Marcus and Self-Defense

Your engagements with Marcus and with the question of self-defense are provocative and so interesting, because they force me to look at a debate that I have read and taught so many times in new ways. I want to engage with this debate about interrupting the rape script and the efficacy of individual resistance in a personal way. I think that each of the theoretical positions in the Marcus versus Mardorossian debate is useful; I have used both of these texts in different ways in my own work. But I want to move away from my scholarly vantage point and tell you about how conflicted Marcus makes me feel.

Susan Estrich wrote a book called Real Rape, a now classic and widely cited book, where she begins with her own experience of being raped. Others, including Brison and Alcoff&Gray, explore the resistant power of first person accounts and of survivor narratives. I write and teach about rape in the third person -- though like Estrich, Brison, Alcoff&Gray and countless others, my own experience with rape is personal, as well as scholarly and political.  When I was 23, I was raped by a man who broke into my house in the middle of the night.  He said he had a knife and I froze.  I was completely immobilized.

I know what we are reading in this class challenges all of us so profoundly, but I especially worry about how it challenges those of you/us who have lived through sexual assault/rape.  I am afraid that these theoretical interventions sometimes silence those who have experienced rape and in a very curious way, transform the bodies of raped women into theoretical objects, even as they attempt to empower. 

I wonder what it would have mean for those who have experienced sexual assault and have been frozen and immobilized in this moment to learn about "interrupting the rape script." Mardorossian does a good job highlighting how the raped women is rendered silent in and through Marcus. I wonder what would happen if Marcus was an assigned reading in a survivors' group. We talked about how Marcus' position works to individualize and responsibilize, to construct the would-be victim as a member of the feminist shock troops in the struggle against sexist violence. But our interrogation so far has posed this as a theoretical or political question. What if we move to the level of the individual and think about how Marcus' position might increase self-blame in survivors?

I want us to feel empowered and to have every resource for resisting sexual violence. Having done a Wen-Do workshop, I can see how feminist self-defense can enable us to inhabit our bodies differently. It was an incredibly powerful experience for me to learn tools for fighting back. But like many of you wrote, it is always imperative that we connect individual struggles and resistance with collective feminist and political struggles against rape. Every effort to resist rape in the moment is to be celebrated. But it also seems to me that in the absence of collective struggles, these individual acts of resistance will remain disconnected, isolated, separate and without power to alter the rape script.