Fem+Rhet

Rape Discourse, Foucault, and Power--Amber's presentation

As a scholar, I feel bound to certain discourses "raise awareness" or "change the culture" or "people need to talk about rape more" but that suggests that there is nothing new to say about rape. And if there is nothing new to say, then there is nothing new to know. Which means prevention is either the least of our worries or a reality we can actually meet but haven't yet. This means we find ourselves in a paradox: if we can't talk about everything other than what we talked about, and our goal is to change things, which i say because there is rape currently, then how are we going to change things by talking about the same things we always talk about? What is troubling then is how Foucault's notion, no matter how troubling, was resisted in a way to throw its assertion off the table rather than really deal with its potential.

We find ourselves in the same pickle as other identity based movements, scholarship, activism etc. how does one talk about rape without being

have to talk about it as self in relation to actual or physical rape instead of in relation to a culture of rape. Within a culture of rape anyone can talk about rape, but in dealing with rape as it manifests in dominant discourse, one can talk about it only as an identity marker.

Has the scholarship on rape culture actually expanded the ethos of rape? This is the feminist mantra "the personal is political" gone awry.

I'm using Cuklanz mainly for her recap of feminist literature on rape and its relationship with media. She explains that early feminist lit attempted to redefine the crime, its perpetrators, and its victims in order to align social notions of rape with feminist reformulations. These anti-rape activists formulated counterformulations of rape for popular circulation. What Cuklanz determines from analysis of prime time tv ten years after the bulk of feminist publication is that these counterformluations did not displace traditional myths or representations of rape, in which it is 1) perpetrated by a stranger, 2) the woman is violently assaulted to the point of near death, and 3) the woman asked for it through provocative behavior or dress. Thus, despite the work feminists did, public depictions of rape on prime time circulated the traditional view of rape, targeting sympathetic masculinity as the potential reformer of rape.
 * Cuklanz, Lisa M. "The Masculine Ideal: Rape on Prime-Time Television, 1976-1978." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998) 423-448.**

Feminists argues that the "traditional understanding of rape, written into legal codes and judicial practices, fostered a cultural context in which victims rather than defendants were placed on trial and where victims were forced to demonstrate moral purity while the defendants sexual history was deemed irrelevant" (424). This quote highlights the social setting that hosted the anit-rape and legal code rape debate. Indeed, it is easy to see why feminists took the position that they did and how they attempted to transform the cultural mythos of rape. What is perhaps less clear is why, despite this information and their coutnerformulation efforts, prime time would still promulgate the mythos in spite of feminists efforts.

And, more importantly for what I want to explore in my presentation, it is clearer why Michel Foucault would have posed the question "why isn't rape the same as a punch in the face" which spurred a return to the heated debate.


 * Henderson, Holly. "Feminism, Foucault, and Rape: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention." Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (2007) 225-253.**
 * Foucault's argument: poses the question "why isn't rape the same as a punch in the face?" He argues that rape should be a punishable as nothing more than physical violence. "One can always produce the theoretical discourse that amounts to saying: in any case, sexuality can in no circumstance be the object of punishment...It isn't a matter of sexuality, it's the physical violence that would be punished, without bringing in the fact that sexuality was involved" (Henderson 225). This "desexualization" of rape is a conclusion formed by three lines of argument found in Foucault's work: 1) productive power, 2) "denaturalized" account of sex and sexuality, and 3) analysis of the disciplinary effects of power over the body. 1) In //History of Sexuality: Volume 1// Foucault discusses how power has a duel function: it is both juridical and productive, meaning it produces discourses of knowledge, sexuality and subjectivity. This power subjugates citizens because discourse produces the notion of subject and an individual's sense of freedom. 2) Foucault claims that power produces social bodies and realities; sexuality is a historically constructed apparatus. This is taken up in Butler's //Gender Trouble// when she discusses repetition, which creates the "naturalized" coherent whole. In this way, sex becomes a generative discourse. 3) In //Discipline and Punish// Foucault claims that a modern form of power emerged that produced a norm of behavior, which then regulates, controls and normalizes bodies. This is disciplinary power, which is a subtle, quiet, uninterrupted form of power. Norms then become dominant discourses, which is power working itself out on the material body. In his estimation, collapsing rape into assault avoids disciplinary and regulatory effects of power over sexuality. For Foucault, resistance is also a part of the discourse system and that means the same body that discourse conditions is also the site of resistance. The body can only always exist as a cultural and social entity, which Henderson zeros in on as the point at which his treatment of rape as desexualized is most troublesome.
 * Foucault seeks to liberate sexuality from a disciplinary discourse, where the individual is an instrument of social regulation. Desexualization is an attempt to disrupt the regulatory and productive capabilities of power manifest in the law.

Henderson's critique of Foucault: there are gross material difficulties with Foucault: 1) patriarchal underpinnings are unacknowledged, 2) desexualizing rape flies in the face of his work, which highlights the effects of power on bodies, 3) the body is always already enmeshed in a play of power for Foucault, but his conclusion on rape forgets that the body has been naturalized, not a neutral surface, but a //gendered// body.

Henderson's critique of other feminist models: changes in rape discourse, particularly from a legal and political standpoint, happen after rape has already occurred. Legal reforms, for Henderson, are both necessary and important in the prevention of rape and aftermath, but are simply not enough. In feminist's desexualized theories of rape, rape originates in men's aggressive nature, not in sexist society. Brownmiller is circular: women are raped because they are rapable, and women are rapable because they are women, which is what Foucault warns against. This posits a biological reality, which runs counter to the aims of feminism as well. Equity feminist's version, unlike Foucault, does not get at the heart of social meanings, but instead seeks the truth of what rape is really about. This totalizing, structuralist approach simplifies the complex elements that comprise the event. Henderson contends that MacKinnon cuts the potential of resistance in Foucault short.


 * Other feminist's arguments: essentialized notion of rape gain and retain meaning through continued deployment //by// feminism, which means feminism might be reinforcing, not breaking down, sexist and gender-stereotyping assumptions. Anti-rape feminists have polarized into 1) consciousness-raising model that encourages women to speak and tell stories about rape to acknowledge its power as a pervasive, social problem and 2) focuses on police procedures and practices, including the legal definitions of rape.
 * Brownmiller: argues that rape is not about natural or biological need, but political motivation to dominate. Thus, rape is not individual; all men keep all women in a state of fear. In this conception, rape is a violence against a class and marks the membership of either a dominant or submissive mass. Equity feminists: argue for a gender-free notion of rape because rape is more importantly an act of violence, so violence is to be pinpointed in society, not gender. Violence is problem, not culture, structural or economic divisions. Re-sexualized theorists aim to put the sex back in rape because social meaning does not precede rape, but instead reinforces it. Others in this camp claim that the sex is good norm can also be reinforced if we ignore the sexualized aspect of rape. In a sexist society, according to MacKinnon, rape is //always// sexual. Thus, she highlights the conflation of equity with sameness, which runs the risk of viewing gender as similarly situated contextually, historically, economically etc.

Henderson's argument: his question is productive for feminism because 1) it demands self-reflexivity by promoting feminism to problematize naturalized versions of sexual violence; 2) his notion that power "incites, instills, and produces effects in the body" is useful to evaluate feminist responses to rape and aids in the articulation of a politics of feminist agency. For prevention to be successful: rape cannot be theorized as a forgone conclusion, but must be viewed instead as a sequence of events that can be disrupted //before it occurs// because rape discourse configures the female body as weak and violable. By claiming that rape is a physical violence, it comes under the rubric of subject-subject violence, making women equal subjects. So he allows for a subjective repositioning of women. If rape is on a continuum, then moments of women's forceful resistance can be located. This makes agency localized and contextual as well as gives women the option to resist the model of femininity as passive, fearful and weak.

While Foucault is provocative, his question can be answered in two ways by feminists: 1) rape is not like a punch in the face because our sexual parts are so imbued with social meaning that they are not a face, fist or hands so his focus is not appropriate. He overlooks the fact that we inhibit gender: "it is precisely because we live as sexed beings that normative judgments must be made about what it means when our bodies are violated as the gender we inhabit" (249); 2) rape prevention disrupts the biological imperative of women as always already raped or rapable, a fixed reality of women. Foucault is asking after the disciplinary effects of rape discourse, or how rape comes to be realized as the trauma that it is and why being violated in one's sexual parts is different form being violated elsewhere. And his question also seeks out ways that feminist discourse contributes to rape as a natural or self-shattering event. This reconceptualization allows for 1) an active tactic of rape resistance because it positions women's bodies as a direct force of rape; 2) women as strength breaks down a dominance/subordination model, a normative and dominant discourse. Women as strength is an integral aspect of resistance against rape culture. Rape prevention through self-defense offers a physical feminism--a feminism in the flesh.

**Cahill, Ann. "Foucault, Rape and the Construction of the Feminine Body." Hypatia 15.1 (2000): 42-63.** "Foucault's suggested decriminalization of rape as a sexual crime forgets that the very bodies of rape victims are themselves expressions of a given power discourse, and that the act of rape itself, especially given its pervasiveness, is fundamental to the discourse which defines women as inferior and socially expendable. It is precisely these meanings that form women's experience of rape, and any legal consideration of the crime must take them seriously. The real, live, living, breathing women who experience rape and the threat of rape on a daily basis, and whose very bodily behavior and beings are in part formed by the presence of the threat of rape, will not be liberated in any sense by a redefinition of rape which excludes its constitutive and oppressive effects upon their existence" (58). She also points out Brownmiller's claim that the culpability of feminine sexuality is an assumption often part of rape. Indeed, the power behind discourses that constitute femininity is their natural claims. "In other words, given that rape is a constitutive element of women's experience, and that it is a social means of sexual differentiation (such that it has radically different meanings and effects for men and women), it must be approached legally in such a way that its sex specific meanings may be articulated. Foucault's analysis of power, and especially the way in which power discourses act on real, live, living bodies should remind us that the individual women rape victims who prosecute their cases were marked by the threat of rape-simply because they were women-long before their bodies were actually violated, and that their experience of rape is not exhausted (although it is certainly dominated) by the one particular incident which commands the court's attention" (59). "Why is an attack with a penis distinct from an attack with any other body part? Precisely because the attack with the penis is the danger which is at the basis of the specifics of feminine bodily comportment. To desexualize the act of rape, to consider it legally only as any other assault, would be to obfuscate--not to weaken!--its role in the production of the sexual hierarchy through the inscription of individual bodies. Rather than resisting the insistent process of sexualization which Foucault describes and decries, it would in fact support the equally insistent process of sexual hierarchization which places women's bodies at such daily risk" (60). For Cahill, it is important that we reframe rape from the the perspective of the woman being raped...only in this way can we understand the way that rape constitutes the female body.

"I am a "lucky" survivor of a rape committed by a stranger - "lucky", because people believed me, a jury convicted the man of raping me, and he is still in prison ten years later. I know many women who have been raped who were not so fortunate, because they believed the rape was their fault, because no one else believed them, because they knew their rapist, or because they were married to him and it wasn't a crime. We share some things - the anger, the pain, the anguish, the fear - and not others; nevertheless, this is what I wished after I was raped and still wish: Never again, not for any woman. Rape is evil. //This article is dedicated to the survivors, in hopes it will help move us toward the day when never again is closer to being a reality//" (127).
 * Henderson, Lynne. "Rape and Responsibility." //Law & Philosophy// 11 1/2 (1992): 127-178.**

Henderson begins her article with the same implied plea which undercuts Henderson's piece: that rape is located on a line of happening moving into the distance of never happening again; that rape is finite or infinitely possible and that we can control whether it is one or the other.

Hengehold examines Freud's study of Dora's encounter with K, an incident which Freud uses to draw conclusions about women's hysteria involving sexual relations and fear of rape. Hengehold finds in Freud's psychoanlaytic method convenient conclusions that neglect the role the father, as a potential rapist, plays in Dora's construction of her fear. Here she turn to Lacan, whom compliments Freud's work by seeking answers to the female structure in order to illuminate teh male structure. Following Foucault's insistence that power has physical and discursive implications, we can see how hysteria is the product of an exercise of power whose impact is brutally repressive. Hengehold claims "To understand rape as a kind of situation which disqualifies the speech of a subject by forcing her to reveal herself as fragmented (as that which is most inadequate to the subject-signifier), reveals the extent to which rape serves as a real horizon for women's psychology (60-61).
 * Laura Hengehold. "Rape and Communicative Agency: Reflections at the Lake of L--." Hypatia 8.4 (1993): 56-71.**

Lacan is central to Hengehold because "Lacanian psychoanalytic theory understands the subject to be constituted within a linguistic community, it cannot help but recognize that language involves not only rules of association but also rules for appropriate speech situations and rules by which self-presentation can be judged effective or ineffective under certain conditions" (61). She concludes her article: "Dora does not even need to be raped for her parents to disbelieve her. But this always already is only understood gradually, on the basis of experiences or hearsay of actual physical violation and its social consequences. Women are "phallic" until the linguistic medium, the "rule," reveals itself in such a way that they are incapable of proving that they know it any longer. If this structure could be acknowledged in the analytic situation and brought to light, it might contribute to a symbolic resolution of hysterical intentions. However, this would prevent men (Freud included) from understanding women's psychic development as derivative of the male and would force them to confront their own role in the historical production of a symbiotic relationship between discourse and the identification/subjugation of a "different" sex. To elucidate this structure within the philosophical arena may be the first step towards developing an empowering psychology of women" (69).

Thus, for Hengehold, the relationship between women and discourse is understood as a relationship between women and men in which women are marked as different and already flawed.


 * Public discourses of rape:**
 * 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_and_Representation : Wikipedia entry that discusses various cultures of rape that have stemmed from theoretical debates about the act of rape versus the representation of rape.
 * 2) Encyclopedia of Rape by Merril D. Smith (2004).
 * 3) http://www.harpyness.com/2009/04/13/what-we-should-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-rape/ : weblog discussing the ethics of representing rape in popular culture. The main argument is that depicting rape is condoning rape.
 * 4) http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/07/27/date-rape-anthem-whitest-kids-you-knows-we-gun-make-love/ :blog discussing the humorous merits and/or ethical concerns with satirizing rape on popular shows like The Whitest Kids You Know
 * 5) http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/broadcasting-laws-allow-hosts-to-do-whatever-they-want-20090730-e2bx.html :story examining broadcasting laws after an incident in which a 14 yr old was asked questions about her sexual history on air
 * 6) http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.mud.diku/browse_thread/thread/4cc73f2156e7fd07/fc2c1f288277c381?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=rape+in+popular+culture#fc2c1f288277c381 : Google Group thread
 * 7) http://groups.google.com/group/soc.women/browse_thread/thread/dc72d2f01d21dc04/711b04be36367fba?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=rape+in+popular+culture#711b04be36367fba :Google Group thread
 * 8) http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/07/02/zombie_rape/index.html :Salon mobile story thread and response letters
 * 9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6Rie2m_fKY&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideosearch%3Fq%3Drape%2520in%2520media%26hl%3Den%26ned%3Dus%26tab%3Dnv&feature=player_embedded :YouTube video in response to date rape information


 * My argument:** The main point of contention that feminist's have with Foucault's question is that it neglects the reality of women's bodies as being marked, through discourse, as always already rapable. Female sexuality is always in danger of, or in relation to, the act of rape. Thus, desexualizing rape does not address the feminization of the body that can be raped.

Cahill states that "The real, live, living, breathing women who experience rape and the threat of rape on a daily basis, and whose very bodily behavior and beings are in part formed by the presence of the threat of rape, will not be liberated in any sense by a redefinition of rape which excludes its constitutive and oppressive effects upon their existence," meaning that liberation of rape, if such a thing is possible, cannot stem from recoding it to ignore the discourse and actions that create it. Such a feat will only cause more grievous injury to the living women who experience rape. Indeed, Cahill implores us to reframe rape from the perspective of women who have experienced it, in order to better understand the imprint of power and discourse on their feminine body. For Cahill, sexualizing rape is ignoring the cultural symptoms or the violent act as well as perpetuating the power discourse if we choose to recode it. Instead, she recommends putting full attention on rape as an act against women, focusing on the gender construction of identity so as to better understand the subject position of women and men.

What is implicit in this view, however, is that women are victims because they are women, the very point she wishes to avoid. In highlighting that women are the construction of a power discourse, she is limiting the intelligibility of women to a relation of rape: we know women because they are raped, can be raped, and women are made to be raped. What is the benefit of such a proposition? First, that it doesn't try to hide or obfuscate the inter-connectivity of the rhetorical construction of women as a category of gender, as a state of being, as a moving body through a physical world. Second, that it attempts to make rape intelligible only through women, the category she claims is constructed by rape. In this is also its biggest problem: while she acknowledges that men are also raped, she must assume that the category of woman is the only gender defined by rape. Is a male who is known as a rapist or molester also not defined in relation to rape?

While rape may be part of a larger web of power, discourse and gender factors, and it is important to culturally mark the way that each informs, creates and deploys the other, it is dangerous to confine the intelligibility of rape to women and vice verse. In other words, we find in Cahill the very essentialized feminism that purports to identify, analyze and resist assumptions about gender that become normalized, dominant discourse, yet the version of femininity that Cahill conjures is the very same as the one that she wishes to eradicate. This contradiction is not merely a theoretical problem: in the case of femininity and rape, it would not actually disrupt the dominant discourse that allows for rape, thus leaving women still entangled in a web of dangerous physical and emotional subjectivity. For my purposes, I would like to highlight that Cahill puts more emphasis on the women who experience rape, that she finds in them a way to understand how rape is implied in our culture both as violence and gender.

Henderson's call for attention to prevention through self-defense is well articulated and provides feminist with good tools for combating rape as a cultural production of power. Her argument that prevention is the site of productive resistance is interesting and exciting in the potential it offers not only for re-conceiving rape, but also acting against rape. Thus, I hope to make clear that I applaud her contribution and hope that it receives continued attention and implementation. However, what I want to simultaneously highlight is the reductive gesture that prevention theory makes in order to solve the problem of rape.

In prevention theory is the implication that rape can be eradicated if prevented through the right steps. This mean that rape can be eliminated--that as a society, the domination or violence, depending on your theoretical view of rape, we can prevent the behavior from happening once we have found the perfect blend of steps to curb its manifestation. Rape, then is a behavior that can be curbed. This has been the rhetorical underpinnings of other theoretical platforms, mainly homosexuality and addiction. It isn't so strange that all three are rooted in behavior aversion per se. What is strange is that rape, in all its complex manifestations of discursive power, gendered domination and social enactment of violence, can be imagined as a problem that can be permanently fixed. Assuming that rape can be eliminated naively assumes that all the power distributions concurrent within rape can also be solved. That our society can become a state of equity to the point of eradicating rape assumes that our state can shatter hierarchies in power, gender, social standing etc. In short, it would mean the realization of Marx's Communism, X's gender equity and X's racial equity. I hope in saying it this way that I am not being cruel to Henderson's or other's prevention theory, but instead highlighting the dangerousness of the naive implications that found prevention theory.

Is prevention a faulty or naive place to put our efforts? I would argue not at all because the reality is that it is important to take strides to combat the cultural and gendered discourses that allow and reinforce rape. Such an endeavor is never a bad idea. However, putting our efforts there, without maintaining efforts on dealing with rape, has dangerous consequences, including enacting a discursive violence against the raped, who get ignored once they've crossed the threshold of prevention, which under Henderson is the forefront of our concern. What we potentially stand to do then is perpetuate an already dire culture of ignorance and silence surrounding rape. If we prioritize prevention, as opposed to therapy and recovery, then we inadvertently condemn the reality of rape to silence--or to a culture whose purpose is to fight simultaneously the violence of rape and the violence of invisibility. Do we wish to double burden the women who face the aftermath of rape? While I agree with Henderson that femininity must combat the essentialized view of womanhood as already raped, it seems that Henderson adds to this problem the condition that if raped, women are left to deal with it on their own, outside the concern of feminists who are diligently working to prevent future rape.

Indeed, if Foucault is challenging us to conceive of rape without the influence of sexualized discourse at play, then it seems illogical to hinge our conceptions of rape on the hope of a utopia of equity, which survives only by ignoring those that have already sacrificed such a vision. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin.