I attended a powerful session titled “Theory and Resistance” at MLA 2026 that tackled difficult and uncomfortable truths about violence in its multiple manifestations. The panelists—Keith Feldman (UC Berkeley), Carol Hay (UMass Lowell), Julia Chi Yan Ng (Goldsmiths, University of London), Sandra Ruiz (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College), and P. Khalil Saucier (Bucknell University)—addressed violence against Jews, violence against Muslims especially in Gaza, the politics of othering in contemporary American politics, and violence in intimate relationships. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the presenters invited sustained engagement with the political, cultural, and embodied complexities of how violence operates across different contexts.

Philosophical Frameworks and Comparative Contexts

Analytical philosopher Carol Hay’s presentation examined erotica through a resistance framework, interrogating not sexuality itself but rather the circulation and moral evaluation of violent sexual content. Drawing on feminist philosophical work, particularly Mari Mikkola’s scholarship on objectification and pornography, Hay explored how regulatory frameworks, production practices, and access mechanisms differ significantly between the United States and Canada. This comparative approach illuminated how national contexts shape both the availability of violent content and public discourse surrounding it.

Hay’s analysis resonates with empirical findings documented in recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation programming. In a CBC Radio feature moderated by Matt Galloway, researchers and clinicians identified troubling patterns in adolescent sexual socialization: young men increasingly derive sexual scripts from pornographic content that normalizes aggression as desire, while young women report experiencing choking, verbal degradation, and other violent acts that they have been socialized to accept as conventional sexual practice (CBC Radio).

The Material Consequences of Abstracted Violence

The urgency of this issue extends beyond theoretical concern. While fatalities from sexual choking remain statistically uncommon, emergency department visits related to such practices are not. The harms are corporeal, documented, and frequently unaddressed due to shame, normalization, or lack of informed consent frameworks.

As Zahi Zalloua argued in his MLA presentation, violence becomes most insidious when abstracted—when theoretical distance obscures lived consequences. Similarly, Sandra Ruiz’s scholarship consistently emphasizes that critical theory must account for embodied experience; theoretical frameworks divorced from material reality risk becoming exercises in intellectual abstraction rather than tools for understanding and intervention.

Pedagogical and Parental Responsibility

This intersection of theory and praxis demands concrete action, particularly in educational and familial contexts. Young people require explicit counter-narratives to pornographic sexual scripts:

• Daughters need clear articulation that strangulation, humiliation, and pain inflicted by partners constitutes violence, not intimacy, regardless of how such acts are framed or normalized in media.
• Sons need direct instruction that pornography does not constitute sex education and that authentic intimacy neither requires nor benefits from domination or violence.

These conversations, however uncomfortable, represent essential pedagogy—one that bridges the gap between theoretical analysis of power and resistance in academic contexts and their manifestations in private spaces.

The Embodied Stakes of Critical Theory

If scholars can analyze violence, power, and resistance in literature, philosophy, and geopolitical contexts, we must extend that analytical capacity to examining violence in intimate spaces, digital consumption, and cultural silences. The alternative is a critical theory that remains intellectually comfortable precisely because it avoids confronting the bodies—and bodily harms—that exist beyond the seminar room.