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The Politics of the Strong Trope: Rape and the Feminist Debate in the United States

Author(s): Sabine Sielke


Source: Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 49, No. 3, Gewalt in den USA der 1960er und
1970er Jahre (2004), pp. 367-384
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The Politics of the
Strong Trope:
Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the United States
Sabine Sielke
ABSTRACT
Taking
off from the
proliferation
of feminist discourse on
rape
since
1970,
this
essay
examines
how American culture talks about sexual violence and
explains why,
in the latter twentieth centu-
ry, rape
achieved such
significance
as a
trope
of
power
relations.
Tracing
the evolution of a
specif-
ically
American rhetoric of
rape
back to the late
eighteenth century,
I
explore
the cultural work
that this rhetoric has
performed
and
argue
that the
representation
of
rape
has been a
major
force
in the cultural construction of
sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and, indeed,
national identi-
ty.
Provoked in
part by contemporary
feminist
criticism, my
work also
challenges
feminist
posi-
tions on sexual violence
by interrogating
them as
part
of the
history
in which
rape
has been a con-
venient and conventional albeit
troubling trope
for other concerns and conflicts.
The United States as
"Rape
Culture"?
The Feminist Debate on Sexual Violence Revisited
Sexual violence has
always
been a central issue of feminist
debate,
whether
more
implicitly,
as in the
writing
and
speeches
of
nineteenth-century
reform
movement
activists,
or
explicitly,
as in
today's rape-crisis
discourse.
However,
if
one takes a closer look at the discussions on violence
against
women that Ameri-
can feminist criticism has
generated
in the last three
decades,
one
thing
becomes
blatantly
evident: in the context of American feminist criticism after
1970,
vio-
lence
against
women seems to
figure
almost
exclusively
as
rape.
While domestic
violence was another
pressing
concern for feminism and sexual violence was rec-
ognized
as
part
of a continuum of violence
against
women,1
rape
has tended to
dominate the debates from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s.
Thus,
during
the final decades of the twentieth
century
feminist
discourse,
on the
one
hand,
has reduced a broad
spectrum
of
systematic
and
systemic
violence
against
women-
including
various social and economic discriminations- to sexual
violence. On the other
hand,
the dominant feminist debate has also redefined
rape
as an act of
violence,
and this
redefinition,
we need to
recall,
is indeed a central
achievement of US- American feminism.
However,
the
conception
of
rape
as an act
of violence- as
opposed
to a sexual act- also marks the
beginning
of a
develop-
ment
which,
to
my
mind,
is not
beyond
criticism. The redefinition of
rape
as an act
1
Cf. Liz
Kelly,
'"It's
Happened
to So
Many
Women': Sexual Violence as a Continuum
(1)"
and
"'It's
Everywhere':
Sexual Violence as a Continuum
(2)," Surviving
Sexual Violence
(Cambridge:
Polity, 1988)
74-112.
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368 Sabine Sielke
of violence is an achievement because for too
long rape
had often been minimized
to a mere
peccadillo. Separating rape
as an
expression
of violence from intercourse
as a sexual
act,
Susan
Brownmiller,
among
others,
objected
to the
predominant
no-
tion that
rape
is a natural
expression
of male sexual desire and an act of sex and
lust.
By
contrast,
classic texts of the debate such as Kate Millett's Sexual Politics
(1969),
Susan Griffin's
essay "Rape,
the All- American Crime"
(1971)
and Brown-
miller's landmark-text
Against
Our Will:
Men, Women,
and
Rape (1975)
see
rape
not as a
sexually
motivated
act,
but as a form of
oppression,
social
control,
and
po-
litical
power;
in
fact,
as the most
significant expression
of male dominance and a
primary
mechanism of male
supremacy.2 Consequently rape
as a dominant con-
temporary
feminist issue also
emerged
in the 1970s because "control over one's
body
and
sexuality
became a
major
area for concern and activism" at that time.3
One crucial effect of this
politicized
notion of
rape
was the revision of
rape
laws
in Canada and the U.S. in the
early
1970s. These
rape
law
reforms,
instigated by
the
passage
of new
rape
statutes in
Michigan
in
1974,
addressed both the defini-
tion of the crime and the court
procedures.4 By
the end of the
1970s,
though,
the
2
Kate
Millett,
Sexual Politics
(1969;
London:
Virago, 1977);
Susan
Griffin, "Rape,
the Ail-
American
Crime," Ramparts
10.3
(1971): 26-56;
Susan
Brownmiller, Against
Our Will:
Men,
Women,
and
Rape (New
York:
Simon, 1975). Redefining rape
as a crime of violence and
power,
Brownmiller in turn also limited
rape
to contexts of
riots, wars,
and
revolutions, setting
it
apart
from
daily
life.
Among
the most
significant
texts of the feminist debate also
belong
Diana
Russell,
The Politics
of Rape:
The Victim's
Perspective (New
York: Stein and
Day, 1974);
Noreen Connell
and Cassandra
Wilson, eds., Rape:
The First Sourcebook
for
Women
(New
York: New American
Library, 1974);
Susan
Griffin, Rape:
The Politics
of
Consciousness
(New
York:
Harper, 1986);
Su-
san
Estrich,
Real
Rape (Cambridge:
Harvard
UP, 1987);
Liz
Kelly, Surviving
Sexual Violence
(Cambridge: Polity, 1988);
Robin
Warshaw,
/ Never Called It
Rape (New
York:
Harper, 1988);
Elizabeth Brauerholz and
Mary Kowaleski,
Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its
Nature, Causes,
and Prevention
(Lexington: Lexington Books, 1991).
Valerie
Smith, "Split
Affinities: The Case of Interracial
Rape," Conflicts
in
Feminism,
ed.
Marianne Hirsch and
Evelyn
Fox Keller
(New
York:
Routledge, 1990)
271-87.
The
Michigan law, upon
which other states modelled their reform
bills,
included the
following
changes:
It
displaced
the distinction between
'simple' rape (penetration)
and
attempted rape by
"a ladder of
offences,
each of which is described as criminal sexual conduct"
(Jennifer Temkin,
"Women, Rape,
and Law
Reform," Rape,
ed.
Sylvna
Tomaselli and
Roy
Porter
[Oxford:
Basil
Blackwell,
1986] 16-40; 28;
cf. also Rosemarie
Tong, Women, Sex,
and the Law
[Totowa:
Rowman
and
Allanheld, 1984] 92-93).
New
charges
were
applicable
to a husband who assaulted his wife
when she was
living apart
from him and either
party
had filed for divorce or
legal separation
(Temkin 28).
In
court,
the
prosecution
no
longer
had to establish the victim's resistance
(Temkin
28,
see also
Tong 96-97).
Strict rules were instituted
governing
the use of the victim's
prior
sexual
history
as evidence
(Tong 106). Only
her sexual
history
with the defendant himself or the
origin
of
semen, pregnancy,
or disease could be introduced
(Temkin 28).
The
changes
in
subsequent
re-
forms and other
jurisdictions
included
making rape
laws
(as opposed
to
just sodomy laws) appli-
cable to male victims as well
(Tong
91 as well as Sue
Bessmer,
The Laws
of Rape [New
York:
Praeger, 1984] 370),
reform of rules
requiring
corroboration
(Tong 104),
and laws
governing
cau-
tionary
instructions
given
to
juries (Tong 105-06).
In some
jurisdictions,
reforms assimilated
rape
laws to laws
prohibiting
assault
(Tong 112-13)
and to reduce the
penalties
for
rape (Tong 114-15).
Cf. also John D 'Emilio and Estelle .
Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A
History of Sexuality
in Amer-
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 369
notion of
rape
as a form of
oppression
and control was itself
subjected
to a new
critique. Objecting
to the
separation
of
sexuality
and
power,
Catharine MacKin-
non insisted on the
convergence
of
sexuality,
or to be
exact,
of male
sexuality
and
violence. For
her,
as for Andrea
Dworkin,
"acceptable
sex,
in the
legal perspec-
tive,
can entail a lot of
force,"
and the use of force
or,
as she
puts it,
the
"penile
in-
vasion of the
vagina,"
is
pivotal
to male
sexuality. "Rape,"
so MacKinnon
insists,
"is not less sexual for
being
violent. To the extent that coercion has become inte-
gral
to male
sexuality, rape may
even be sexual to the
degree that,
and
because,
it
is violent."5 "If we
separate
violence from
sexuality,"
she
argues,
"we leave the line
between
rape
and
intercourse,
sexual harassment and sex
roles,
pornography
and
eroticism,
right
where it is."6 In the work of MacKinnon and
Dworkin,
this line has
in fact dissolved: under the
given
social
conditions,
Dworkin
claims,
heterosexual
intercourse is
always rape.
And while
pornography,
as Robin
Morgan famously
put
it in
1977,
is the
theory, rape
is the
practice.7
While this so-called radical feminist
position
was
originally quite marginal,
it
eventually
took center
stage
and
fundamentally
affected the
concept
of
rape
in
feminist criticism. Since the
early 1980s, rape
has been
acknowledged
as
part
of a
continuum of violence
against
women that
ranges
from the
inscription
of conven-
tional
gender
roles across
misogynist
or obscene
speech
to torture and murder.8
As a
consequence,
innumerable cases of sexual harassment and "date
rape"9
as
well as
prominent
incidents such as the Central Park
Jogger Rape
Case
(1989)
were covered
by
the American media
during
the 80s and 90s. The debate eventu-
ally
culminated in the claim that the US is a
"rape
culture"10- a claim which mis-
Zea
(New
York:
Harper, 1988)
314. Women's sexual
history
remains an issue in
rape trials, despite
the fact that the reforms of
rape law,
first manifested
by
the
passage
of new
rape
statutes in Mich-
igan
in
1974,
have established rules
governing
the use of the victim's
prior
sexual
history
as evi-
dence, restricting
it to the
relationship
with the defendant.
5
Catharine
MacKinnon,
Toward a Feminist
Theory of
the State
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP,
1989) 173,
172. See also Andrea
Dworkin,
Intercourse
(New
York: Free
P, 1987)
and
MacKinnon,
Sexual Harassment
of Working
Women: A Case
of
Sexual Discrimination
(New
Haven: Yale
UP,
1979)
218-20.
Catharine
MacKinnon,
Feminism
Unmodified:
Discourse on
Life
and Law
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP, 1987)
86-87.
7
Robin
Morgan, "Theory
and Practice:
Pornography
and
Rape,"
Take Back the
Night:
Women
on
Pornography,
ed. Laura Lederer
(New
York:
Morrow, 1980)
134-40.

On this issue cf. Liz
Kelly
"'It's
Happened
to So
Many
Women': Sexual Violence as a Con-
tinuum" and "'It's
Everywhere':
Sexual Violence as a
Continuum," Surviving
Sexual Violence
(Cambridge: Polity, 1988) 74-112;
as well as
Kelly,
"The Continuum of Sexual
Violence," Women,
Violence,
and Social
Control,
ed. Jalna Hanmer and
Mary Maynard (Atlantic Highlands:
Human-
ities P
International, 1987)
46-60.
9
According
to The
Official Sexually
Correct
Dictionary
and
Dating
Guide
(New
York: Vil-
lard, 1995),
the term "date
rape"
was coined in 1982
by
Ms.
magazine
writer Karen Bechhofer. It
is a
concept
that due to the absence of a
"dating system"
lacks a frame of reference in
many
Eu-
ropean countries, including Germany.
10
The term
"rape
culture" is used in
sociological
studies to differentiate so-called
"rape-
prone"
countries
(such
as the United
States)
from countries
where,
according
to official
records,
rape
is a
relatively
rare crime
("rape-free" countries).
See
Peggy
Reeves
Sanday's essay "Rape
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370 Sabine Sielke
leadingly suggests
that
rape
occurs more
frequently
in a culture that talks about
rape excessively
than in cultures that
deny
the occurrence of sexual violence.
This rather
comprehensive
definition of
rape partly
resulted,
at least in
part,
from a
tendency,
dominant in the
debate,
to diminish and blur the boundaries be-
tween
acts,
on the one
hand,
and
speech
acts,
on the other. Hate
speech
and
imag-
es of violence are violent
acts,
MacKinnon insists in her book
Only
Words in
1993,11
thus
putting
forth an
argument
that ushered in not
only
debatable forms of
"sexual correctness"12 and
censorship,13
but a considerable backlash as well. "Has
feminism
gone
too far?"
consequently
became the
question
more and more often
voiced even
by supporters
of feminist
agendas.14
So what had
happened?
Intent to make
people
aware of both the
degree
and
the cultural and individual effects of sexual
violence,
feminist discourse had
evolved
rape
as "the master
metaphor,
for
defining
the violation of woman
by pa-
triarchy."15 Employing
a
strong trope
for an effective
politics,
however,
can work
only
as
long
as that
trope
does not lose its momentum and force. And thus it seems
crucial to me that we not
only
talk about
rape,
but also reflect about what we talk
about when we talk about
rape.
Why
Talk about the Rhetoric of
Rape?
Being
a scholar of
literary
and cultural studies I was not
guided
in
my
research
by
the
phenomenon
that Susan Estrich called "real
rape."
I was not
really
interested
in how
many
women
get raped
in the course of their
lives,
or how this traumatic
experience changes
or even
destroys
their sense of self. Nor was I concerned about
whether we can
really distinguish
the United States as a
"rape prone country"
from so-called
"rape
free
countries,"
as some scholars in fact do.16
My
interest was
and the
Silencing
of the
Feminine," Rape,
ed.
Sylvna
Tomaselli and
Roy
Porter
(Oxford:
Basil
Blackwell, 1986)
84-101. It has been
adapted by
feminist criticism to
suggest
a culture's
general
tendency
to
oppress
women.
See,
for
instance,
Emilie
Buchwald,
Pamela
Fletcher,
and Martha
Roth, Transforming
a
Rape
Culture
(Minneapolis:
Milkweed
Editions, 1993).
11
Catharine
MacKinnon, Only
Words
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP, 1993).
1Z
On the issue see
Debating
Sexual Correctness:
Pornography,
Sexual
Harassment,
Date
Rape,
and the Politics of Sexual
Equality,
ed. Adele M. Stan
(New
York:
Delta, 1995).
13
See Sarah
Crichton,
"Sexual Correctness: Has it Gone Too Far?" Newsweek 122
(1995):
52-
64;
Marcia
Pally,
Sense and
Censorship:
The
Vanity of Bonfires (New
York: Americans for Consti-
tutional Freedom and Freedom to Read
Foundation, 1991);
Sabine
Sielke, "Drawing
the Line Be-
tween Art and
Pornography: Censorship
and the
Representation
of the Sexual
Body," Democracy
and the Arts in the United
States,
ed. Alfred
Hornung,
Reinhard R.
Doerries,
and Gerhard Hoff-
mann
(Mnchen: Fink, 1996)
287-98.
14
Two
examples
of such
critique
are Christina Hoff
Sommers,
Who Stole Feminism? How
Women Have
Betrayed
Women
(New
York:
Simon, 1994)
and
Margaret
D.
Bonilla,
"Cultural As-
sault: What Feminists Are
Doing
to
Rape Ought
to Be a
Crime," Policy
Review 66
(1993):
22-29.
15
Warren
Beatty Warner, "Reading Rape:
Marxist Feminist
Figurations
of the
Literal,"
Dia-
critics 133
(19S3):12-32;
13.
16
See
Sanday.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 371
geared
toward the discourse of sexual violence or what I came to call "the rhetoric
of
rape,"
a rhetoric which I deem to be
historically,
in
fact,
nationally specific.
I
asked
myself why
from the 1960s onward American culture in
general
and Amer-
ican feminist criticism in
particular
have talked so
insistently,
if not
obsessively,
about
rape.
What cultural work is
being
achieved
by
this rhetoric of sexual vio-
lence? How has American culture learned to talk about
rape?
And
why
has femi-
nism,
at a time when it
attempted
to recover the female
body
from the debris of
cultural constraints and
inscriptions,
at a time when it meant to liberate a
suppos-
edly
other,
subversive female
sexuality
from sexual
oppression, practised
a dis-
course that tends to resituate the female
subject
in the
position
of the victim- a
discourse,
in other
words,
that to some
degree
reasserts the
very gender
differenc-
es that
nineteenth-century
culture had so
firmly
inscribed?
In order to answer these
questions
we have to re-trace the cultural function of
this "rhetoric of
rape"
to the late
eighteenth century-
which is what I will do in
the
following,
at a
very
accelerated
pace.17 Only
in this
way,
I
argue,
can we under-
stand
why
late
twentieth-century
American feminist criticism and
politics
have
been so
preoccupied
with matters of sexual violence. And
only
in this
way
can I
explain why my
work on violence has been
provoked
and
inspired by
feminist
per-
spectives yet
has had to
considerably
distance itself from these views. After all
American feminist criticism itself is
part
of this
historically grown
and
nationally
specific
discourse,
a discourse which has
employed rape
as an effective
trope
for
the debate of rather diverse
cultural, social,
and
political
conflicts. In
fact,
a close
analysis
of the historical
trajectory
of the discourse of sexual violence makes evi-
dent that the
trope
of
rape
has
only rarely
been
appropriated
for the
fight against
social hierarchies or
political
dominance. On the
contrary,
in the
history
of the
"rhetoric of
rape" images
and
figures
of sexual violence have
repeatedly
served to
establish and
subsequently
stabilize
parameters
of difference such as
gender,
race,
ethnicity,
class,
and nation. Late
nineteenth-century
cultural
practices
in
particular
made use of the
trope
of
rape
to evolve notions of race and
gender
which inform
our sense of otherness and
sexuality
to this
very day.
The American feminist de-
bate of the late
twentieth-century,
I would
claim,
further reinforced and cemented
these notions of difference. And this is
why
I think we
may
as well be
happy
that
the
peak
of "date
rape"
debates and "Take Back the
Night
Marches" is meanwhile
behind us.
Before I re-trace the American rhetoric of
rape, though,
I need to make a few
general
remarks. When I
distinguish
the "rhetoric of
rape"
from "real
rape,"
I do
not mean to
separate appearance
from
'reality,'
nor do I mean to
project
a bias be-
tween
supposedly impressionistic perspectives
of cultural
studies,
on the one
hand,
and the
empiricism
of the social
sciences,
on the other.
By insisting
on a dis-
tinction between
rape
and its
rhetoric,
I mean to underline that it is the talk about
rape,
the
"putting
into discourse" of the
phenomenon
of sexual violence which
produces
the
particular
cultural
significance
of such violence because it
interprets
and evaluates
rape
and even
determines,
to a certain
degree,
how such violations
17
For a
complete
account of
my argument,
see Sabine
Sielke, Reading Rape:
The Rhetoric
of
Sexual Violence in American Literature and
Culture,
1790-1990
(Princeton:
Princeton
UP, 2002).
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372 Sabine Sielke
are to be
punished.
Therefore it is the
proliferation
of
rape
discourse rather than
the actual increase of instances of
rape
that
generated
the sense that the US is a
"rape
culture."
At the same
time, however,
we have to
acknowledge
that the
experience
of
rape
is a
phenomenon
which- not unlike
experiences
of
sexuality, pain,
and death-
tends to resist
representation. According
to
narratologist
Mieke
Bai, rape
cannot be visualized not
only
because "decent" culture would not tolerate such
represen-
tations of the "act" but because
rape
makes the victim invisible. It does that
literally
first- the
perpetrator
"covers" her- and then
figuratively-
the
rape destroys
her self-
image,
her
subjectivity,
which is
temporarily
narcotized, definitely changed
and often de-
stroyed. Finally, rape
cannot be visualized because the
experience is, physically,
as well as
psychologically,
inner.
Rape
takes
place
inside. In this
sense, rape
is
by
definition
imag-
ined;
it can exist
only
as
experience
and as
memory,
as
image
translated into
signs,
never
adequately "objectifiable."18
The
very
fact,
though,
that the
physical experience
of
rape
resists
representation
also
explains why
the
figure
of
rape
has been so
politically
effective.
Presuming
with Bal that central
aspects
of
rape-
such as
physical pain
and
psy-
chic violation-
escape representation, yet
that
rape
can be communicated as text
only,
I
argue
that the central
paradigm
of a rhetoric of
rape
is not
simply
one of
rape
and
silencing,
as feminist criticism
suggests,
thus
insinuating
that this silence
can be
broken,
that we can and should read the violence back into the texts. Since
silences themselves
generate speech,
the central
paradigm
is rather that of
rape,
si-
lence,
and
refiguration. By refiguration
I do mean all forms of mediation
by
which
the actual
phenomenon
of
rape
is transformed into discourse and thus
necessarily
transfigured.
If our
readings
focus on
refigurations
of
rape
as well as on
rape
as re-
figuration
we
acknowledge
that texts do not
simply
reflect,
but rather
stage
and
dramatize the historical contradictions
they
are overdetermined
by.
At
best,
read-
ings
of
rape
therefore reveal not
merely
the latent text in what is
manifest,
and
thus
produce
a text's
self-knowledge; they
also evolve a new
knowledge pertaining
to the
ideological
necessities of a text's silences and deletions.19
Refiguration
works
by way
of
displacement
and substitution. In
metonymy,
such
substitution is based on
relation, association,
or
contiguity,
which forms
syntactical
connections
along
horizontal,
temporal
lines and has therefore been associated
with realism.
Metaphor, by
contrast,
substitutes on the basis of resemblance or
analogy,
and creates
semantic, spatial
links
along
a
paradigmatic,
vertical
line,
of-
ten
suggesting (poetic)
truth- value. Due to these
asymmetrical,
hierarchical,
com-
plementary
rather than
exclusory,
rhetorical
processes
at
work,20 readings
of
rape
cannot be reduced to the
study
of a motif. Nor would it suffice to recover "the un-
18
Mieke
Bal, "Reading
With the Other
Art," Theory
Between the
Disciplines: Authority/Vi-
sion/Politics,
ed. Martin Kreiswirth and Mark A. Cheetham
(Ann
Arbor: U of
Michigan
P, 1990)
135-51;
142.
19
I am indebted here to Peter
Storey's chapter
on
"Althusserianism,"
An
Introductory
Guide
to Cultural
Theory
and
Popular
Culture
(Athens:
U of
Georgia
P, 1993)
110-18.
zu
Barbara
Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy,
and Voice in Their
Eyes
Were
Watching God,
A
World
of Difference (Baltimore:
Johns
Hopkins
UP, 1987) 155-71;
155.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 373
speakable aspects
of the
experience
of
rape"21 by foregrounding
the "violence of
representation,"22
and thus reinstall on the level of rhetoric the violence choked
by
the
story
line. Such
practice
could be
applied
to
any text;
it evolves
systemic
vio-
lence, yet
tends to
ignore
the
particular
cultural functions and the
historically spe-
cific
meanings
texts
assign
to
sexuality
and sexual violence.
Reading rape figura-
tively,
as
rhetoric,
we can follow the
symbolic
traces of violation
instead,
exploring
its function within the structure of
particular literary
texts and
larger
cultural nar-
ratives as well as within the construction of individual and communal identities.
Such
correspondences
between aesthetics and
politics
can be
probed
because lit-
erary
texts and the formation of cultural identities involve similar
processes
of re-
figuration.
Like
metaphors,
identities are structured
against
difference
(of
race,
class,
gender, ethnicity,
and
age,
for
instance)
and "directed toward the
gradual
overcoming
of difference
by identity."23
Yet even if
identity
subordinates differ-
ence to the demands of
likeness, "[t]o
see the
like,"
Paul Ricoeur
argues,
"is to see
the same in
spite of,
and
through,
the different." The
"logical
structure of likeness"
is
consequently
characterized
by
a "tension between sameness and difference"24
and constructions of
identity require
both the
assignment
and the subordination of
difference. The rhetoric of
rape
is one of
many
discourses
by
which such differenc-
es are
being
ascribed,
victims and violators
othered,
set
off,
while the
subject
who
assigns
difference remains unmarked and unlimited in his
possibilities.25
The structural likeness of
processes
of
identity
formation and
refiguration
makes the
analysis
of
literary
texts
particularly productive
in this context.
Literary
texts translate
pain
into
art,
transform the
unspeakable
into
figures
of
speech
whose structure and function both
disfigure
and
bespeak
their cultural work.
They
tell stories and translate tales of violation into
nationally specific,
cultural
symbol-
ogies
and conclusive narratives. As
such,
they
both form and interfere with the
cultural
imaginary. Why,
however,
should
literary
discourse be the
privileged
me-
dium for an
analysis
of the rhetoric of sexual violence? Unlike the discourses of
the social and natural
sciences,
literature is central here not so much because it has
allowed
marginal
voices to enter into the conversation on
gender,
race,
and sexu-
ality
at an earlier time. Literature
may
have accommodated "other"
perspectives,
but their otherness has nonetheless been channelled and limited
by
the institu-
tional frames in which
they appeared.
Likewise we no
longer
share the
(formalist)
faith in the
powers
of fiction and its
particular
aesthetics to
represent
and level
conflicting
cultural
forces,
or assume that
literary
texts are
generically
more "tell-
21
Bal 137.
I refer here to the
essay
collection The Violence
of Representation:
Literature and the
History
of Violence,
ed.
Nancy Armstrong
and Leonard Tennenhouse
(New
York:
Routledge, 1989).
23
David
Lloyd,
"Race under
Representation,"
Culture/Contexture:
Explorations
in
Anthropol-
ogy
and
Literary Studies,
ed. E. Valentine Daniel and
Jeffrey
M. Peck
(Berkeley:
U of California
P, 1996) 249-72;
257.
24
Quoted
in
Lloyd
256.
Lloyd
himself
partly
relies on the
argument
that Colette Guillaumin makes in "Race and
Nature: The
System
of
Marks,
the Idea of a Natural
Group
and Social
Relationships,"
Feminist Is-
sues 8.2
(1988):
25-43.
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374 Sabine Sielke
ing"
than other discourses and thus
manage
to subvert and crumble cultural
hege-
monies. In
fact,
antebellum American
literature,
for
instance,
was
subjected
to
ge-
neric constraints which tended to reduce rather than
expand
its thematic
range,
if
compared
with other cultural discourse of the time.
However,
the
analysis
of
literary
texts is
particularly revealing
for a
study
focused
on the rhetoric of
rape,
because
(some) literary
texts
conclusively
narrativize
and,
by way
of
dispelling contradictions,
manage
to 'naturalize' sexual violence into
seemingly
consensual views on
gender, sexuality,
and the world at
large.
In this
way,
taking my
clue from Louis
Althusser,
I hold that
literary (rape)
narratives both
give
answers to the
questions they pose
and
produce
'deformed' answers to the historical
questions they
steer
away
from. Thus
reading rape
also involves
deciphering
"the
'symptoms'
of a
problem struggling
to be
posed,"26
such as the
problem
of
sexuality
and
race,
for instance. At the same
time,
fictional
texts,
and modernist and
post-
modernist texts27 in
particular by way
of an insistent
intertextuality, foreground
the
historicity
of their
(rape)
rhetoric and the constraints as well as the
possibilities
of
the
meanings they assign
to sexual violence.
Echoing
and
playing upon
their
pre-
texts,
they refigurate, re-present, re-politicize,
and thus
re-interpret previous
liter-
ary interrogations
of
rape
and sexual
violence,
and in this
way
inscribe themselves
into a tradition of
readings
of
rape,
a tradition
they simultaneously
remember and
interfere with. At the same
time,
we have to
acknowledge
that the
questions
we
bring
to our
inquiries
of
literary
texts- such as issues of
rape
and
representation-
are
motivated, mediated,
and framed
by
our
present
concerns about
identity
and
difference.
Accordingly,
the
texts,
their
textuality, temporality,
and tradition tell us
as much about themselves as about the
ways
in which we
project
our selves.
What I am
arguing
is that in order to
fully
understand the cultural
significance
of
the
appropriation
of the
rape trope
as a means of feminist
politics,
we need to re-
member how
rape
has been
represented
over time and what cultural functions
rep-
resentations of sexual violence have taken in the course of American cultural his-
tory.
In
examining
the
literary
aesthetics and
politics
of
rape,
we become aware
that the
meanings
that culture
assigns
to sexual violence evolve from an
interplay
between constructions of cultural
parameters
of
identity
and difference
(such
as
gender, race,
and
class)
and their
specific
forms of
representation.
As a conse-
quence,
this
interplay
has
generated
ideas about
gender, race,
and class which
keep
monitoring
our
perception
and
interpretation
of real
rape.
At the same time in
reading
the rhetoric of
rape,
we also reveal the
ideologies,
cultural
anxieties,
and
contradictions that
crystallize
in
representations
of
rape- ideologies, anxieties,
and contradictions that feminist
theory
has
tended,
at least in
part,
to
perpetuate.
26
Storey
113.
27
Using
a
hyphen
between
"post"
and
"modern,"
I mean to
suggest
a
particular understanding
of
post-modernity
which does not want to limit the term to a
particular
aesthetics. Rather I take
post-modernism
as a cultural condition
which,
like
any
other
era,
is characterized
by
what Ernst
Bloch called the
synchronicity
of the
non-synchronic.
On this issue cf.
Sielke, "(Post-)Modernists
or Misfits?
Nonsynchronism, Subjectivity,
and the
Paradigms
of
Literary History," Making
Amer-
ica: The Cultural Work
of Literature,
ed. Susanne
Rohr,
Ernst-Peter
Schneck,
and Sabine Sielke
(Heidelberg: Winter, 2000)
215-33.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 375
Toward a
History
of the American Rhetoric of
Rape
Tracing
the American rhetoric of
rape
from the end of the
eighteenth
to the end
of the twentieth
century highlights
how much this rhetoric has contributed to the
cultural construction of
sexuality, gender,
class,
and ethnic difference as well as to
the formation of cultural and national
identity. Why, however,
begin
with the
eigh-
teenth
century?
The
enlightened
late
eighteenth century
not
only
saw the rise of
two
genres
central to American
literary history,
the novel and the slave narrative.28
It also witnessed
paradigmatic changes
in the
conceptions
of
sexuality, gender,
and
the
body,29 changes
that manifested themselves
prominently
in the
representation
of the female
body.30
More
particularly,
both the seduction novel and the slave nar-
rative intertwine the rhetoric of sexual violence with the discourse on race and the
early republic. Consequently,
the reason for
addressing
the novel of seduction and
the slave narrative first is not that this is where American literature
begins;
rather
this is where American literature
begins
to take on
particular
functions.
I will reduce
highly complex processes
to their most fundamental cultural ef-
fects here.31 It is safe to
say, though,
that late
eighteenth-
and
early
nineteenth-
century
American literature both
produced
and
challenged
racialized
conceptions
of
sexuality
and sexual violence. With its sentimental tales of
"coquette," yet
inno-
cent,
women
falling prey
to reckless
villains,
the seduction novel
acknowledged
the
vulnerability
of the white female
subject
while at the same time it
opposed
newly enlightened
notions of
womanhood,
containing sexuality
within the institu-
tion of
marriage,
and
preparing
for the Victorian cult of true
femininity-
for an
28
While
literary history
traces the American seduction novel back to Samuel Richardson's
Pamela
(1740)
und Clarissa
(1747-48), Nancy Armstrong,
in
turn,
traces the
English
novel back to
the
captivity
narrative. Like Richardson's
epistolary texts, Armstrong argues,
wherein the victim/
heroine transforms from sexual
object
to
subject
of her own
writing,
the
captivity
narrative reaf-
firms the individual as author. Cf.
Armstrong,
"The American
Origin
of the
English Novel,"
American
Literary History
4.3
(1992):
386-410. It should also be noted that the slave narrative is a
hybrid
more than a
genuinely
African American
genre.
Joanne M.
Braxton,
for
instance,
refers to
earlier studies such as
Stephen
Butterfield's Black
Autobiography
in America
(Amherst:
U of
Massachusetts
P, 1974)
which "demonstrated the
parallel development
of the slave narrative with
colonial and
early
federal
autobiographies, journals,
and diaries"
(Black
Women
Writing
Autobi-
ography:
A Tradition Within a Tradition
[Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989] 6).
On the function of
African American
autobiography
see also William
Andrews,
"The First
Century
of Afro- Ameri-
can
Autobiography:
Notes Toward a Definition of a
Genre,"
To Tell a Free
Story (Urbana:
U of
Illinois
P, 1986)
1-31.
29
This
change
of
paradigm
has been
argued,
for
instance, by
Thomas
Laqueur, Making
Sex:
Body
and Gender
from
the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP, 1990).
30
Cf. Peter
Brooks, Body
Work:
Objects of
Desire in Modern Narrative
(Cambridge:
Harvard
UP, 1993).
L
For a more detailed account of
my argument,
see
chapter
one of
Sielke, Reading Rape (2002)
and
Sielke,
"Seduced and Enslaved: Sexual Violence in Antebellum American Literature and
Contemporary
Feminist
Discourse,"
The Historical and Political Turn in
Literary Studies,
ed.
Winfried
Fluck,
REAL 11
(1995):
299-324.
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376 Sabine Sielke
ideal that itself is fundamental to the rise of the "black
rapist"
as a central
figure
in
late
nineteenth-century
American culture.
The transformation of the black
body
into an icon of deviant
sexuality
has a
long history, going
back to the Bible and
passing through
the slave narrative. In
slave narratives authored
by (former)
female slaves- narratives told
by subjects
of
rape generally
conceived as seducers- the threat of
rape
"surfaces
obliquely,"
as
Saidiya
Hartman
puts it,
"and
only
as the
captive
confesses her
guilt."32
While
antebellum texts thus cast both white and black
femininity
in terms of
property
re-
lations and
physical violation,
black
women, however,
were assumed to be im-
mune to such
violation,
their
injuries
deemed
negligible.
Black femaleness has
consequently
been
engendered
"as a condition of unredressed
injury."33
This in fact holds true to this
very day,
as the infamous "Central Park
Jogger
Rape
Case"
poignantly
shows. On
April 20, 1989,
a
29-year-old
white female
jog-
ger-an
investment
banker,
as it turned
out,
at Salomon Brothers in downtown
Manhattan- was found in Central
Park,
near 102nd
Street,
her clothes
torn,
her
skull
crushed,
her left
eyeball pushed
back
through
its
socket,
the characteristic
surface wrinkles of her brain
flattened,
her blood reduced
by
75
percent,
her
vagi-
na filled with dirt and
twigs-
the victim of a
beating
and
gang rape
of utmost bru-
tality supposedly
undertaken
by
six black and
Hispanic teenagers.
Now that the
actual
perpetrator
has been
arrested,
we know that the case was
entirely
miscon-
ceived at the
time,34
interpreted
in accordance with the familiar narratives that
American culture has evolved and
keeps repeating. Accordingly,
none of the
thousands of
rapes reported
that
year,
some of which lacked
nothing
in
brutality,
including one,
a week
later,
"involving
the near
decapitation
of a black woman in
Fort
Tryon Park,"
could ever
register
in a similar
way.35
"[CJrimes
are
universally
understood to be
news,"
Joan Didion writes in "Senti-
mental
Journeys,"
her brilliant
reading
of the
case,
"to the extent that
they offer,
however
erroneously,
a
story,
a
lesson,
a
high concept."36
The
story
offered
by
the
Jogger Rape
Case is an old and well established one:
rape,
we are
assured,
is an
encounter of total
strangers
in
public parks. Accordingly,
media
coverage
did not
center
upon
the
(gender)
issues involved in the sexual
violation, but,
as Didion
emphasizes, interpreted
the case as a conflict between two
parties clearly
distin-
guished by
race,
ethnicity,
and class: on the one
hand,
whites affluent
enough
to
keep
the
city's
realities at a safe
distance,
to whom the violation of the
young
ur-
ban
professional signified
the loss of sacrosanct
territory;
on the other
hand,
Afri-
can Americans who considered the treatment of the violators as
yet
another
32
Saidiya Hartman,
"Seduction and the Ruses of
Power,"
Callaloo 19.2
(1996):
537-60.
M
Hartman 556.
34
In the fall of 2002 the case was
reopened, eventually turning
over the convictions of five men
found
guilty
in the
case,
after Matias
Reyes,
a convicted
rapist
and
murderer,
confessed that he
had committed the crime and had acted alone.
35
Joan
Didion,
"Sentimental
Journeys," After Henry (New
York:
Simon, 1992) 253-319;
255.
See also Don
Terry,
"A Week of
Rapes:
The
Jogger
and 28 Not in the
News,"
New York Times 29
May
1989:
25,
28-29.
36
Didion 255-56.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U.S. 377
lynching campaign,
a kind of
rape
in itself. The discursive scene of the crime thus
draws
upon
a whole cultural
register generated
in the course of late nineteenth-
century
interracial conflicts and national
identity
formation. So how did this
regis-
ter evolve?
While late
eighteenth
to
mid-nineteenth-century pretexts
turned the female
body
into a focal
point
of
meaning production,
late
nineteenth-century
cultural
discourse directed its attention toward the
previously
indistinct male
body.
The
black
body,
in
particular,
became a crucial
figure
in the
processes
of remasculin-
ization and
(national) identity
formation
during
the transition of the American
nation from Victorianism to
modernism, processes
which
generated
what I consid-
er the
dominant, overdetermining
line within the American rhetoric of
rape.
The
so-called
"myth
of the black
rapist"
is central to these
processes. According
to the
logic
of the so-called "Southern
rape complex"37
the
presumed
sexual violation of
white
beauty by
a black beast
equalled
the
'rape'
of the South
during
Reconstruc-
tion and
legitimized
retaliation
through lynch
violence and the continuous disem-
powerment
of the black male.
Throughout
Thomas Nelson
Page's
Red Rock
(1898),38
for
instance,
Southern women
embody
the sacred element of the ante-
bellum South.
Likewise,
in The Clansman
(1905),
Thomas Dixon
pictures
the
rape
victim Marion Lenoir- "the one human
being
that
everybody
had
agreed
to
love"39- as an icon of common
morality
and social consensus. Where white wom-
en
symbolize
the
South,
their
alleged
violation mutilates the Southern
body poli-
tic.40
Projecting
Marion's ravishment as "a
single tiger-spring,"
as "black claws"
sinking
into a "soft white
throat,"
Dixon's
rape
scenario discloses this
symbolic
significance.
In
fact,
it literalizes the author's
metaphor
for the
postbellum
South,
which likens the conditions under
"Negro
rule" to
"[t]he sight
of the Black Hand
on
[Southern people's]
throats."41 The
figure
of the white woman thus
displaces
the
complex
relations between black and white
men;42
her sacrifice "on the altar
of
outraged
civilization"
legitimizes retaliatory
attacks.43
Accordingly-
and unlike the African American victim of sexual violation-
white
rape
victims never survive
and,
like Ovid's and Rembrandt's
Lucrecia,
pre-
37
Cf. W. J.
Cash,
The Mind
of
the South
(1941;
New York:
Vintage, 1991).
38
Thomas Nelson
Page,
Red Rock: A Chronicle
of
Reconstruction
(Albany: N.C.U.P., 1991).
39
Thomas
Dixon,
The Clansman: An Historical Romance
of
the Ku Klux Klan
(Lexington:
UP
of
Kentucky, 1970)
254.
Since the Reconstruction
rgime,
as Benn Michaels
argues convincingly,
was read as an at-
tempt
to colonize the
South,
the
politics
of white
supremacy
is
fundamentally anti-imperialist.
"[S]ubjected
to the
greatest
humiliation of modern times: their slaves were
put
over
them-,"
writes Thomas Nelson
Page
for
instance,
the aristocratic Southerners
"reconquered
their section
and
preserved
the civilization of the
Anglo-Saxon" (1).
Cf. Walter Benn
Michaels,
"The Souls of
White
Folk,"
Literature and the
Body: Essays
on
Populations
and Persons
(Baltimore:
Johns
Hop-
kins
UP, 1988) 185-209,
and "Race into Culture: A Critical
Genealogy
of Cultural
Identity,"
Crit-
ical
Inquiry
18.4
(1992):
655-85.
41
Dixon
304,
276.
42
Robyn Wiegman,
"The
Anatomy
of
Lynching,"
Journal
of
the
History of Sexuality
3.3
(1993):
449-67;
462.
43
Dixon 324.
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378 Sabine Sielke
fer suicide to a life with the stain and
stigma
of contamination. In this
way, rape
triggers political change:
the rise of the
KKK,
the destruction of what Dixon
termed
"Negro rule,"
and the reinforcement of
Anglo-Saxon supremacy
and true
(white)
womanhood. The
very
blanks and blind
spots
of antebellum fiction
per-
taining particularly
to the
(black)
male
body
and
(white)
female
sexuality
thus
prepared
the
ground
for a
supposedly
'realist'
literary
discourse that established
(black-on-white) rape
and the
specter
of the
rapist
'other' as central
tropes
of cul-
tural transformation. If one reads
Page
and
Dixon,
though,
in
dialogue
with the
rhetoric of
rape projected by
their
contemporaries
Frank
Norris,
Frances E.W.
Harper,
Sutton E.
Griggs, Upton
Sinclair,
Edith
Wharton,
and William
Vaughn
Moody,
it also becomes evident that this dominant rhetoric of
rape
is,
in
fact,
the
product
of
highly
conflictual and
stylistically
varied- naturalist and realist as well
as sentimental- discourses which conflate matters of
race, class,
and nationhood
with issues of
gender
and
sexuality.
Partly owing
to the
overdetermining
racial fracture of American culture and so-
ciety,
all these authors
employ
the
figure
of the racialized
'rapist'
other and
project
sexual
aggression
and
aggressive sexuality
as interracial or interethnic encounters
between different classes.
Discriminating
violator and victim on the basis of
race,
class,
ethnicity
as well as
gender,
the 'realist' rhetoric of
rape
thus constitutes a dis-
course of difference.
Dramatizing
crucial
social, cultural, sectional,
and national
conflicts,
this discourse evolved fictions or
'myths'
about
gender, race,
and sexual-
ity
that have
subsequently
achieved truth value and that
keep informing
feminist
perspectives
on sexual violence as well. At the same
time,
the
'rapist'
rhetoric of
turn-of-the-century literary
texts
exposes
the anxieties
informing processes
of
identity
formation in a time of transition. Most
particularly,
the 'realist' rhetoric of
rape
monitors reconstructions of
gender
and
sexuality,
the threat of which materi-
alizes in
figures relating
to the crisis of homo/heterosexual definition
(as
in Nor-
ris's
McTeague [1899]
and Dixon's The Clansman
[1905])
and to redefinitions of
the
gender
divide
(as
in
Page's
Red
Rock,
Wharton's The House
of
Mirth
[1905],
and
Moody's
Sabine Woman
[1906]).44
Thus it is
important
to note the
ambiguities informing
the
stereotypes
of both
blackness and whiteness
produced by eighteenth-
and
nineteenth-century
dis-
courses of
sexuality
and sexual violence. Just as black
masculinity
is
projected
as
both
hypersexualized
and
feminized,
the
image
of the black woman oscillates be-
tween
nymphomaniac
and
supermom.
Both are thus
cast,
as
Robyn Wiegman puts
it,
in terms of "extreme
corporeality."45
At the same
time,
the
complex processes
of remasculinization
evolving
at the end of the nineteenth
century
also
generated
the notion of an
inherently aggressive
white male
sexuality
and its
complement
fe-
male submission. This model of
sexuality
finds its first
literary
manifestation in
Frank Norris's naturalist novel
McTeague (1899).
In fact the
passion
that McTe-
ague's
wife Trina feels for her brutish husband is
triggered by
"the absolute final
44
Frank
Norris, McTeague (New
York:
Signet, 1964);
Edith
Wharton,
The House
of
Mirth
(1905;
Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1979);
William
Vaughn Moody,
A Sabine
Woman, republished
as The Great Divide
(New
York:
Macmillan, 1909).
45
Wiegman
455.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 379
surrender of
herself,
the
irrevocable,
ultimate submission" which
"merged
her in-
dividuality
into his."
Presenting
this
dynamic
as "the
changeless
order of
things-
the man
desiring
the woman
only
for what she
withholds;
the woman
worshipping
the man for that which she
yields up
to
him,"46
Norris's novel turns
(hetero-)sex-
uality
into a sadomasochistic
power play
and itself becomes
"probably
the first
representation
of masochism in American literature."47
This
polarizing
model of white
heterosexuality
has
strongly impacted
on
gender
relations as well as on their
critique,
most
particularly
on the feminist
critique
of
sexual violence
during
the 1960s and 1970s. The same
goes
for the
double-edged
fic-
tions of black
corporeality.
In
fact,
due to the
persistent stereotypes
of deviant black
sexuality,
African American feminist critics- with the
exception
of
Angela
Davis
and Michele Wallace in the 1970s and bell hooks in the 1980s and 1990s- have tried
to restrict the discussion to the so-called black
community
and have thus remained
marginal
to the dominant
anti-rape
movement,
whose
(implicit
or
explicit) critique
of
(black)
machismo
appears
to reinforce the
"myth
of the black
rapist."
The
history
of the American "rhetoric of
rape"
thus not
only
underlines how
closely
notions of sexual violence are
entangled
with the construction of sexuali-
ties and difference. This
history
also
foregrounds why
after the so-called "sexual
revolution" of the 1960s the feminist
agenda,
set on
rescuing
the female
body
from
male domination and cultural
inscription,
worked
by way
of a rebellion
against
sexual violence. After
all,
until that time female
sexuality
had almost
exclusively
become an issue when
conjoined
with,
or framed
by,
incidents of sexual violence.
And it is not that women authors did not
explore
the dimensions of female
desire,
as Kate
Chopin
as well as Edith Wharton- in her
story
"Beatrice
Palmato,"
for in-
stance-certainly
did. Their texts on female sexual desire were
simply
not allowed
to circulate.48
At the same
time,
the feminist
fight against
sexual violence has also tended to
perpetuate
those
gender,
class,
and ethnic differences that the nineteenth
century
so
firmly implanted
in the American
imaginary.
As a
consequence,
critics of femi-
nist
rape-crisis-discourse (such
as Kathie
Roiphe)
liked to talk about the "new
Victorianism" of radical feminist
positions.49
And
indeed,
not unlike the Victorian
ideal of a
supposedly
asexual female
disposition,
the demonization of male sexual-
ity
and the reduction of female
subjectivity
to the
position
of the victim
may open
46
Norris
145,
70.
47
Walter Benn
Michaels,
The Gold Standard and the
Logic of
Naturalism: American Literature
at the Turn of the
Century (Berkeley:
U of California
P, 1987)
119.
48
I am not
suggesting
that these texts are
unproblematic
in their
representation
of female sex-
uality; especially
when viewed from late
twentieth-century
American
perspectives,
Wharton's cel-
ebration of an incestuous
relationship,
for
instance,
and the overdetermination in
Chopin's
short
story
"The Storm" of fulfilled female
sexuality by religious imagery
of sacrifice and ritual
bespeak
the ambivalences that characterize the issue. In
fact, Chopin's
and Wharton's texts
highlight
that
even where women are
imagined by
women as
sexually
desired and
desiring,
the traditional
oppo-
sition of male
activity
and sexual
passivity
remains intact when it comes to the sexual act.
49
Cf. Katie
Roiphe,
The
Morning After: Sex, Fear,
and Feminism
(Boston: Little, Brown,
and
Company, 1993)
and Rene
Denfield,
The New Victorians: A
Young
Woman's
Challenge
to the Old
Order
(New
York:
Warner, 1995).
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380 Sabine Sielke
sheltered
spaces
for a certain
period
of time. In the
long
run, however,
this
politics
has tended to reduce the
mobility
of women in the United States. "I am
angry
I
can't walk alone at
night,"
one could read in the mid-1990s on a
flyer
in the Har-
vard
University gym.
Even
quaint
Harvard
Square
had
supposedly
turned into
rapers' territory.
The
significant
difference that
separates nineteenth-century
Victorian discourse
on
gender
ideals from the
arguments
of late
twentieth-century
radical
feminism,
however,
is the fact that women have meanwhile achieved
subject
status whereas
the male
subject
has
undergone
a continuous crisis the end of which is nowhere in
sight.
This crisis which found
multiple
manifestations in modernist culture also
created
major disruptions
in the rhetoric of sexual violence
during
the first half of
the twentieth
century.
While racist historical novels as well as realist and naturalist
texts seemed to relate conclusive narratives about the contexts and
consequences
of sexual
violence,
while
they projected
the
image
of a
predominantly
black
(and
oftentimes
Irish) rapist,
thus
marking
clear differences and borderlines within
American
culture,
modernist texts
highlight
the
interdependence
between
rape
and
representation. Capitalizing
on the
very
artifice of fictional
representation
that realism means to
obscure,
modernism translates the
figure
of
rape
from
pri-
marily
cultural into
predominantly
textual
categories.
In the
process,
modernist
fiction disseminates the established
meanings
of
rape
to a certain
degree
and re-
veals their
ideological
subtexts without
subscribing
to
particular ideologies.
In-
stead their textual
strategies, ranging
from
ellipsis
to
mimicry, target
sexual vio-
lence from within its discursive modes. As modernist texts
acknowledge rape
as a
figure
and form of
representation
rather than an
event,
they
also hint that the in-
sights
of narrative
theory
and visual
poetics
I started with are themselves
insights
generated by
modernism.
Due to modernism's
preoccupation
with
perception
and
process
rather than his-
tory
and cultural
consensus,
texts such as
Djuna
Barnes's
Ryder (1928),
Faulkner's
Sanctuary (1931),
Richard
Wright's
Native Son
(1940),
and Ann
Petry's
The Street
(1946)
no
longer project rape
as a
figure
of
'othering,'
difference,
and social
boundaries.50 Instead
they
turn sexual violence into a
trope
of
transgression
and
border
crossing
which
recognizes
the
disturbing proximity
of
figures
and
phenom-
ena that 'realist'
rape
narratives so
obsessively separated-
or
segregated-
from
each other. This does not mean that differences dissolve.
Instead,
modernism
questions
realism's claims to
authority
and
authenticity.
Modernist
rape
narratives
either
playfully expose
and mime their rhetorical tradition
(as
Barnes
does),
or
(as
does
Faulkner)
re-assess the 'realist'
rape
rhetoric
by capitalizing
on the
represen-
tation of
rape
and
blurring
the borderlines that realism had
managed
to
imple-
ment. As both texts
insistently
cross-over
rape
and
incest,
they
also dramatize the
uncanny
subtexts of that rhetoric. Due to a difference in
subject position,
which
impacts
on
aesthetics,
African American modernist fiction at the same time
repre-
sents
rape
in its own
ways. Wright's protagonist Bigger
Thomas,
for
instance,
reen-
50
Djuna
Barnes, Ryder (New
York: St.
Martin's, 1979);
William
Faulkner, Sanctuary (New
York:
Vintage, 1985);
Richard
Wright,
Native Son
(New
York:
Harper, 1987);
Ann
Petry,
The
Street
(Boston: Houghton, 1974).
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 381
acts the
racist/'rapisf projection
and recreates himself in an abortive act of mod-
ernist
mimicry. Petry's
first
novel,
by contrast,
which
daringly explores
intraracial
sexual
violence, occupies
an in-between
position leaning
towards
post-modernist
literary
modes. As she
challenges
the modernist aesthetization of the
sexual(ly
vi-
olated)
black female
body
and
exposes
the
significance
of the
visual,
the cinematic
'real' for the
late-twentieth-century
American cultural
imaginary, Petry projects
a
black female
subject
in transition.
Exposing
the
processes
of rhetorical
refiguration by
which the issue of
rape gets
metaphorically
condensed and
metonymically displaced
into other cultural contexts
(such
as
political
and economic
conflicts),
modernist texts not
only
underline how
our
understanding
of
rape depends upon
the traditions and aesthetics of
representa-
tions of
rape. They
also reveal both the
ideologies
circulated
by
the rhetoric of
rape
and the
complex
subtexts of cultural anxieties and desires that underlie the discourse
of sexual violence-
without, however, following
a
particular political agenda.
Challenging
the Politics of
Strong Tropes
In the second half of the twentieth
century,
American fiction has
subsequently
retransformed modernist notions of
rape
and
representation
into cultural
catego-
ries. As it
projects
the aesthetics of
rape
onto the level of content and
theme, post-
modernist
writing
tends to
re-politicize
and oftentimes literalize the
trope
of
rape,
in this
way renegotiating
the constructions of
identity
and difference effected so
'successfully'
at the turn of the last
century.
At the same
time,
post-modern
fic-
tions have retained modernist
insights
into
textuality
and the
processes
of mean-
ing
formation. In fact all
post-modernist re-figurations
of
rape,
no matter whether
they aspire
to verisimilitude or radicalize modernist
modes,
display
and
play upon
an awareness of their own
essentially
rhetorical character.
Post-modernist fiction thus
only
seems to be 'about' sexual violence. More of-
ten than
not,
it is
preoccupied
with the cultural effects of the established rhetoric
of
rape,
with the
ways
in which the rhetoric of sexual violence informs and struc-
tures our
perspectives
on real
rape,
and with how
'rape myths'
and
rape
as a so-
cial fact have become
inseparably
intertwined. These cultural effects
frequently
affect
subjectivity:
novels as
incomparable
as Chester Himes's A Case
of Rape
(1963)
and Lois Gould's A Sea
Change (1977),51
for
instance, expose
the
impact
of
commonplace readings
of
rape
on their
protagonists'
sense of self. In this
way,
post-modernist
texts dramatize the
privileged
relation of
rape
narratives to what
Eve
Kosovsky Sedgwick
calls "our most
prized
constructs of individual
identity,
truth,
and
knowledge."52 They
not
only
insist
that,
like the discourse of
sexuality,
the rhetoric of sexual violence has become "a
very
real historical formation."53
Post-modern fiction also
recognizes
that now that
rape
can be
openly
addressed,
51
Chester
Himes,
A Case
of Rape (Washington:
Howard
UP, 1984);
Lois
Gould,
A Sea
Change
(New
York:
Avon, 1977).
52
Eve
Kosovsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of
the Closet
(Berkeley:
U of California
P, 1990)
3.
53
Michel
Foucault,
The
History of Sexuality (New
York:
Vintage, 1980)
157.
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382 Sabine Sielke
its cultural
significance
and function are
being equivocated
and
displaced
in turn.
And while old silences
may
have been
'broken,'
new ones have taken
shape
in
their stead.
Rape
and its
meaning
therefore
keep circulating,
as
Sedgwick aptly
phrases
it,
into
opposite
directions.54 It is no
longer
the
representation
of
rape
that
gets displaced
and
disseminated, though,
but its
signifying power.
The
ongo-
ing significance
of the
pretexts
to which
post-modernist rape
narratives attest at
the same time underlines
that,
just
as
rape only
can exist as
experience
and mem-
ory,
the
literary
rhetoric of
rape
evolves in
part
as the
memory
of its own
history
of
representation.
Increasingly repoliticizing
and
remetaphorizing
sexual
violence, postmodernist
texts- and these include feminist criticism and
theory-
have thus tended to ad-
vance
rape
as a
trope
of cultural
politics.
Over the last three decades this
politics
has
undergone
a
major transformation, though.
Whereas the debate on sexual violence
started out as a collective feminist
endeavor,
the
trope
of
rape developed
more and
more into the means of an individual
identity politics, serving
a
self-conception
or
subjectivity
based on victimization.
This,
to
my mind,
is one reason
why
the rhetoric
of
rape
has had such a
high currency
in late
twentieth-century
American culture. At
the same
time,
this rhetoric illustrates two tendencies within American culture that
have evolved from the American 1960s:
first,
the
growing significance
of
sexuality
and
corporeality
as
parameters
of
subjectivity; secondly,
the
increasing displace-
ment of
political
activism
by
a
politics
of
strong tropes.
The current inclination to
appropriate
and recontextualize terms like
genocide
and
holocaust,
for
instance,
in
the discourse
pertaining
to AIDS or African American
history
manifests a
tendency
within American culture to
project identity through parameters
of violation and
victimization,
to redefine- and
thereby
racialize-
subjectivity
as survival.55
One effect of the
politics
of
strong tropes
is the
tendency
to override both the
ambiguities
and the
very
difference between
representation
and the real that
modernist culture
capitalized
on. In the case of radical feminism this resulted in
what critics of
rape-crisis
discourse
polemically
have called an "iron-fisted denial
of
complexity
and
ambiguity"
or,
to be more
precise, attempts
"to
legislate
ambiv-
alence out of sex."56 And
indeed,
dominant
rape-crisis
discourse has tended to
lump together
under the label of
rape
a series of acts such as consensual hetero-
sexual
intercourse,
consensual sexual
violence, acquaintance
and
stranger rape,
as
well as verbal coercion and
representations
of sexual violence57- acts which need
to be
clearly
differentiated in order to not belittle actual violence.
54
Eve
Kosovsky Sedgwick,
Between Men:
English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New
York: Columbia
UP, 1985)
10.
55
On this
issue,
see
Sielke, '"Celebrating
AIDS:
Quilts, Confessions,
and
Questions
of Nation-
al
Identity,"
Ceremonies and
Spectacles: Performing
American
Culture,
ed. Teresa
Alves,
Teresa
Cid,
and Heinz Ickstadt
(Amsterdam:
VU
UP, 2000)
281-93.
56
Mary Gaitskill,
"On Not
Being
a
Victim," Debating
Sexual
Correctness, 259-72; 264;
263.
57
See,
for
example, MacKinnon,
"Reflections on Sex
Equality
Under
Law,"
American Feminist
Thought
at
Century's
End: A
Reader,
ed. Linda F. Kauffman
(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993)
367-
424;
379.
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Rape
and the Feminist Debate in the U. S. 383
However,
when the
figure
of
rape
was
coming
of
age
in the
mid-1990s,
it was
soon
enough displaced by
a
trope
that was
applicable
to even broader contexts.
All of a
sudden,
incest seemed a
rampant
cultural
phenomenon
and what
Roiphe
called America's "latest
literary vogue."58
The
proliferation
of incest fiction in the
mid-1990s not
only
marks a certain exhaustion of the cultural effect of the
rape
trope.
It also
downplays
issues of race and does
so,
significantly enough, by
bor-
rowing
a
trope
that has
traditionally transported
race matters. Whereas 1970s and
1980s African American women's fiction
employed
the incest
trope
in order to re-
present rape
as
'family
affair' and
figure
for internalized
racism,
this new focus on
incest steered
straight away
from and
passed
issues of
race, class,
ethnicity, gender,
and
age.
In a "nation of
raped
children,"
as the African American writer
Sapphire
puts
it,59
to be
"rapable"
no
longer
defines what a woman
is,
as MacKinnon
claimed;
it defines
anyone
as a victim.
The recent rise to
prominence
of the incest
trope
within
(American)
cultural
symbology
is
part
of a
larger struggle
over
signifying power,
a
struggle
that makes
increasing
use of
particularly potent
rhetorical
figures.
The
displacement
of one
strong trope
of sexual violence
by another, though,
at the same time
clearly
under-
lines that no
trope
or discourse will ever be
appropriate
to render sexual violation
adequately.
Rather,
each
trope
calls
upon
its own
history
of
representation
and
thereby
also
perpetuates interpretations
of sexual violence
that,
due to their cul-
tural
dominance,
seem more conclusive than others- even
if,
as in the case of the
Central Park
Jogger Rape
Case, they
turn out to be no more than
misreadings.
While we can neither undo this
history
of
representation
nor do without
tropes,
we
can, however,
and have
to,
account for the
complexity
of all
phenomena
of vi-
olence. This entails that we
acknowledge
the fact that the rhetoric of sexual vio-
lence is
by
no means identical with acts of sexual
violence,
that the dominant ef-
fect of this rhetoric is rather to remember and
assign
cultural
significance
to
certain acts of violence while
forgetting
and
culturally marginalizing
others. More-
over,
instead of
challenging supposedly outrageous-
and
supposedly
realist- re-
presentations
of
rape (such
as Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American
Psycho*),
we
may
be more
politically
effective if we
challenge
our
readings
of such
represen-
tations. For
rape,
of
course,
is real. Its
re-presentation,
its translation into
signs,
images, signposts, posters,
and
pins,
however,
is an
altogether
different
matter,
closed off
by quotation
marks from the
unspeakable experience,
the full horror
that cannot but remain
absent, elsewhere,
"never
adequately
'
objectif
iable."'
At the same time American culture
may
also want to remember the discourses
on sex and desire it has
produced,
and shift its focus
every
now and then to the dis-
course disseminated
by
so-called
"sex-positive
feminism." For unlike the
suppos-
edly
radical feminist
politics
of the
strong trope,
this
highly marginalized
mode of
58
Katie
Roiphe, "Making
the Incest
Scene," Harper's Magazine (Nov. 1995): 65-71;
65.
59
Quoted
in
Roiphe,
"Incest Scene" 68.
60
Bret Easton
Ellis,
American
Psycho (New
York:
Vintage, 1991).
Cf. Sabine Sielke and Anne
Hofmann,
"Serienmrder und andere Killer: Die Endzeitfiktionen von Bret Easton Ellis und Mi-
chel
Houellebecq," Anglo-Romanische
Kulturkontakte: von Humanismus bis
Postkolonialismus,
ed. Andrew Johnston and Ulrike Schneider
(Berlin:
Dahlem
UP, 2002)
283-318.
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384 Sabine Sielke
feminism
aligns
its
critique
of traditional
gender
relations with alternative
images
of sexual desire
projected by
dissident
literary
texts,
pornography,
and
perfor-
mance art. It is about time that these
images
do effective and successful
political
work. And
yet
I have serious doubts that this is a
good
time for cultural dissidence.
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