I’m finding it tough to respond to you this week because you are all dealing with very provocative, yet very different, issues. First, I need to say that I am sorry if the course is causing you distress. It’s really difficult to be in a state of hyper-awareness of rape culture. I am so sorry if your CSL work is difficult; though you are making sense of this discomfort here and talking about it in such productive ways.
Maybe what is most important this week is honesty. I feel so fortunate to be constantly engaged and challenged by you. I appreciate the reminder that personal work is profoundly political, even as I remain wary of the individualization that configures sexual violence in rigidly individualized terms. Some of the most difficult questions for me arise around how to include men as victims. I really struggle with the tensions between tracing gendered power and the great necessity of gender inclusion. The gender-dichotomized framework of second wave feminism is politically and rhetorically powerful, at the same time as the complex gender analysis that Stemple and Weiss begin for us disrupts this simplicity and offers us hope. When we break the equation of men and masculinity and examine the social and cultural conditions that enable and intensify sexual violence, then we can begin to imagine the strategies that would undermine and ultimately minimize the uses of sexual violence.
Marcus' concept of the rapt script is very compelling. At the same tome, I can’t imagine that that recommending that women take their place in a community of violent subjects (the implication of Marcus) would reduce the incidence of sexual violence. In fact, as Stemple suggests, the intensification of sexual violence is linked with inequality and conflict.
We have a fascination with violent and aggressive (and difficult) women (Lynndy England and Karla Homolka are two examples). Women’s violence takes on great symbolic weight, pushing inevitably in the direction of a false equivalence, obscuring and erasing the ongoing problem of male violence against women. There is a tendency to not only condemn feminists for failing to acknowledge women’s violence, but also to blame feminism for erasing violence against men.
A fwew of years ago, an important trans legal theorist whom I deeply admire spoke at UofA. Dean Spade suggested that that feminist theorizing has minimized violence against men or against trans people. This made me furious. I think that feminist thinkers have actually been at the very forefront of efforts to theorize and contest men’s and trans people’s victimization, including grappling with the very difficult issues of women as perpetrators. Feminists have analyzed constructions of masculinity and femininity and contested binary conceptions of gender.
Spade relied on a flat and caricatured depiction of feminism to make his challenging point, even suggesting that feminism has reinforced what we see in the example of Mindy Project – the treatment of male rape as a joke. Patricia Hill Collins wonderful work on prison rape and on the connections between the prison and the closet in the context of what she calls the “new racism” surely could not be accused of treating sexual violence against men as a joke. Instead she offers what might just be the most compelling theorization of prison rape. Joanna Bourke, Lynne Segal and Lara Stemple all complicate the analysis of gendered sexual violence without leading us down an analytic and political dead-end – that is, taking gender out of our efforts to theorize sexual violence.
Feminism insists on the necessity of contextualizing sexual assault within power relations. Surely there remains a link between the persistence of gender domination and men’s violence against women. I think that if it becomes politically taboo to specifically interrogate the problem of men’s violence, we will miss important opportunities to develop truly transformational solutions to sexual violence in all of its gendered manifestations. The rape script that Marcus describes, for example, is forged in a context of dominant heterosexuality and there are links between this script and sexual violence enacted in other gendered contexts.
This said (and forgive my rant), we really need to devote some serious resources to men who have been sexually assaulted. I believe that we won’t be able to progress with feminist struggles against sexual violence until we acknowledge that not all men are rapists, that men are rapeable and that women can be rapists. We need to theorize gendered violence in all of its complex manifestations, including understanding how sexual violence is racialized and the role it performs in colonization. I think that dispensing with a gendered analysis and politics would simply result in decontextualization, pushing the problem of gendered violence back into the closet.
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