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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Sexual violence has become a topic of intense media scrutiny, thanks to the bravery of survivors coming forward to tell their stories. But, unfortunately, mainstream public spheres too often echo reports in a way that inhibits proper understanding of its causes, placing too much emphasis on individual responsibility or blaming minority cultures. In this powerful and original book, Linda Martín Alcoff aims to correct the misleading language of public debate about rape and sexual violence by showing how complex our experiences of sexual violation can be. Although it is survivors who have galvanized movements like #MeToo, when their words enter the public arena they can be manipulated or interpreted in a way that damages their effectiveness. Rather than assuming that all experiences of sexual violence are universal, we need to be more sensitive to the local and personal contexts - who is speaking and in what circumstances - that affect how activists' and survivors' protests will be received and understood. Alcoff has written a book that will revolutionize the way we think about rape, finally putting the survivor center stage.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Text Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rape after Foucault
Gray Areas
Managing the Problem
Sexual Violation
The Problematic of Foucault
An Agenda for Theory
Coda
Note
1: Global Resistance: A New Agenda for Theory
A Period of Heightened Visibility
Reasonable Goals
The Complicated Echoes Surrounding Sexual Violation
The Specific Challenges to Speaking Out
Steps Toward Change
Conclusion
Note
2: The Thorny Question of Experience
The Subjective Nature of Experience
Ideology and Experience
Foucault
Rape Scripts
Interpretations All the Way Down?
A Phenomenological Approach
Experience as Know-How
Note
3: Norming Sexual Practices
The Case Against Norms
Foucault on Normalization
The Case of Jouy
Children and the Law
An Alternative Approach to Norming
Notes
4: Sexual Subjectivity
Formative Effects of Violations
Consent, Desire, Pleasure, Will
Technologies of the Sexual Self
Conclusion
Notes
5: Decolonizing Terms
Consent
Honor
Victim
Conclusion
Notes
6: Speaking “as”
The Reality of TV
Discourse and Power
Pragmatic Contexts of Speech
Confessions
Television Confessions
Dangers
Subversive Speech
Notes
7: The Problem of Speaking for Myself
The Feminist Debate
Epistemic Reliability
The Effects of Trauma
Narrative Selves
Relational Selves
Notes
Conclusion: Standing in the Intersection
Why Intersectionality Is Crucial
False Universals
A Universal to Aim for
Instructive Examples
The Question of Love
Note
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
to those who know
Copyright page
Copyright © Linda Martín Alcoff 2018
The right of Linda Martín Alcoff to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9191-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9192-3 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11.25 on 13 pt Dante by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
I have been fortunate to participate in numerous support groups for survivors over the years, in Providence, Kalamazoo, and Syracuse. Some of these were organized formally by social service organizations and some simply by activists. Here I was able to witness as well as take part in the collective and tentative process of developing an understanding. The memories of our many conversations have stayed with me for years. I have given portions of the arguments of this book at numerous conferences, colleges, and universities, in several countries around the world, always with private conversations afterward with members of the audience. I want to express my thanks to all of those who have shared their stories and their analyses with me.
I have also discussed these topics with numerous colleagues and friends over the years to my great benefit, including especially Ann Cahill, Laura Gray-Rosendale, Raja Halwani, Jamie Lindsay, Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey, Sarah Clark Miller, Robert Praeger, and Steven Seidman.
Finally, I owe a special debt to the following people: to my family for their million acts of support and kindness; to Laura Gray-Rosendale for venturing to collaborate on this difficult topic with me many years ago; and to Amber Chiacchieri for working incredibly hard as my research assistant and also giving me sound feedback on many theoretical points. I want to also thank Sarah Gokhale for preparing the excellent index, and Sam Alcoff and Anna Gold for their helpful ideas for the cover design.
Text Acknowledgments
Chapter 2, “The Thorny Question of Experience,” is largely based on the essay “Sexual Violations and the Question of Experience.” Copyright © New Literary History, The University of Virginia. This article first appeared in New Literary History Volume 45, Issue 3 (Summer 2014), pages 445–62. Chapter 3, “Norming Sexual Practices,” draws in part from “Dangerous Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Pedophilia,” in Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, edited by Susan J. Hekman (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996), pages 99–136. Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University. Chapter 5, “Decolonizing Terms,” is largely based on “Discourses of Sexual Violence in a Global Framework. Copyright © Philosophical Topics. This article first appeared in Philosophical Topics Volume 37, Issue 2 (Fall 2009), pages 123–40. A much earlier version of Chapter 6, “Speaking ‘as’,” appeared, co-authored with Laura Gray (now Laura Gray-Rosendale), as “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Copyright © SIGNS. This article first appeared in SIGNS Volume 18, Issue 2 (Winter 1993), pages 260–90.
Introduction: Rape after Foucault
We are living in a moment of an unprecedented global social revolution. It has been instigated by the many survivors of sexual violence who have come forward, forcing the issue into the public domain with an unparalleled visibility. Across the world, the multiple voices of victims are growing in strength, and taking courage from each other's success. In some cases, their words have brought down powerful men and put revered institutions – religious, military, media, government, entertainment – on the defensive. Just as important as their voices are the many others who are fighting to ensure that survivors’ voices are heard, and heard fairly.
Yet, despite the wider and better media coverage, there is also a continuation of the long practice of casting accusers as hysterical liars, or blaming them for their violation, or bullying them into silence or even suicide. Old tropes of revenge, jealousy, and the innate deceitfulness of women are persistently used to discredit accusers, as well as the idea that victims exaggerate their suffering in order to gain some kind of status. Social media has shown itself to be a rather sharp double-edged sword: a tool for whistle blowers but also an easy means to stage a virtual stoning of victims.
The atmosphere around sexual violence can appear to resemble a team sport with clearly demarcated sides, and no space in the middle. Advocates and activists can get caught up in the need to hammer home the message that we have an epidemic and all accusers must be believed. They rightfully point out how this issue still generates an unfathomable shrug of the shoulders: “Why should his life be ruined by just ‘20 minutes of action’?” as one enraged father of an accused Stanford University student put it. One of the confounding aspects of rape is the way in which many people around the world persist in repudiating the significance of the harm and misplacing the blame.
This book is not written from the middle of this agonistic struggle: I am an advocate, have been an activist, and am a survivor myself. I argue, however, that the movement itself need not fear exploring either a more complex understanding of the constitution of the experience of sexual violence or the sometimes complicated nature of culpability. Well beyond the arena of legal reform, there is understandable uncertainty about how expansively to define sexual coercion, how overtly to demand consent, how seriously to interpret repressed memories, how strictly to constrain the freedom of past offenders, even how to think about the sexuality and sexual desires of children and young people.
It is often the voices of victims who bring us these difficult questions, and thus, I will argue, it is the voices of victims that need to remain at the center of the fight for cultural change. It is their/our knowledge that is at stake when the problem is shrugged away, but this knowledge must be heeded to enlarge, enrich, and also complicate our understanding of the problem. Hence what we need is a new epistemology of rape, which is to say we need a new understanding of the way in which our collective knowledge of the problem has been formed, and might be improved.
It was not until I began an earnest study of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault that I thought about sexual violence within a theoretical framework. Foucault's specific statements on rape were problematic, to say the least, and have been the subject of deserved feminist critique (Plaza 1981; McNay 1992). I discuss this in detail in chapter 3. Although he wrote extensively about the history of sexuality, Foucault did not contribute new ideas about the cause of sexual violence, a topic that is still in the first throes of serious academic research and debate. But in any case, I was, and am, more interested in a solution. And here Foucault has some interesting contributions to make.
Foucault's work offers a diagnosis of the politics of speech and authorization in relation to subject-position and social identity (Foucault 1972; Alcoff 1996; Hacking 2002). He defined discourses as the background system that organizes our knowledge and the practices that relate to knowledge. He argued that discourse is an important site of social struggle, given that discourses organize the realm of intelligible meanings and the range of meaningful questions and statements. He also showed how there must be excluded speech, derogated, unspoken, in order to maintain existing discursive systems in place. Foucault's idea of a discourse was that it was less about what is said than about the prior conditions of the statable. The concept of homosexuality as we use it today had no referent in ancient Greece, despite the fact that the activities we associate with it were plentiful. It is not quite as simple as saying the identity existed though it lacked a term: Foucault and others plausibly suggest that identity formations and even the texture of experiences can be affected by the available concepts that delimit the scope of the intelligible. Thus, the borders of meaningfulness are not determined in any simple and straightforward way by the actual conditions of practice or by common events. In other words, concepts and terms and statements do not emerge as they do determined by the social and natural worlds, but are somehow partially independent, and sometimes effectively constitutive, of those worlds. The language itself is part of the practice, part of what makes it possible, part of what makes it meaningful, part of what gives people ideas of what they can do and of what they have just experienced.
Rape cultures produce a discursive formation in which the intelligibility of claims is organized not by logical argument or evidence, but by frames that set out who can be victimized, who can be accused, which are plausible narratives, and in what contexts rape may be spoken about, even in private spaces. Discourses operate not on the ground level but behind the scenes, so to speak, determining not the validity of a particular claim so much as the criteria by which claims are interpreted and judged, what may be spoken of, what can come up for judgment itself. They don't tell us what is true; they tell us what can be true, as opposed to nonsensical (Hacking 2002). For Foucault, discourses are the aggregate product not of individual intentions or systems, but of concordances between domains of language, practices, institutions, and forms of subjectivity. As such, they can be difficult to discern, identify, and subvert.
We need to consider the realities of this complex interplay of causes as we make efforts at reform. And we need to look to the political forces that constrain, curb, and sometimes incite speech for an understanding of how to change the linguistic environment that so often enables the epidemic of rape and sexual violence.
In this introduction, I first explore what we can learn from the public's uncertainty about the problem of sexual violence, and then turn to show how engaging Foucault's philosophy can help us to think through both the question of experience and the question of resistance. I end with an overview of the theoretical agenda this book articulates and advances as necessary for the movement's progression.
Gray Areas
It is no overstatement to say that mass culture, at least in the global North, is confused on the topic of sex, veering between an ever more extreme libertarianism and the ramping up of legislation to protect minors. The Japanese phenomenon of body-pillow “girlfriends” made up of full-size pictures of scantily clad pubescent anime girls is so accepted that men carry them in public and trade openly at conventions (Katayama 2009). Eight-year-old girls in Los Angeles compete in dance contests dressed like strippers with bump and grind routines, and this was nationally marketed in the show “Toddlers and Tiaras” on a station that was boycotted for sponsoring a program that was positive toward gay identities (Morgan 2012). Upmarket as well as mass-market movies play with the idea that women's sexual bliss involves being the target of predation, whether vampiric or merely mortal. Popular indie movies by Miranda July and Todd Solondz call into question the venality of sexual perpetrators, portraying them as more sad than dangerous, and target overly protective middle-class parents as invested in social panics. Meanwhile, 14 year olds engaged in sexting other 14 year olds – sending nude or partially nude pictures of themselves or of friends using their cell phones – have been arrested on child pornography charges (Hasinoff 2016), and there is a public campaign against using the vaccine to protect teenage girls from cervical cancer on the grounds this might encourage premarital sex (Grimes 2016). The public culture is a jumble of snarled messaging circuits.
This is to be expected with so many new voices and advocacy groups as well as rapidly changing legal definitions that vary widely across nations but also states or provinces. Advocates, activists, and survivors ourselves do not always agree, and the general public are often more uncertain, I suspect, than some feel comfortable airing, certainly on college campuses.
What is nonetheless clear is that there is a great deal of uncertainty today about the nature of sexual violence and the most effective means of reducing the alarming number of incidents. Our current numbers are no doubt inexact given the widespread reticence, and simple inability, of victims to come forward, even to their friends and family. But beyond uncertainty about the numbers, there is also uncertainty among broad publics about the true nature of sexual violence, the veracity of claims by survivors, and whether feminism has inflated the statistics by expansive definitions that over-politicize our sex lives. How reliable are “retrieved” memories? Does the term “rape” fairly characterize those confused and drunken events in college dorm rooms? This book starts from the premise that some uncertainty is warranted given the rapid pace of change but also the complexity of the problem. Though many advocates today like to say that “rape is rape,” in truth, some incidents are ambiguous. It is not only anti-feminists who entertain skeptical doubts about the claims of sexual violence; there is also debate within feminism itself over the nature of pleasure, the role of fantasy, and the ways in which we come to name and interpret our experiences.
Furthermore, it is not only libertarian feminists such as Katie Roiphe or Laura Kipnis but also infuential radical feminists such as Dorothy Allison who have raised critical questions about the way we talk about sexual violence. Allison (1994) has contested the idea that power has no place in sexuality, no role in arousal. And the writer Mary Gaitskill (1994) has insisted that the simplistic binary between what is rape and what is not rape doesn't always apply, and didn't apply in her own case. Gaitskill was clear that she hadn't wanted the sex, but she was very young at the time, he was aggressive, and she didn't have the capacity to stand up for herself. So, she says, “The complete truth is more complicated than most of the intellectuals who have written scolding essays on victimism seem willing to accept” (1994: 36). There was a clash of wills and expectations in a context Gaitskill had not yet learned, had never been taught, to negotiate. She did not know how to assert her rights or her will against what seemed to be the accepted rules of engagement. This does not mean, however, that the behavior of the male involved was blameless.
The fact that Allison and Gaitskill are both victims is important: it indicates that the victims of sexual violence are as interested as anyone in the question of how to understand the tangled questions of sexual agency and culpability. In reading through a large stack of memoirs, as well as listening to conversations in survivor support groups of which I have been a member, I find people asking questions about the general applicability of the term “survivor,” how to name their experiences, and what is the true etiology of post-traumatic symptoms given a therapy-obsessed, overly diagnosed society. There is also concern about the confessional mode enacted by speak-outs and whether this exacerbates the problem of media sensationalism, and further debate over the realm of fantasy, role play, and kink in producing pleasure. Even the rather orthodox radical feminists who ran the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival from 1976 to 2015 eventually set aside a tent for bondage. And yet, in cultures where girls still grow up, as Gaitskill did, unable to voice their will, or even discern it, the debate continues over the political conditions that have constituted important aspects of our desires.
Clearly, the critical force behind the social revolution we are witnessing is the voice of survivors. And yet, as more survivors come forward, and better social science is developed on the topic, we will be certain to hear more complexity, more nuance, more variety, and more questions (Gavey 2005). This should be nothing for the movement to fear. But the public's receptiveness to the newly emerging voices will require a better understanding of the nature of human experience: that it is always affected by a nexus of social relations and existing conceptual options. Voices expressing complexity will be dismissed as simply in denial, or as liars, or as deluded about their experience, if the public sphere is not pushed to be more sophisticated in its understanding.
Imagine, if you will, what it feels like to wake up and find yourself in a strange bed in the act of sex, within, shall we say, the passive position. Imagine that the other party is someone you know and perhaps are even in something of a relationship with, but someone you have not had sex with before this point. It is as if you are entering into an event in the middle. Someone else has had you signed in, delivered up, and things have gotten well under way, before you have, in a sense, arrived. It may seem implausible that one can wake up only at this late stage of an activity, but imagine that before sleeping you drank alcohol and/or did some drugs, perhaps given to you by the person who is now on top of you. This is the sort of thing that happened to me.
It does seem overly harsh to call this rape, but there is the fact that I did not participate in the initiation of the event. Soon afterward I broke off the relationship; the event just described left me with a bad feeling I could not quite articulate at the age of 16, but it was a sensation strong enough that it had to be addressed. I knew I could not trust him. Sex may always involve some degree of instrumentalization, as both Kant and Sartre believed, and yet in this instance I felt no give and take, no reciprocal modifications of autonomy. I had had boyfriends and some sex before this point, but those events had been more like partnerships, collaborative adventures, shared risk-taking. I like to think I was on my way to developing a sense of sexual agency, even if it was still relatively undeveloped. But this event was different. I realized when he was on top of me that he had no condom, nor did he use any other method for avoiding pregnancy. I subsequently found myself pregnant, sometime after I'd broken off relations with him, and a series of ensuing events led to my dropping out of high school.
I would not call this rape, but consider it less than optimal sexual behavior on his part. If, on finding him on top of me, I had cried out to stop, and pushed at him to get away, and he had forced me, then it would have been an unambiguous case. As it was, I was passively acquiescent, perhaps in part because of the surprise with which the event overtook me. My mind was fuzzy, I was sluggish, and it was all over rather quickly. Also, I had friends in the next room, and was mortified at the idea they may have seen or heard what was going on. I wanted what was happening to stay quiet.
The impulse to take a supine, comatose body, undress it and position it for sex and then begin the action, unilaterally, before the person inhabiting that body has come to consciousness, has always piqued my interest. What makes someone, a young man, want to have sex under these kinds of circumstances when he might have them otherwise? What is the nature of the desire that leads to such events? What are the beliefs necessary to generate such action, or to think afterward that no harm was done?
Events similar to these constitute a common range of widespread experiences in the lives of girls and women in many places in the world, and some boys and men as well. Legal terminology has been expanded to capture a spectrum of events within categories such as “unwanted sexual intercourse,” but this does not tell us much about the actual events. And “unwanted sexual intercourse” sounds like a euphemism for rape, covering over complexity once again. If I say simply that I wish I had been asked, it sounds trivial, laughable, silly. But that is what I wish had happened. If I had been asked, the nature of the experience for me would have changed; it would not have left a “bad taste,” and I could have raised the topic of pregnancy. Events such as the one to which I was subjected are part of a constellation of normative, or commonly accepted, behaviors that too often curtail the development of women's and girls’ sexual agency: that is, their ability to develop forms of self-regard strong enough to resist the accepted rules of engagement. Hence, such events should be judged not in isolation, but as a part of a cultural pattern that stymies the sort of sexual subjectivity that Beauvoir called for as necessary for women to develop their personhood.
Females of my culture and generation grew up mostly developing an agency of escape and self-protection. By the time I was 13, I could deftly slip out of a boy's grasp, elbow his arm sneaking around my back, even talk my way out of a coercive situation in which I was pinned by a stronger guy. The idea I eventually developed of turning toward, not away, from some such possibilities was quite gutsy, possibly born of fatalism about the likelihood of maintaining my good success rate. I was far from naïve. Yet my turn followed an intense reading of Kahlil Gibran, after which I decided that I wanted to experience life in all its joys, physical and otherwise. Once I decided to occasionally turn toward, and not away, from possibilities, I developed a “reputation.” But I considered this the result of a misinterpretation of my behavior, a retrograde double standard for boys and girls, and an assault on my freedom as well as my human dignity. The meanness of my peers goaded me to think more deeply about the nature of society, and about my life.
In Tricia Rose's important book Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy (2003), a woman named Sarita tries to explain what happened in an event that occurred when she was in college:
I wouldn't call it date rape, but I would call it rape by mental force. I was completely manipulated and made to have sex through my own mental shortcomings – by a person I trusted. … I still have a lot of shame about it because deep down I feel like I played along with it. (2003: 32–3)
The man in this case was 50 years old and had worked with her for some time in a group dance performance. That night he got her alone by offering to teach her some drumming techniques, and then created a situation in which, out of fear and pressure, she “just let him have sex with me” (2003: 34). He did not use a condom. Sarita was suicidal afterward, and had the bodily sensation of being unable to get his smell off of her no matter how much she scrubbed and used oil. It is apparent that he knew what he had done, since he called her the following day and said, “ ‘I hope you're okay, because nothing happened last night, right? Nothing happened’ ”(2003: 33). Still, she primarily blamed herself for getting “played.” Rose's collection of stories includes other similar incidents where women went along with men's suggestions until they found themselves in vulnerable situations. Part of the manipulation here is to displace causal agency and deflect blame: the old story of blaming women for going into the room, or the car, or the woods for a walk, as if these choices were tantamount to consent. Manipulators are aware that it is difficult to express a preemptive distrust of people in your social circles, or men you work with. This difficulty may be exacerbated where there is an implicit expectation of racial solidarity against a racist society that portrays men of color as predatory.
Sexual agency is not something one can learn in a book. Local, specific conditions that create obstacles to sexual agency require local and specific analysis. Having a sexual subjectivity, as I will argue in chapter 4, is something that one must develop as a kind of practice within the particularities of a cultural context with its specific conventions and likely opportunities as well as dangers.
Certainly for girls in many sexist cultures, it can be a heady experience to find out that one is desirable, since this is the key aspect of our social worth. But to have sexual agency means that I consider what my desires are as well. The development of sexual agency requires a space to try things out, to experiment, but this requires some reasonable expectation of safety and reciprocity. This is what we want when we say things like: I would like to have been asked. I would also like to be able to ask.
The point at issue here ranges far beyond the question of whether the guy whom I found on top of me in the middle of the night so many years ago was legally culpable of sexual misconduct, or the older man who coerced Sarita was guilty of rape. I think my then-boyfriend had some moral culpability, though of a pretty mild sort given the conventions of behavior that were evidently common in our milieu. Sarita describes a scenario that, especially given the significant age difference between them, sounds more intentional and premeditated.
The idea that sex is complex but rape is not is not helpful. In recent years, young activists and victims have introduced the term “gray rape” to capture the complexity of some events. This has helped, I believe, to enlarge the scope of discussion and make it possible for more voices to come forward. The idea that rape is a simple, straightforward matter actually works to dissuade the many victims from coming forward who feel that their own experience had complexity and ambiguity, and it inhibits the vitally necessary process of being able to discuss one's experience with others. Acknowledging “gray rape” thus becomes a way to respect the perspective of survivors themselves.
Managing the Problem
Rape and sexual violations of all sorts are truly of epidemic proportions, and let me be clear that skepticism about their prevalence or the severity of the effects on survivors is not warranted. The sexual violence that occurs within prisons, colleges, businesses, and religious and military institutions is handled to protect the institution, not the victim. And incest (even that involving biological fathers) is far from rare yet difficult to prosecute under current procedures. The social response to rape needs to be measured not just in relation to what occurs in the courts but also in relation to general public attitudes. What is clear is that the epidemic continues because there is a willfully inadequate response to it, in which other concerns trump the concern for the harm to victims. The individuals who survive assault are too often viewed as so much collateral damage to the larger necessity of protecting the religious institution, or maintaining military morale, or even just winning the football tournament.
Hence, it makes more sense to say that many if not most societies manage the problem – that is, manage the accusers and their allies – without making a serious attempt to change the status quo. Tackling the problem in a serious way would require challenging many conventional ideas and norms of heterosexuality and gender identity that excuse or romanticize rape as a form of strong desire or normative masculinity or an inevitable feature of certain kinds of interactions or living situations. Too often a case becomes newsworthy only when it serves some other agenda that has nothing to do with ending sexual violence, such as anti-black or anti-Mexican racism, or homophobia, or imperial military operations, or a backlash against working mothers who put their children in childcare, or just stoking media ratings by covering celebrities. When the issue is “just” about the usual occurrences of sexual violations within relationships, marriages, families, and neighborhoods, there is little coverage. This generates a widespread fatalism.
Today, in the wake of the new social movements against rape emerging in many societies, opposition and skepticism are coming from diverse quarters. The new movements worry some because they seem to threaten or at least be at odds with the attempt to promote sex-positive radicalism or to explore power in sexual play. Every effort of anti-rape reform, from admonishing rape-jokes, to requiring “affirmative consent,” to changing the rules about burden of proof, is met with powerful criticism, and the critics are not always conservative. Liberal comedians, alt- and indie writers, even some academic feminists, suggest that the movement against sexual violence is creating a social panic, legitimating revenge, vilifying molesters beyond all reasonableness, and creating a slippery slope leading to sex-negative attitudes and traditional moralism.
It is difficult to avoid surmising that these critics don't take the problem of sexual violence as seriously as they take the problems that reform efforts might cause. This could be explained as due to some skepticism about the scope of the problem itself, and/or the real reasons behind the increase in accusations. Chloë Taylor (2009a, 2009b), for example, raises questions about whether rape always caused trauma in past historical periods, and Laura Kipnis (2017) suggests that young women have become enamored with the idea that they have no agency. Such critics rarely explore the memoirs such as Tricia Rose or many others provide.
What is needed is an approach that will accept the legitimacy of complicating questions about the problems we face without in any way downplaying the deep effects that our sexist sexual cultures have on our sexual subjectivities (Heberle 1996). I find most of the skeptics like Kipnis to be wrong-headed, but this does not mean that how we understand the nature of the problem is cut and dried. Acknowledging the need for complexity is crucial in order to better understand the nature of the problem as well as to craft an effective political response to the skeptics. The nature of human experience is a complicated feedback loop involving cultural conventions, discourses, beliefs, and practices, as I will explore in chapter 2. Language and concepts affect not only whether we can prosecute, but also how we engage one another and experience our lives. The swiftness of this revolution has found our available concepts, at times, ill matched to the needs of victims.
Despite the many obstacles to social change, there is a growing global tide of activism against rape and sexual violence that has been made possible by victims who have spoken out and insisted that their lives and experiences and rage become visible in our public culture. Whether they make legal charges, create performance art, organize demonstrations, or use anonymous forms of social media, we can no longer escape the fact of their presence or their call – their demand – for change. Their discourse has provided a catalyst, and has been experienced like a bomb thrown against cherished institutions and cultural ways of life. Finally, the daily barrage of sexual violations in our communities is becoming a public issue that cannot be ignored.
Yet the mainstream response often takes the form of discrediting, minimizing, or deflection to another agenda. To make survivor speech as politically effective as possible, we need to consider the conditions and context of its reception, interpretation, and uptake. In particular, as I will argue throughout this book, we need better accounts of the nature of the experiences of rape and sexual violence, and we need to help the wider publics become more sophisticated in their understanding of the ways in which the speech of survivors is packaged, interpreted, and sometimes willfully misinterpreted and summarily discredited.
I have been working in this area for nearly three decades, both as a philosopher and as an activist. My activism has been generally of the rank-and-file sort, though on occasion I have been able to help revise college procedures, push for reforms, and organize events. But my activism has also taken the form of philosophical writing and speaking in order to help develop a better assessment of the public media and cultures as well as a better feminist response.
As mentioned above, I am also a survivor, and have written and spoken publicly as such for many years in a variety of contexts, from the local news, to political rallies, PTA meetings, and academic conferences. Thus I've witnessed first hand the sorts of problematic responses survivors are likely to encounter when we dare to speak in public, which can range from harassment to accusations of anti-male bias to confessions of titillation by the topic. Like many women, I've had more than one experience of violation in my life. The first, and worst, was at the age of nine, an event that lacked all ambiguity. It took 20 years before I could speak to anyone about it and, sometime after this breakthrough, I found myself going public in a Take Back the Night march. The plan was for the survivors in the march to wear black armbands to signify in a public way the scope of the problem. Whether any particular survivor participated was up to us, but I felt the call to help, to make the collective act as strong as it could be. It was a small act to simply wear a band over my sleeve, but it felt like an important opportunity for solidarity and defiance. As I accepted the armband, my mouth went dry, I began to shake, and I could sense panic on the horizon. In an instant, my capable, mature self was transformed into the child who was threatened with violence if she ever told. But I managed to do it nonetheless, to stay in the march, and hold myself together. I regret to report that it does not get easier with time.
Sexual Violation
This book will argue that we need to complexify our understanding of what counts as sexual violence and move away from simplistic binary categories and simplistic claims that rape is about power but not sex. In fact, it is not always about violence in the usual sense; thus, I will suggest we use the larger rubric of sexual violation to make clear that our concern is broader than what used to be called “forcible rape,” or an action that is physically coerced. To violate is to infringe upon someone, to transgress, and it can also mean to rupture or break. Violations can happen with stealth, with manipulation, with soft words and a gentle touch to a child, or an employee, or anyone who is significantly vulnerable to the offices of others. Sometimes the phrase “sexual violence” is used as a metaphor to stretch its meaning to encompass such events, but this is misleading. Violence is not determinative of what we are after. What we are concerned with is a violation of sexual agency, of subjectivity, of our will. We should also be concerned with the ways in which our will has been formed.
Sexual violation is just as complex a phenomenon as any domain of meaningful human experience. There is often a long process in which we mull over how to understand and assess the event, sometimes with the help of others. Just as we may reassess our relationships and our family experiences throughout our lives, we may at times change our understanding of the meaning of an event of sexual violation. And such changes can carry changes in affect as well. Advocates and therapists often describe their work with survivors as turning shame into anger, or fatalist desolation into the capacity for regaining one's self-regard.
It continues to be a mark against the credibility of an accuser, however, if there is even a whisper of change in their assessment of an event. Some take this to be proof of susceptibility to suggestion, fickleness, ulterior motives. Yet, what we are interpreting – trying sometimes desperately to make sense of – is not a blank slate that can be given any meaning whatsoever. Bodily experiences are not infinitely malleable, and those that involve bodily parts as uniquely sensitive and important as sexual organs have a meaningful content that cannot be manipulated at will, whether by feminist therapists or conservative cultures or new discursive formations. Fundamentally, sexual violations occur in the whole human being, body and mind, and are not just “in the head,” open to any meaning we give them. As Susan Brison memorably explains, rape trauma “not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind, but also remains in the body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic event” (Brison 2002: x).
These complexities of human experience suggest that theorists and philosophers do indeed have a role to play in understanding sexual violence and expanding (and refining) the concepts we use to describe it. Sexual violations also, as Brison argues, have a lot to teach philosophers about the relational and embodied nature of the self. Hence, this is not a domain simply for psychologists or sociologists or jurisprudence. Philosophers have been working on the topic of rape for more than four decades, largely engaging with the development and definition of new terms, like “date rape” and “sexual harassment,” as well as clarifying and fine-tuning old terms, like “consent” and “coercion” (see, e.g., Foa 1977; Pineau 1989; Kazan 1998; Burgess-Jackson 1999a; Cahill 2001) The struggle around sexual violence has played out perhaps most significantly in our linguistic environments, changing both our legal terms and everyday discourse, the way we name and categorize our experiences, and the way we classify and prosecute offenses.
The United States finally changed its definition of rape in 2013 to include other orifices besides the vagina, making it possible to include male victims. It is astounding that, until very recently, statistics were not kept on male victims, prisons were not monitored, and legal charges could only be represented as battery (Kramer 1998; Federal Bureau of Investigation 2013; Javaid 2014). Changing definitions affects the possibility of resistance, as well as the way in which we understand the harm. It is common for older generations of women to name coercive sexual experiences very differently than younger generations, often with a strong measure of fatalism, as just “part of growing up,” or “just one of the dangers of being born female,” as I was told. Melania Trump, the wife of Donald Trump, described her husband's braggadocio about groping as just “boy-talk,” a version of the fatalist “boys will be boys” idea.
The concepts we use for sexual violence vary not only diachronically, across the generations, but also synchronically, across cultures and societies, as I discuss in chapter 5. Global variation in the definition of rape captures a different range of events, making statistics impossible to tabulate. In the past, what we today call rape was often classified as “seduction,” but it included consensual acts outside of marriage. For these reasons, and because of the obstacles victims perpetually face in speaking out, we cannot really claim to know to what extent the problem has existed in the past, or to what extent it crosses all cultures today. Steven Pinker (2011) has recently claimed that violence over the long expanse of human history has significantly decreased, but such ideas really have no evidentiary basis, certainly not in this domain of violence.
In the face of this linguistic chaos, theorists and philosophers sometimes try to impose conceptual and terminological order. Certainly, for the purposes of the law, one needs clearly defined terms with a specifiable scope and reference, but I will argue in chapter 1 that it is a mistake to designate the legal arena as the principal site for redressing the problem of sexual violations. The aim of courts is to establish individual culpability, while advocates, scholars, and victims and their supporters are more often interested in social change, analysis, and understanding. The low incidence of reporting (over 90% are never reported) reduces the efficacy of the law as a deterrent, and the problematic legal arenas around the world – including policing and court practices as well as carceral injustice – are in fact a significant cause of the meager reporting. Moreover, the tightly constrained discursive space available in a courtroom is not a conducive arena for the work of transforming our language. Solicitors are concerned with outcomes when they speak to juries or to judges, a fact that encourages them to play to existing presumptions.
Thus, our approach to the concepts of sexual violence should not be conflated with a project in the philosophy of law or the efforts of legal reform. The test for new concepts should first be in helping us to understand the phenomenon and hear the words of survivors with more clarity. In general, we should stop taking the domain of the courts as the sole arena for pursuing truth, a tendency with ill effects on public discourses about rape. The fact that a case is unsuccessfully prosecuted in the courts does not mean that it has no merit or that the claimant is making a false accusation. In reality, the ability to gain a conviction depends on many variables which have nothing to do with the truthfulness of the case but rather concerns the presentation of the accuser and the accused, the prejudices of juries and prosecutors, and the vagaries of evidentiary standards. Hence, the legal domain should never be taken as the privileged route to truth or as the only domain with a concern for the truth. Both assumptions are mistaken.
Theoretical work on rape and sexual violence should, then, range beyond the domain of legal clarifications and reforms. How might we think of the aims of theory in light of both intellectual and activist considerations?
The Problematic of Foucault
Engaging with Foucault's work on these topics turns out to be helpful in a surprising sense. In essence, I'll argue, the public's perception of the constitutive role of language in forming our experiences – that is, the claim that it is feminism itself that is producing inflated reports – is a version of Foucault's famous claim that discourse plays a constitutive role in our experience, that, as he put it, discourses are not merely “groups of signs” but “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972: 49). Feminist theories on rape must address this directly, as I shall do in this book.
Moreover, engaging with Foucault's work is helpful in another sense. He made mistakes but he also got several things right, for example, about the reflexive nature or feedback loop of language and experience as well as discourses and practices, about the peculiar modern concern with normality and normalization, about the need to analyze conventions of speaking that differentially distribute roles and authority, and about the ways in which knowledges are bound up with power. Foucault was quite wrong about rape, but his acute analyses of power and his liberatory agenda in regard to “technologies of the self” make him a perhaps unwitting ally, as I will argue in chapters 3 and 4. It would be useful to consider his idea that our goal cannot simply be to reformulate new norms of sexual practice, or new notions of the normal, but must also consider how a given discursive climate impacts “the consciousness one has of what one is doing, what one makes of an experience, and the value one attaches to it” (1989: 322). Feminist theories of rape and sexual violence, I'll conclude, need to think both with Foucault and beyond him in order to construct more creative and effective approaches to reducing sexual violence.
Most feminists agree that Foucault was just wrong in the few statements he made explicitly about rape. He held that rape should be treated analogously to burglary or battery, and hence drained of any association with sex. Amazingly, given his own attentiveness to power, Foucault took a simplistic approach to the issue of consent. He suggested in more than one place that sex between adults and young people, even children, might be harmless away from the effect of normalizing inducements of shame and guilt. Chapter 3 will explore these issues in some detail.
As is often true among the best philosophers, Foucault's mistakes are interesting. His views are not as esoteric as might be imagined, and in some ways, oddly enough, his writings on sex have tapped into the zeitgeist. This is a further reason to explore them.
A main cause of our contemporary confusion about the actual nature and scope of sexual violence has to do precisely with the role of language in affecting experience. The claim that feminists have created the epidemic out of whole cloth is, of course, a patriarchal illusion, and yet feminists well know that the available languages for naming, accusing, and explaining play a role in some aspects of the experience. Believing that an event is “my own fault” renders its phenomenality different from understanding it to be completely undeserved. Characterizing an aggressor to be operating out of choice or volition rather than unstoppable hormones can make a difference akin to the difference between natural and human disasters. Natural disasters, in general, do not generate rage, humiliation, shame, or remorse.
The way a society thinks about sex can play a role in the erasure, justification, trivialization, rationalization, and cover-up of rape. Thus feminism has had a role in producing the epidemic by agitating to create rage when this is necessary for self-regard, self-respect, and social change. But it would be a mistake to think that there is a stable “reality” of rape while the theorists and poets and courts fight over the language. We should not assume that the meaning of our experiences unfolds unperturbed by discursive contexts.
To theorize rape after Foucault calls on us to grapple with the constitutive nature of discourses, but this opens a Pandora's box of potential relativism as well as new opportunities for dismissing the high incidence of claims. Foucault infamously suggested that, before the era of scientia sexualis and the legal codifications of perversity, monetary exchanges between village men and small girls for the purposes of procuring some fondling were petty and trivial events. David L. Riegel is among those who have generalized from such ideas to claim that “much of what we read in victimologically oriented writings as well as the media concerns men who retrospectively view their sexually expressed boyhood relationships with older males as negative and abusive” (2007: 35, emphasis added). Riegel calls this retrospective reevaluation the result of “pervasive brainwashing,” claiming that it is “only the interference of outside parties” that produces the emotional trauma that survivors experience. It is not the event itself that introduces shame and guilt but the idea that sexual interaction with adults is abnormal and immoral (2007: 35).
Riegel's view that severe emotional trauma from adult/child sex is “vanishingly rare” may not be widely shared, but his view that a “victimologically oriented” media has had a distorting effect on a wide set of sexual experiences is much more commonplace (see, e.g., Angelides 2004). Numerous feminists have shared Naomi Wolf's view that we have been overplaying women's victimization (see Wolf 1994). And the wide support for Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, both of whom engaged in sex with minors, in Polanski's case involving a manipulative administration of drugs, should demonstrate that Riegel's views are not really relegated to the fringe (see Toobin 2009; Geimer & Silver 2013).1 Many who flock to their movies think neither Allen nor Polanski did anything wrong, while others believe the harm was minimal. Gayle Rubin's influential essay “Thinking Sex” (1984), a mainstay of women's studies courses, portrays pedophiles as unfairly victimized by normalizing witch-hunts; I'll explore her views in depth in chapter 3. In truth, the uncertainty and disagreement about many aspects of sexual violence and coercion include even those concerning minors.
Foucault's account of regimes of power/knowledge is helpful here, by bringing into relief the contingent and variable character of our problematizations, or the way in which issues of concern are formulated. Absolutist claims, whether they come from religious institutions or the latest psychotherapy, arouse legitimate skepticism as to whether they are quite so objective as they claim. Furthermore, Foucault's diagnosis of the focus on “normality” also sheds light on our current controversies. He suggested that research into the normal produced not only negative judgments but also forms of resistance presented as new “corrected” versions of the normal. The subsequent proliferation of competing norms has produced a conflict and contestation that has given rise to the uncertainty that exists today. The unquestioned assumption behind this uncertainty, Foucault suggests, is the desire “to know.”
Foucault persuasively argued that bringing sex into the realm of scientific research, a fairly recent phenomenon, enhanced the surveillance operations of the state. This has worked primarily through the idea that there are identifiable “norms” of sexual practice and desire. I will argue that feminists can unite with Foucault in rejecting the pursuit of the “normal,” but that the identification of violation does not, in fact, require that we produce an account of what is normal in regard to human sexuality. Although any account of sexual violation will be necessarily normative, the grounds of these normative considerations need not be tied to ideas about what is “normal.” Hence, the project of resistance requires a new agenda, a different problematization.
An Agenda for Theory
This book both formulates and addresses a set of programmatic questions concerning the nature of experience and the strategies of resistance vital for the movement against sexual violence to move forward. These questions are as follows:
How do we come to name our experiences? In particular, how should we understand the process of naming our experiences given the reflexive relation between language and experience?
Given that the very concept of sexual violation is a normative one, how should we go about norming our sexual practices? How can we do this without inscribing new hierarchies of practice that vilify sexual minorities?
How should we come to terms with the cultural variety of sexual norms, practices, and concepts? How can we navigate these differences without replicating racist and colonialist approaches?
Given that speaking out is a critical tool for changing the wider public's understanding of and support for social change, how can we improve the conditions of reception that survivors experience?
How can we maintain a concern for truth while ensuring that survivors receive a fair hearing? In other words, how can we rectify the ways in which survivors are so often wrongly judged as lacking even while we retain the critical importance of epistemically evaluating both our own and other's claims?
Given how often the concern with rape is hijacked to support other agendas, such as racism, colonialism, religious hatred, and so on, how can we enhance attention to the intersectional dimensions of the problem? How can the many highly publicized cases of sexual violence that might support racist agendas be addressed differently without in any way downplaying the real harms of rape?
Chapter 1, “Global Resistance: A New Agenda for Theory,” presents an overview of how the current heightened visibility of the epidemic has come about. It shows how important the speech of survivors has been, but also how politically variant the responses to this speech continue to be. From this I develop an agenda for theorists, making use of José Medina's concepts of meta-lucidity, epistemic friction, and echoing. These concepts will help us to analyze and reform the conditions of reception in the public domain.
Chapter 2, “The Thorny Question of Experience,” focuses on the complex process in which we come to name and interpret our lived experience. Rather than stonewalling critics who believe that feminist discourse may affect how we experience events, feminist theorists need to address the question of reflexive effects of language and ideas. I use a range of concepts from William James, Foucault, and others to argue for a mediated notion of experience that avoids relativism. Against the concept of “scripts” that individuals simply follow, I make use of the concept of “affordances” in which perception is understood to be enactive and agential.
Chapter 3, “Norming Sexual Practices,” tackles the vexed question of norms. I argue against some of Foucault's followers that the elaboration of norms does not implicate us in concepts of the normal. I look carefully at Foucault's own views about rape, as well as Gayle Rubin's influential Foucauldian version of a resistance to norms. I argue that the libertarianism characteristic of Rubin's position is un-Foucauldian, implausible, and simply an avoidance strategy for addressing the difficult questions we need to face about sex.
Chapter 4, “Sexual Subjectivity,” develops an alternative to the libertarian approach yet argues for an open-ended pluralism in regard to the possibilities for our sexual lives. I argue that the key way to understand the harm of sexual violation is in terms of its effects on our sexual agency and thus our subjectivity, a concept I elaborate here. I develop the concept in part through a discussion of consent, desire, pleasure, and the will. I also give here an account of the history of the use of the concept of consent, and the dangers of an over-reliance on this concept.
Chapter 5, “Decolonizing Terms,” explores further the contentions among feminists as well as the public at large about three important concepts: consent, victim, and honor. I trace out the sources of controversy in regard to each of these concepts, and show that the controversies are connected to the ways in which connotations and operative meanings are tied to geographical and geo-political location. Based on this, I develop an argument against the idea that we should seek to establish a universal meta-language or set of common global definitions. Instead, I argue for a decentralized approach that maintains an attentiveness to the hermeneutic variation of meanings and the diverse political effects of terms.
Chapter 6, “Speaking ‘as’,” takes up the question of speaking about sexual violations in the first-person register. In this chapter, which is developed from a paper I originally co-authored with Laura Gray-Rosendale, we explore the question of speaking as a survivor in light of Foucault's critique of the confessional mode of speech. We argue that the lesson of Foucault's critique is not to avoid “confessional” speech in all cases, but to consider the conditions in which we speak. We also begin to formulate ideas about how to enable the maximum subversiveness of survivor speech, sometimes through guerrilla tactics.
Chapter 7
