Politics, Law and Sexual Crimes: The Assange Affair and the Critique of Legal Feminism In December 2010, the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange was arrested on the basis of allegations of rape and sexual assault. The allegations and the arrest have led to a heated public debate aorund the world. The Assange case provides an excellent example to analyze the delicate and complicated relations between law, politics and sexual crimes. This paper interrogates this messy field of complex issues by elaborating on the debates in the US and in Sweden. This paper will proceed through three levels. In the first part, I will make a comparative evaluation of the US and Swedish debates and claim that the terms of the debate were totally different in each county and that feminist politics should derive different lessons from these debates to think about the question of state, politics and law in relation to sexual crimes. Secondly, I will critically analyze legal feminism and its problems as it is revealed by the Swedish rape laws. Finally I will try to think the problems of legal feminism in the context of feminist politics in the Western world.
