male power, followed by the Everyone’s Invited scandal that outed numerous British private schools as hotbeds of sexual harassment. The essays in The Right to Sex have a new urgency.
“It was no surprise to me that a Tory government came up with a carceral solution to this problem,” she says of the proposal to put plain-clothes police in clubs to protect women. “What worried me was the feminist embrace of that in certain corners.” She adds, “State power has to be handled with care and delicacy. That’s not something that feminists have totally – this is to understate the point – grappled with yet.”
More often than not, this approach backfires against the worst off in society – more police on the street, more men sent to prison, gives “cover to the governing class in its refusal to tackle the deepest causes of most crime: poverty, racial domination, borders, caste.” Feminists, she writes, “must ask what it is they set in motion, and against whom, when they demand more policing and more prisons”.
Her students, she adds, don’t see legislation as the way to remedy social ills. “They have a level of political awareness and sensitivity to identity-based politics that was unthinkable when I was an undergraduate,” she says. Of the “highly distressing” claims that emerged from Everyone’s Invited, prompting a call for porn literacy in sex ed, Srinivasan says, “They don’t surprise me a great deal… One reason I’m not surprised is just that I’ve spoken to a lot of women of that generation about it.”
Srinivasan divides her term time between lecturing, seminars and graduate supervisions, ploughing through university admin and taking Goose, her new Labrador puppy, on walks. “For me, a vacation means writing, but hopefully also getting to surf,” she says. She was born in Bahrain to Indian parents – her father was a banker and her mother, to whom the book is dedicated, a dancer. She was raised “roughly speaking” as Hindu and began reading Indian philosophy in her final year of high school. The family moved often, with Srinivasan growing up in Taiwan, Singapore, New York and London before attending Yale, where she drifted between English, history and politics, but kept returning to philosophy. “It felt like the discipline that could best help me make sense of the questions that troubled me most, which are always about the relationship of my finite mind to the world.” Writing on everything from shark attacks to epistemology and Rhodes Must Fall, she glides between philosophy, social theory and feminism. “Maybe that comfort comes from the practice I had growing up between lots of different cultures.”
Srinivasan came to feminist theory relatively late, after winning the Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. “At Yale, I was barely even taught by any women,” she notes. “Even when we were reading these great texts and rethinking everything else… the thing that was just never questioned in my milieu was the basic terms of relating between women and men.”
One of the most disturbing anecdotes in the book features a female student realising that her boyfriend was adamant she was having sex “wrong” because he had been comparing her with porn. “I don’t want to sound like, you know, a hysterical moralist,” she says. “But my actual experience of teaching and lecturing on pornography for young people is that it is a serious issue for them on their own account, and not just for the women, but the young men as well. A lot of them feel like it actually closes down what’s sexually possible for them.”
In another essay, Srinivasan deftly unpacks the phenomenon of false rape accusations, pointing out that it is poor Black men who have historically been falsely accused – and lynched – on the say-so of white women. She writes of Colgate University, an elite American college where half of the accusations of sexual violence are against Black students, even though only 4.2 per cent of the student body is Black. “Does ‘Believe Women’,” she wonders in the book, “serve justice at Colgate?”
“If there’s a methodological orientation to the book, it’s an insistence on discomfort, ambivalence and truth-telling,” she tells me. In an age where complex political stances are routinely condensed into tweets, it’s a deeply unfashionable approach – and a necessary one. “To me, what marks someone as having a philosophical orientation is whether they find meditation on that form of anxiety itself kind of therapeutic – whether they can take comfort in that ambivalence. That’s something that’s always been true of me,” she says, laughing. And this is precisely the pleasure of reading – and speaking to – Srinivasan: in a world of easy, one-dimensional answers, she is unquestionably the real deal.