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 Published by: Universittsverlag WINTER Gmbh Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41158073 . Accessed: 18/05/2014 22:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Universittsverlag WINTER Gmbh is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Amerikastudien / American Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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- This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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 This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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). This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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). This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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). This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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. This content downloaded from 131.123.1.227 on Sun, 18 May 2014 22:04:49 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions