It's not a posting week or time at all, but I thought everybody should see this

A friend of mine shared this link on her facebook page, it is 21 photos of men holding up signs that quote what their rapists said to them or what was said when they tried to seek help.
It is sad and sort of triggering so please read with caution and self-care if needed, but I thought it was important to show this because we are all aware of how many men suffer in silence because of rape myths and heteronormative stereotypes.

21 Men Holding Signs Quoting Their Rapist

The World I Want to Live In

When dealing with those who are “a threat to our safety and security”, I feel as though incarceration and the prison (as an institution) does not provide a solution to address these social issues – if anything, it would only re-individualize a potentially political problem. Perhaps this is why Angela Davis’ suggestion for a prison abolition movement intrigues me so much. Especially as she goes on to explain that the prison, as a means to contain and control violence, is itself a space of violence that functions as a racist repression of gender and sexuality. Looking at the prison as a “gendering apparatus,” it takes into account the violence that is inflicted on people who are different and refuse to subscribe to the gender binary or to compulsory heterosexuality such as trans*, lesbians, gay men, and so on... “so that you might say that the prison is this institution that is grounded, in so many ways, in violence.” It is ultimately still about (gendered) power, and therefore nothing has been solved, and nothing has been changed – except of course, that violence has been perpetuated and reinforced through such a “solution.”

Again, I find that having to use violence against violence can be problematic – nobody should have to perpetuate such a destructive cycle that never ends. As an intervention into this cycle, Davis highlights the importance of engaging in a national conversation on true alternatives, which can help de-individualize and politicize these social problems. As pointed out by Davis, I truly believe that education can be a powerful tool for change and as a form of intervention within this cycle of violence. And I see this within my CSL placement with the GBVPP’s gender inclusive bathroom initiative, where we educate others (especially those who are unsupportive or unaware) about the gendered violence that can potentially happen within these gender segregated spaces and how we can then interrupt this “script” by creating a space that does not tolerate or perpetuate the cycle of violence. So far, education as a tool has been a very empowering experience for myself (so much so that we were able to make an impact, no matter the size, on people's responsiveness to the initiative).  

I know that we must also be skeptical of a complete abolition of prisons, but there is value in what this movement stands for. And the question that we must consider is "what does this mean for those who do in fact perpetrate violence?" Part of my answer is that I hope that by providing alternatives such as education can help serve as an early intervention before people become perpetrators of violence. 

But I do not have an answer – and though I cannot wish away the violence that does happen day to day nor can I entirely change world we live in, what I do believe in is “a movement for a better world, for a different society, for a world that does not need to depend on prisons, because the kind of institutes that provide – that serve people’s needs will be available.”

 

Thank you!

 Reference:

Goodman, A., & Gonzalez, J. (2012, October 19). Angela Davis on the Prison Abolishment Movement, Frederick Douglass, the 40th Anniversary of Her Arrest and President Obama’s First Two Years. Democracynow.com. Retrieved November 16, 2013, from http://www. democracynow.org/2010/10/19/angela_davis _on_the_prison_abolishment.

Response Alternatives: Community-Based Radical Violence

As many of you have addressed in your blog entries already, Angela Davis unsettles the way feminists have approached sexual assault. Despite the major feminist contribution to sexual assault activism being  law reform Davis questions the state’s involvement when it comes to  intervening in violence against women. According to Davis, the prison industrial complex only reiterates the structural and  hegemonic violence.   This leads us to the question asked in class: what would it mean to take prison abolition seriously when thinking about sexual assault?

 

Following Davis’ Democracy Now interview, we’ve discussed education and re-education as a potential alternative (or preventative) to incarceration. This is a valuable intervention, but it doesn’t immediately abolish the prison system. Following Emily’s blog post I was wondering about other feminist ‘alternatives to police’ we might advocate for. Inspired by the film Born in Flames, I thought the best alternative into sexual assault might actually be a vigilante collective response--literally bashing back.

What if communities held individuals accountable through violence? If the survivor felt it was appropriate a collective, violent response to their perpetrator was enacted.

Davis argues that the prison industrial complex is a product of violent structures, and should be abolished because of its perpetuation of violence. But what if there was a violence outside of this structure? What if violence against perps was radically not sexist, racist, transphobic, and heterosexist? I’d like to believe that bashing-back violence could be removed from an inherently oppressive structural violence, and instead is a revolutionary violence--retribution of the oppressed.

Our CSL project aims to prevent perpetrators by advocating for consent. While I am excited about our project, it is limited by advocating for consent at the level of the individual. What if our CSL project advocated for bashing back, collective accountability and responsive violence  instead of consent between two individuals? It would be radical and would paint feminists as aggressive. But maybe it would also breathe life into the powerful victim figure that Mardorossian suggested we return to--a power that comes from collective response.

These are my twisted desires for community response. I leave you now with this 10 second tune from every Albertan feminist's fav radical band, Rape Revenge.

CSL Group Activism Project Update!

This week has been very successful for all of us working with the Gender-Based Violence Prevention Project! Just as a bit of a recap, our group activism project is a series of consent-based light projections on campus. Danielle was able to capture some really cool photos of the project so far, and I updated our tumblr site with the contents.

The first posters we projected are from a really amazing group of students at the New College of Florida. What is really cool about this, is that these students have found our project online and connected with us, supporting what we are doing.

In just a few posts, talking about the Gender Based Violence Prevention Project, the posters we used, and our project specifically, we were able to create some really cool online discourse in the Edmonton community, as well as abroad! Our documentation post has 93 notes so far, in just less than a week. It might not seem like a ton of feedback (especially when a lot of online feminist projects get close to thousands of shares, but the reblogs and likes are coming from all around the world and I think that's really cool.

Our projections are coming along well and I am really happy with the results we are starting to see, and the discourse we are creating. I'm starting to realize just how important media can be to activist projects, and how critical it can be to the success and awareness of a project, and I am hoping to develop more strategies to become more effective using media. 

Finally, please check out our site and signal boost it to the people you know. Our URL is consentsquadron.tumblr.com

Restitution

Restitution

I wanted to answer the question "Is restitution the solution??" that was asked in class however I had too much to say so I will type it on here instead. In my visits to the court house I never saw restitution given as punishment for crimes committed. However the one major trial I witnessed multiple sexual assaults occurred and the decision for that trial has not yet been made. Also this woman had experienced these assaults twenty years ago, so even if she did receive restitution, what would make up for the horrendous crimes committed and who would make that decision. If I had something so terrible done to me so long ago I am not sure that restitution would cure the years of depression that I would have experienced.

Also as Lise pointed out in class it says to women that we cannot prevent the crime, it is inevitable, we can only try and make up for it after the fact. I think we need to start by educating our youth at a very young age, I have met some eleven year olds that are more vulgar then anyone I know. If they can talk about such intimate topics so young, then that is the time we need to be educating them about consent, it should be a mandatory class over the course of their entire schooling.

Also we need to have police officers that take sexual assault claims seriously, which means doing an undercover investigation to find the views that current officers hold, and holding training sessions for properly dealing with victims of sexual violence. Mistreatment by police officers is a huge phenomenon in the law enforcement industry where patriarchy is still a key player as noted by Angela Davis.
With much more difficulty we should also try to address rape culture in the media. This involves cutting out women being taken advantage of, beautifying of women corpses, using women as inanimate objects or booty shaking eye candies in music videos, and anything else you can think of that shows women as objects deserving of abuse.

If and only if all of these methods have been put in place can we begin to think about the importance of restitution for making up for sexual assaults against black women, white women, transgendered individuals, children, and yes men also. I think this crime is definitely enforced through our patriarchal misogynist heteronormative culture, but we need to fight that when people are young, not after 30 years of being brainwashed into believing their actions to be justified. It might take a few decades but I do not know what else to do?

Miscommunication and Sexual Assault

As part of my CSL placement at the Sexual Assault Centre on campus I am a member of the education committee. Last week I did my first presentation to a group of Graduate Education Psychology students. As a part of the workshop we unpack some of the myths and stereotypes the media presents to us about the issue of sexual assault. As my co-facilitator and I were debunking the myth that acquaintance sexual assault happens because of a miscommunication, one member of the audience challenged us on that point. Their argument was that there are many studies that note the fallibility of communication and how sometimes signals can be crossed. In our workshop we assert that “survivors always communicate some form of ‘no’ in a sexual assault situation and all of us are aware when the person we are with does not want to engage in sexual activity, or wants to stop, regardless of whether the person verbally says the word ‘no’ or not.” (ctd. in Working for Change, 2013)

 First this obviously shows us is that when we cite studies on an issue as fraught as sexual assault there’s going to be research that fall on both sides of the fence. Beyond that though it also demonstrates why sexual assault is such a difficult subject to grapple with on a social level because of hegemonic understandings of heteronormative interaction.

Indicators of non-consent, be they verbal or behavioral, are quite attributed to playing coy, particularly in a heterosexual interaction. There’s this idea that women are “playing hard to get” when they flirt with a man, and are warned not to “give it up” too easily. These messages of what constitutes good feminine sexuality reinforce ideas that we have discussed in class. In her article Hakvag quotes Hird and Jackson saying “young women’s sexuality is defined by is absence and [their] sexual desire is framed by the accommodation of male desire.” Hakvag also discusses the notion of sex as property and takes issue with this understanding of sex as gift, which plays into one of the discourses of heterosexuality that Gavey mentions, the have-hold discourse. These normative discourses form, as Gavey terms it, the “scaffolding of rape” and create a culture in which a women’s signs of non-consent are simply dismissed as playing coy. But I do not think such dismissals can be equated with a miscommunication. It demonstrates an understanding of, “I know this person is refusing this sexual attention, but they’re just playing hard to get -- I know what they really want.”

I can see the appeal of attributing a sexual assault to a miscommunication; no one is at fault, it was just an accident. But such an understanding has the potential to minimize a survivor’s experience. Therefore while I can see the value of challenging absolutist statements (like that from the SAC presentation, “survivors always communicate no”)  in an academic setting. After all, as this class has shown us, sexual assault is not as cut and dry as the SAC represents it; however, for the context of the work we do at the centre supporting survivors I think it is incredibly important that we take a position that leaves no doubt that we are there for the survivor one hundred percent.

Works Cited

Gavey, Nicole. “Unsexy Sex: Unwanted Sex, Sexual Coercion and Rape,” Just Sex?: The Cultural Scaffolding of   Rape (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 136-165.

Hakvåg, Hedda H. “Does Yes Mean Yes?: Exploring Sexual Coercion in Normative Heterosexuality”. Canadian Woman Studies(2009), 28(1), 121-126.

McCaw, J. & Senn, C. (1998). “Perception of Cues in Conflictual Dating Situations: A Test of The Miscommunication Hypothesis.” Violence Against Women, 4(5): 609-624.

The Construction of Male Masculinity on Campuses

I have chosen to do my blog post this week on the construction of male masculinity solely based on the fact that it is the foundation for my paper. I have done some research on this topic and would like some insight on the topic from my fellow classmates. With much of my research there has been ample indication that the construction of the dominant hegemonic form of male masculinity is largely due to to the  large amount of fear many men have about being judged and not accepted by their male peers. Where these fears “often lead to a certain homosocial element within any heterosexual encounter: men often will use their sexual conquests as a form of currency to gain status among other men” (Kimmel, pg 147). 

With the majority of these ‘conquests’ taking place around university campuses and during the time when male bonding is at its peak (involvement in clubs, sports, fraternities and the like) we can see why there is an increased pressure to acknowledge the importance of sexual assault on campuses and university communities. Based on the “deeply rooted fear of other men” (Kimmel, 145), many males engage in homosocial bonding such as binge drinking and high risk taking behaviours that “enable them [men]  to establish their reputations with other men and to mark off the distinctions between themselves and women” (Razack, pg 108).This is where the sexualization of female bodies comes into play.  By targeting women and coercing sexual interests that lead to sexual assault, they are confirming their hegemonic masculinity to their male peers, at the same time rejecting any notion of homosexuality.

It has been suggested that sexual safety policies should be put in place on campuses  to reduce the the incidences of sexual assault that is brought on by these instances. Such polices include education and responsibility of safe sex practices. Is this a considerable solution?   If any, what other types of policies should also be put in place by the University communities to decrease the social implications generated by the construction of male masculinity? Why or why not? 

References

Buchwald, E., Fletcher, P. R., & Roth, M. (2005). Transforming a rape culture / edited by Emilie Buchwald, Pamela Fletcher, and Martha Roth. Minneapolis, Minn. : Milkweed Editions, 2005. 

Razack. S. (2000). Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George. Canadian Journal of Law and Society. Vol 15(2); pp 91-130.