While reading the articles this week, victimization kept
popping out for me. Thinking back to earlier readings (ie. MacKinnon), many
authors have been critiqued for denying women agency. I would have to agree
with this; while it is important to recognize and discuss the power hierarchies
that result from patriarchal structures and discourses, it is also important to
recognize the agency that exists that can challenge this hierarchy. I found
Mardorossian’s argument interesting: that “critics use the term [victim] but
fail to look at the processes through which cultures count or discredit people
as victims and at the ways in which victimization has been defined by
historically changing conditions of intelligibility” (766). How do we define a
victim in Canadian culture? Is a victim constructed the same way based on how
we see the actions that the individual employed during the time of the sexual
assault?
I
think it is fairly obvious to say that no rape experience is the same as
another; however in any threatening/violent situation our responses are boiled
down to fight or flight – I would also argue that freeze is also a valid
response in this situation. In cases of rape, flight and fight are seen as
active responses while freezing is seen as passive. In my personal opinion, all
three are valid options. Mardorossian’s argument sums up my response more
eloquently: “agency is thus redefined as doing whatever she deemed necessary at
the time to survive the attack” (768). I think that it is unfair to chastise
women who do not fight their perpetrator, rendering them as a passive victim.
It made me think of one case in the “Thinking to Feeling” article we read: in
order to survive, the woman who experienced the assault did not fight back and
had to tell her rapist that she enjoyed it. In my opinion, this reaction also
embodies strength and courage – maybe just a different kind rather than physical
strength. The societal constructs femininity to be docile, passive - yet are expected to rise up and super-cede the constructed strength of masculinity. Our society perceives women who do not physically/verbally/etc. fight back as passive, and therefore as almost an incredible source; as a 'bad rape victim.'
I agree. One rape experience should not be considered more compelling or less compelling than someone else’s. An individual’s response in a given situation is not what we should be focusing on; we should be focusing on the act that caused a response in the first place. The actual act of rape/ sexual assault gets distorted when the focus is on how the victim reacted or how the victim didn’t react. There are certain expectations of the victim, to give as much detail as possible, if they did fight back what did they do exactly, and if they didn’t why couldn’t they. The topic about self defense has been thrown around during class discussion this week. Which has left me torn on the idea, I’ve taken a few regular self defense classes myself in the past and I felt like I did learn a lot about how to use my surroundings and how I could use my body to work in my advantage. As great as these things were, yes, in a situation where coercion was present or someone I know was my attacker, I would find it hard to use those tricks. What I find even more complicated is the idea that we tell women that in order for them to fight back or understand their body they need to mold and manipulate their mind and body in order to try and avoid an attack. We reproduce gendered expectations of how a women’s body should be which puts the responsibility on the victim.
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