This
week I have been struggling a lot with balancing the different perspectives on
with sexual assault with which I have been presented since the beginning of the
semester. The two main sources of these perspectives are of course this class
and my time spent volunteering with the Sexual Assault Centre on campus (which
is what I am doing for my CSL placement). I am not trying to suggest that these
approaches to the issue of sexual assault are vastly different from each other;
throughout the course of this week however, some nuanced differences have come
to light for me which I find particularly troubling.
What
was troubling for me in class this week was our conversations around
self-defense as a means of breaking the rape script that Sharon Marcus posits
in her essay “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words.” In her discussion of Bart and O’Brien
study she says that “their surveys of women who prevented rape attempts
consistently show that resistance does work, and that often minimal signs of it
. . . can suffice to block a man from continuing a rape attempt” (396). My
immediate reaction when I read this phrase was, “Wow, this sounds a lot like ‘tip-giving.’”
I feel like this encouraging of women’s use of self-defense as a means of
combatting sexual assault does in some way responsibilize them in a somewhat
neo-liberal fashion.
As
a part of my volunteer work at the SAC I am a member of the Education Committee
and part of the presentation we give (and the part I was working on this week)
is about the negative effects of tip-giving as a means of preventing sexual
assault. In the presentation we discuss how this culture of tip-giving
contributes to victim-blaming attitudes around sexual assault. Along with that it
also has the potential to elicit self-blame in the survivors of sexual assault.
When we look at the promotion of self-defense as a kind of tip-giving we might
consider this idea of self-blame. For example, I saw those posters advertising
the feminist self-defense class that Dr. Gotell mentioned, and I was interested
in them, but never got around to signing up. If I had been sexually assaulted
and then told that I would not have been had I taken that class I might blame
myself for neglecting to take preventative measures and sign up for that class.
All
this being said though, I definitely do still see the value of feminist self-defense
in combatting the rape script as opposed to other kinds of tips we hear. These
other kinds of tips – don’t walk alone at night, don’t wear your hair in a ponytail,
don’t wear provocative clothing – all contribute to a patriarchal controlling
of women’s bodies and restricting the space they take up in the world.
Self-defense on the other hand, like we talked about in class, empowers women
to embody their own bodies and use them in ways outside of the normative
construction of femininity. So in that way self-defense is certainly a much
better way to confront the issue of sexual assault – especially, like Marcus
suggests, as a preventative step instead of a post-assault reaction like law
reform (388); however, I do think we still need to be critical of the ways it
individually responsibilize women and has the potential to contribute to a
culture of victim-blaming.
Work Cited
Marcus, Sharon. “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political, (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 385-403 (Oct. 17).
Shannah,
ReplyDeleteI’m currently reading Aftermath, a book by Susan Brison, in which she discusses her experiences of recovering from sexual assault and attempted murder. For her, self-defense serves neither as a way to defend herself from future attackers, nor as a way of through which she might have prevented her own attack. Instead, feminist self-defense becomes a way for Brison to care for herself. She describes feeling an inseparability between her psychic and her physical trauma--and self-defense became a way for her to cater to this inseparability. This stood out to me: self-defense as self-care (and, as an aside, a response to mind-body dualism).
While there are the apparent contradictions, that you point to, I think that self-defense might be rethought simply as a way through which we might be able to learn to inhabit our bodies differently; as a way to learn how to take up more space (read: interrupt the rape script) in the way that Marcus advises us to. Similarly to your insights, perhaps one way that feminist self-defense could operate is as explicitly not assault prevention-based, and instead it could operate as embodiment consciousness-raising.