The Dutch Art Institute (Masters of Art Praxis)

ADVISOR: Marina Vishmidt

STUDENT: Clementine Edwards
Propositions: to complicate the position of having been raped

1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract 3
SECTION TITLES
The gesture as methodology 4
On the eeriness and absences of what makes rape 5
Power, intimacy and sucking blood 7
Legislating consent, rationalising power 9
Why I have a body, kind of 11
Complicating subjecthood, locating body 13
The body remembers trauma 15
Having been raped as interruption 19
Frankenstein’s form fell through the gaps 22
An encounter with a shit-cunt 25
Do it, damnit: the experience formally known as rape 27
Threatened by pedagogy, I can’t find desire 29
Conjuring disgust 31

CONCLUSION 34
Acknowledgements 36
Bibliography 36

2
ABSTRACT

Using the gesture as methodology, this thesis sets out to investigate the following proposition: to
complicate the position of having been raped.

The thesis draws on a range of written and visual material that is combined with the author’s
biographical experience. Its interdisciplinary nature emphasises the plurality of the experience of
sexual trauma, whereby I place sexual trauma as an extension of the rape experience. The essay spans
queer theory and affect theory, feminist legal theory and cultural theory, decoloniality and critical race
theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychology.

The thesis’ work is to test binaries such as raped/rapist, victim/perpetrator, consensual sex/rape,
before/after, desire/disgust and victim/survivor and in so doing, reject the narrative of return – that is,
to a ‘healthy’ ‘original’ individual state after sexual assault.

I open by thinking through the possibility of eeriness in the rape experience, and then address the
unintelligibility of sexual experience, the complexity of consent and power within legal frameworks,
who has rights to subjecthood and therefore who ‘has’ a body, how trauma is remembered –
individually and intergenerationally – the temporal and formal complexity of sexual trauma, loving
one’s rapist/s and rape as encounter, post-rape worlds and thinking through the complications of
disgust and attraction in the framework of the rape experience.

The stance is reflected in the essay form itself, which is non-linear. The function of time, trauma and
memory are central to the writing’s enquiry into non-linearity, whereby the essay’s form and content
are ‘tested’.

3
The gesture as methodology

This thesis is an attempt to create a sort of document that embodies various political and philosophical
positions on ‘having been raped’ (HBR). It is a collection of ideas around sexual trauma that are
configured in constellation with one another. If the ideas were to be mapped or made material, they
would materialise as a single gesture: a hand flicking open in suggestion.

This form needs to be traced out. In the gesture, says Giorgio Agamben, ‘nothing is being produced or
acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture opens the sphere of ethos as
the more proper sphere of that which is human’ (2000, 56). Here ideas are in motion and open-ended,
unfolding somewhere between production and reception (Agamben 2000, 56). What is relayed to
human beings in gestures is ‘the sphere of a pure and endless mediality’ (Agamben 2000, 57–58). As
methodology then, the gesture’s potential is in this mediality.1 In nudging open the door onto the
sphere of ethos, the gesture makes space for the messiness of life.

My goal is for the thesis’ form to extend the messy experience of HBR. But the notion of my drawing
academic conclusions within the context of this goal goes against my intention to complicate. The
gesture loosens the grip of such expectations. By dispensing of responsibility to formal progression of
argument, I am better placed to ‘honour’ the state of HBR by following disparate lines of enquiry. My
own responsibility to the material can then be about exploring the complicated disarrangement of
thought and feeling that living with sexual trauma after HBR produces. If the gesture is a signifier that
reiterates the ‘being-in-language of human beings’ then as neither analysis nor confession (Agamben
2000, 57), following Juana María Rodríguez my writing becomes a site through which the
‘imaginative potential’ of readers and writers’ being-in-language can arise (2007, 282).

Further and finally, the gesture behaves as a validation2 of my decision to engage with a wide variety
of subject matter that isn’t necessarily directly sexual-assault related. In its mediality, it recognises the
shifting incoherence of lived experience, the impossibility of speech, the overlap of touchable life,
intangible thought, and the ‘being-in-ness’ of writing.

1
And if the ‘false alternative between ends and means paralyses morality, then gesture breaks from the
paralysis’ (Agamben 2000, 57–58).
2
To validate a decision or position is a lesson I learned from clinical psychology – it is to communicate, affirm
or legitimize one’s experience through a range of methods.

4
On the eeriness and the absences of what makes rape

I have experienced sexual violence but it took me some years to acknowledge that what had occurred
to me was in fact rape. The extremity of the experience, combined with the psychological and
physical side effects, was felt later. It was only when my body and mind felt as if they were coming to
pieces and I began to exhibit clear indications of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that my
memory registered events and the experience ‘became’ real. Until then I didn’t feel raped: there was
an experiential absence to the event.3

I want to emphasise that this essay is what comes after the reckoning, after the coming to terms with
the psychological challenges that might accompany the feeling of such an experience. It does not
assume that clinical or psychosocial ways of coping with a rape experience aren’t enough, nor does it
presume to locate itself as a theoretical stepping-stone on the ‘recovery’ path. In fact this essay rejects
the term recovery as a recuperative concept that implies the possibility of a return to a ‘normal’ state
of health.

My writing moves outward from and returns to the ‘autobiographical example’ – Saidiya Hartman’s
term (2008, no pagination). For Black studies professor Christina Sharpe, who discusses Hartman’s
autobiographical example in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, the personal counters the violence
of abstraction (2003, 7). Following these two women then, I am interested not in personal story that
folds in onto itself but rather in ‘historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window
onto social and historical processes, as an example of them’ (Hartman, cited in Sharpe 2003, 8).

From the autobiographical example it becomes clear that this essay’s work isn’t about ‘wallowing’ in
PTSD, as CA Conrad puts it, just as it’s not about ‘posttraumatic stress growth’ (2009, no pagination).
It is interested in how the rape experience can cast light on one’s entangled embedded-ness in socio-
political processes. By shifting focus away from a desire to return to, or even a belief in, an original
state, the essay attempts to theorise ideas beyond binaries such as victim/perpetrator, raped/rapist,
sickness/health. It rejects the linearity of Conrad’s term and instead follows theorist Anne Cvetkovich,
who uses trauma theory as a way to understand accounts of pain that are psychic and physical (2003).
For Cvetkovich, trauma is a name for experiences of socially situated political violence that forges
connections between politics and emotion (2003.). This understanding validates my structural
3
Discordant side note: my experience of rape, initially, was that it occurred in my mind but not on my body. My
early experience of the events mirrors the legal definition of rape that understands it to be about what I was
thinking rather than what occurred on my body. I became inadvertently a sort of textbook legal example of the
raped ‘subject’.

5
approach to the essay, just as the gesture does. To settle for narrow or ‘closed’ accounts of sexual
trauma is to settle for the cognitive account. Mine is an attempt to write into a realm that might
increase plural sensitivities to and understandings of the state of having been raped. Affect’s nebulous
indications are embraced. As Donna Haraway says, ‘We need stories (and theories) that are just big
enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old
connections’ (2015, 160). I’ll try to at least push at the edges.

Back to the peculiar state of having not felt raped. I’m thinking here of Mark Fisher’s book The Weird
and the Eerie. In the book Fisher describes eeriness as a ‘particular kind of aesthetic experience’ that
can be constituted by a failure of absence. ‘The sensation of the eerie occurs … when there is
something present where there should be nothing’ (2016, 61). In my case, the not-nothing was the
neural recollection of violent events. Un-felt in any affective sense, it marks a sort of inverse
affective-cognitive state to that of Fisher’s invocation of the mode: the anomalous cry of a bird.
Where his eerie relies on the sense of a failure of absence, mine is a neural awareness without the
sensory accompaniment. I’m cognitively aware of the un-felt experience. Nonetheless, he claims that
the eerie ‘necessarily involves forms of speculation and suspense’. He goes on:

The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears. It must
be stressed at this point that not all mysteries generate the eerie. There must be also a sense of
alterity, a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity and
sensation that lie beyond common experience… The central enigma at its core is the problem
of agency. In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency
as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has
not yet revealed itself?’ (Fisher 2016, 62–63)

What entity possessed me – man, men, boys? trauma, ghost, rape? To know that something terrible
happened is not necessarily to apprehend that knowledge bodily, but it provides a clue. Fisher’s eerie
is a clue, too, for thinking through the complex state of having been raped. Like Agamben’s gesture,
which Rodríguez says ‘leaves an impression that haunts the spaces of its absence’, here the non-
apprehension of an affect, unspoken and unspeakable because unknowable, yields an interrogative
energy that will surface in various guises throughout this essay (2007, 282).

6
Power, intimacy and sucking blood

Early on in Octavia Butler’s 2005 vampire novel Fledgling, the amnesiac protagonist Shori is reading
up on mythologies about her own kind. She has only recently woken up to the darkness of a cave
where ‘there was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other
feelings’ (Butler 2005, 7). With no memory of who or what she is, Shori’s story of self-discovery
begins. She researches human accounts of the millennia-old race popularly known as vampires but in
the novel named Ina. ‘Some ate flesh either from the living or from the dead. Some took in a kind of
spiritual essence or energy – whatever that meant […] All took something from their subjects, usually
not caring how they injured the subject’ (Butler 2005, 43). On reading about her kind, Shori questions
the logic of the folkloric behaviour.

Shortly after she feeds on Theodora, the second human she has drunk from since ‘waking up’ and she
takes great care with her victim. The older woman asks if she will kill her and Shori responds, ‘“Of
course not. But you shouldn’t go to work tomorrow. You might be a little weak”’ (Butler 2005, 44). If
the Ina demonstrates here a care towards her human dinner that could be interpreted as instinctive
given her inability to recollect anything, then it is with such narrative exchanges that Butler
establishes the Ina’s emotional investment in humans and so complicates notions of vampirism as
metaphor for opportunistic sexuality.

Butler’s narrative is laden with such instances of what I interpret as complicated power dynamics in
sexual relations and I want to briefly touch on two more as examples.

First, Shori’s influence over Theordora is not straightforwardly benign. Behind the caring captor front
is a vampire who emits an addictive venom when she feeds that induces humans to experience
feelings of wellbeing and suggestibility. Once Shori has drunk someone’s blood, the person becomes
tied to her in a relationship that is an uncomfortable mix between love and slavery. In fact, when
Theodora asks if Shori will kill her it is, for the human, ‘as though she didn’t care what the answer
might be’ (Butler 2005, 44). There is ‘no tension’ in Theodora when she asks the question, which is
alarming given the threat she faces (Butler 2005, 44): under the influence of Shori’s venom,
dangerous amounts of blood are being extracted from her neck and she is idly wondering whether she
is about to be murdered.

Butler takes this much further, though. She situates as her protagonist a black female vampire who
appears to be a child of just nine or ten years old. The Ina-child has superhuman strength and easily
overpower-enchants her predominantly Caucasian adult snacks. When Shori drinks the blood of her
human ‘symbioants’ – those to whom she becomes tied – the exchange regularly culminates in sexual

7
intercourse in which the human parties achieve heightened states of erotic pleasure. It’s my claim here
that Butler is getting at the unintelligibility of sexual experience. It’s likely that Cvetkovich would
agree. Using S&M and butch-femme sexual practices to illustrate her point in Archive of Feelings,
Cvetkovich advocates for sexual discourse that explores ‘the imbrications of pleasure and danger in
sexual practice’ in order to provide a model for approaches to trauma that ‘resist pathologizing
judgments’ (2003, 35). I believe that Butler makes a similar point using the novel form to explore the
inscrutable world of sexual experience.

The readers’ temporal commitment to Fledgling as a novel makes space for incoherent and enigmatic
sexual experiences to sit alongside each other. Social, sexual and sensual relationships entangle and in
them rape is a mode of sexual exchange. Such confronting themes are delivered within the tidy
packaging of genre fiction: specifically vampire sci-fi. Science fiction, crime and romance novels and
all their subgenres are structured so that they gather the reader up in the story and sweep them along.
From the moment that Shori wakes up injured, amnesiac, naked in a cave, the reader wants to know –
who is she, what happened and what is going to happen? The story is salacious and I would argue
thematically dangerous, but the reader is seduced by the novel’s pace, fast, and language, easy.

Content is form here. In the same way we witness the symbioants’ ultimately obliging attitude
towards Shori, Butler reproduces in the reader an obliging disposition towards the story’s complex
sexual power dynamics. Vampire science-fiction is Butler’s venom. In Fledgling, says feminist writer
Susanna Morris, Butler ‘troubles any easy notion of a vampire utopia by ambivalently regarding the
concept of freewill’ – and this extends to the reader (2012, 147). Just as it’s difficult for the reader to
regard Shori as a predator, so too is it difficult to feel preyed upon or played with by Butler. We are
implicated in the novel’s structure (what a great read!) and the reader also has no tension in them
when reading about what might otherwise be perceived as distressing entanglements of intimate
interrelations. By bringing our sympathy into first-person proximity with Shori, Butler also brings the
reader into the subjective universe of a sexual aggressor and demonstrates how, up close, binary
categories of raped/rapist or victim/perpetrator can be difficult for the person who has been raped to
discern.

The novel Fledgling provides an elegant entry point into the complicated territory of the experience of
HBR. By touching on questions of interpretation and implication within sexual relations, we are now
well placed to address how sexual interactions are framed across contexts and how value is assigned
to certain lives over others.

8
Legislating consent, rationalising power

Legal notions of consent are not as straightforward as the well-known ‘No means no’ slogan makes
them out to be, because to respond in the negative to a sexual advance is to take an active stance and
that stance is predicated on one’s cognitive and social capacity to do so. At its simplest, consent is a
freely and willingly given agreement between participants to engage in sexual activity. Agreement
can be verbal or indicated with physical cues, meaning that sexual determination is in part about
communication. But if one’s ability to freely give consent is impaired, say by drugs or alcohol, then
according to the largest anti-sexual violence network in the USA, sex becomes rape (RAINN 2017
(no pagination)). In many definitions consent must be explicitly given every time a sexual act takes
place and one is not considered capable of communicating it if one is below a certain age. Where
legislated and legal, consensual non-heterosexual sexual encounters are liable to stricter legislation
within legal systems globally, further complicating understandings of what constitutes sexual consent.
Rape is generally understood as ‘sexual intercourse by force or without consent or both’ according to
legal feminist scholar Catherine Mackinnon (2017, 285). But where it is a penetrative sexual offence
in some legal systems, in others it pertains specifically to the phallus. In the Netherlands ‘active
French kissing’ can be rape, whereas in the UK if one is penetrated with something other than the
penis, then one hasn’t been raped. Ha! What one could do with that exclamation mark if wielded at
the UK law.

In legal application, it is a requirement that a woman is believed concerning a sexual event – making
the judicial process contingent on a victim’s subjective state of mind. MacKinnon argues that it comes
as no surprise that consent is often found when women are ‘drunk, drugged, repeatedly said no, were
asleep, comatose’, in other words in situations of considerable force, ‘building into law the
misogynistic assumption that women want to be forced into sex’ (2017, 286).

But sex that is wanted or desired has mutuality written all over it – it needn’t be termed consensual,
MacKinnon says (2017). That said, in a social context the concept relies for its appeal on the
presumption that it stands in for desire (2017, 288). For political theorist Wendy Brown it simply
indicates the presence of a power to which one submits, thus in submission it ‘marks the subordinate
status of the consenting party’ (1995, 163). And while the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)
has said that consent is the core of an equality approach, MacKinnon shows that it is not. She says the
ECHR case studies ‘unintentionally endorse the active/passive model of sex and social conditioning
to trauma and the acquiescence that goes with it, and call that equality’ (2017, 288). Broadly, what the
ECHR example does is demonstrate how central the term is to patriarchal, heteronormative models of
human behaviour, and in turn to the reproduction of liberal democratic society, the normative nuclear
family and capitalism. Consent’s subsumption within such institutions says nothing about desire or

9
about what sex looks like, unless the person being consented to is a white heterosexual male. ‘Under
unequal conditions, many women’ – and here I insert racialised, femme, trans- and gender-non-
conforming bodies – ‘acquiesce in or tolerate sex they cannot as a practical matter avoid’
(MacKinnon 2017, 288). I’ll explore in the next section how value is assigned differently to
individual persons based on cultural, historical and socio-political contexts, further complicating the
way in which the rape experience is interpreted.

What is becoming clear here though is that authoritative language around what makes consensual and
non-consensual sex is inadequate. In seeking to outline an idea, language locks down definitions –
creating an undefined ‘outside’ characterised by everything but that which is defined and, therefore,
full of penetrative potential. Such language is exclusive, in fact anti-social, because it is predicated on
systems of institutional classification that abstract experience. Sexual violence makes things fuzzy
and there can be no clarifying definition because such language cuts lines and legislates power.

MacKinnon understands rape as ‘a physical invasion of a sexual nature under circumstances of threat
or use of force, fraud, coercion, abduction, or of the abuse of power, trust, or a position of dependency
or vulnerability’ (2017, 290). I choose to follow this definition for its comprehensive detailing of the
circumstances under which one might experience rape and in so doing, for how it makes space for the
recognition of its complexity within a legal framework.

10
Why I have a body, kind of

The way in which the rape act is interpreted varies radically across different social and political
systems and through history, and as I’ve shown legal recognition of consent and rape is predicated on
a tight circle of conditions. The two terms’ very existence within legislative frameworks mask
complex power structures that attribute value to certain lives over others. Structural assignations of
value and humanity impede, prevent and radically derail the possibility of conversation around
consensual sex, and so reconfigure and thus complicate individual experiences of rape.

I am an English-heritage Caucasian from settler-colonial Australia, writing a thesis about sexual

trauma for a Dutch institution, so I find myself firmly planted between two major perpetrators of
colonial knowledge production. As an Australian I identify with a land that First Nation people
haven’t ceded. I live because of decades of English and then Australian state-sanctioned genocide,
rape and plunder. Using my position of experience as a departure point for understanding sexual
trauma, my mode of sense-making is enclosed within this world. Writing about the coloniality of
power, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues that the concept of rationality was constructed
within the subjective universe of European colonial power. In the reign of colonial domination ‘the
cultural complex known as European modernity/rationality was being constituted… [this] was
elaborated and formalized by the Europeans and established in the world as an exclusively European
product and as a universal paradigm of knowledge’ (2007, 171–72). This way of knowing is
Eurocentred (Quijano 2007). ‘Eurocentrism naturalizes the experience of people from within this
model of power’, thus underscoring the absurdity of its institutions’ purported neutrality (Quijano,
cited in and translated by Lugones 2008, 3).

For Quijano ‘the norms and formal-ideal patterns of sexual behaviour of the genders and consequently
the patterns of familial organization of “Europeans” were directly founded on the “racial”
classification (Quijano, cited in and translated by Lugones 2008, 6). In ‘The Coloniality of Gender’,
feminist philosopher Maria Lugones makes the case for the decolonization of gender based on its
racialised understandings. Extrapolating on Quijano, she says there is a ‘light’ and a ‘dark’ side to
gender, which is itself simply a coding of the body into the system (2008). On the light side we find
white women as preservers of race, class and purity and as such they become necessary for the
perpetuation of the social order via the the reproduction of the hetero-patriarchal family unit. The light
side is enforced through hegemony or manufactured consent, where the prostitution of women acts as
a counterpoint to the European bourgeois family (Lugones 2008, 15).

On the coloniality of gender’s ‘dark’ side, we find everyone else, everyone ‘not-white’. Here it is
about the splitting off of the human into the deviant and disposable, where the dark is enforced

11
through coercion (Lugones 2008, 15). Frank Wilderson’s thinking on Blackness extends the raced
implications of Quijano’s and Lugones’ paradigms. Wilderson locates Blackness outside of humanity
and civil society – making its relation to the world and the humans who are defined as not-Black one
of antagonism (Wilderson, cited in Von Gleich, 2017). Following Wilderson then, the way in which
Blackness is constituted challenges what it is to be human and so becomes an opposing force to
articulations of humanity. In this light, any notion of human ‘equality’ becomes fantastic. The
distinction between Blackness and humanity that emerges thus raises the question of relevance around
consent definitions discussed previously, and to an extent even feminist legal theory, given the limits
of their application within Quijano and Wilderson’s framework. Amid such binary tension, Saidiya
Hartman writes into the near silent archive of slavery through the Middle Passage in Venus in Two
Acts. The archive is for the enslaved, she says, ‘a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated
body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhoea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an
asterisk in the grand narrative of history’ (2008, 2). In Blackness, in gender’s ‘dark’ side, we see how
humanity is not ascribed and how, unlike my history, the histories of people of colour surface
residually – or retroactively, as in the case of Hartman. As a model citizen of race, class and purity,
my humanity is inscribed on my body and I can rely on a generous slice of historical representation.
My rapes count.

There are so many ways in which value is assigned differently to individual persons. The above
examples go towards locating me within this coded, European rationalist, white-supremacist
patriarchal universe that elevates civil society and its associated institutions, including the nuclear
family. The simple fact of this thesis’ existence is testament to my structural privilege, and unravels
any straightforward reading of my own ‘having been raped’ experience. In an attempt to refract or
depart from this universe, I engage with material by people of colour and/or queer artists and thinkers.
This essay’s foundational literature reminds me of the not-neutral nature of human experience and the
implausibility of its circumscription – just as rape and its associated trauma can fracture singular
conceptions of reality. And if the gesture is a ‘gag’ marking the failure of speech, then let my attempt
to occupy the sphere of communicability collaborate with people who also understand the complex
disarrangement of thought and feeling that accompanies the traumatic paradoxes of existing within
twisted structures of power.

12
Complicating subjecthood, locating body

The ground on which I stand is so unsteady.

Throughout the Old Testament, the question of having or not having a body is bound up in God’s
power and authority: people have bodies and God does not. ‘Even among human beings, the one with
authority and power has no body for his inferiors’ (Scarry 1985, 210). In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema’ first published in 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey coins the term the ‘male
gaze’ to articulate the gender power-imbalance of watching film. ‘Pleasure in looking has been split
between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the
female form which is styled accordingly’ (Mulvey 1999, 837).

Think of the deeply embodied portrayals of the European female figure – women rendered in oil,
marble, pencil and on film – and then consider Suite Vénitienne, the artist book of Sophie Calle’s,
which is, in effect, an archive of her stalking of Henri B in Venice in 1980 (2015). Calle observes
Henri B from the the shadows and follows and investigate his daily movement and habits. Like the
protagonist/artist, the reader/viewer is also bodiless. (And that our watching of events takes place at a
temporal and spatial remove doesn’t get us off the hook – as we saw with Octavia Butler’s Fledgling,
the witnessing implicates the reader.) Calle tracks her subject and alongside her photo-documentation
of him, she describes her emotional and psychological state and projects her ideas of what he might be
like onto him.

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry says that ‘to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension
out into the world’ (1985, 207). A god-like ghost that is without a body and therefore cannot be raped.
She goes on:

Conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms
of creation, instruction, and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the
small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the
equivalent of being unrepresented and is almost always the condition of those without power (1985,
207).

Suite Vénitienne unsettles common narratives of (Eurocentred) female embodiment. From this
vantage point, the story of gazed-upon thus preyed-upon victimhood – person who has been raped or
otherwise – is told from a crooked script. Calle devotedly stalks Henri B. Some days she sees Henri
around Venice, other days she simply retraces his steps, meandering along canals and streets to places
he may have visited. She wears a blonde wig disguise and feeds pigeons. Regardless of how

13
threatening her presence-absence might seem to be from Henri’s perspective, it’s difficult not to read
Calle’s work as one of tenderness not threat, and this is based on received ideas around fearsomeness.
As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed argues, fear works to secure a relationship between bodies: it is
concerned with the preservation of a subject rather than the gratification (2014, 64). The threat of
violence is itself shaped by the authorization of narratives about what is dangerous. It’s interesting to
combine Lugones’ coloniality of gender theory here with Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, and see
how notions of purity and protection from deviance or public threat pertain directly to the white
bourgeois woman. Ahmed’s concept of fear becomes reproductive – about preservation of the social
order through the nuclear family.

A white woman’s non-absence charges this work, and she’s everything that a threatened woman
ought not to be, haunting Henri’s life in the public spaces where she doesn’t belong.

Calle further complicates by writing about her shame and desperation. To be emotional is to be
reactive, dependent and at the will of one’s body according to Ahmed (2014, 3). Calle contradicts: she
is vulnerable and predatory, author and subject, exacting and erratic. Feelings are not below this
stalker, showing how Calle augments blunt conceptions of the (sexual) predator, and so subverts the
narrative around those who are preyed upon.

Suite Vénitienne is an elegant inversion of the fearful female victim-subject. As photographer and
author, Calle is at the helm of her story and Henri B the object of her documentation, dreams and
desires. His horizons are Calle’s. She is as unmediated as a white man; it seems her limits on her
extension into Henri B’s life and Venice, as Scarry would put it, are of her own choosing. And like a
milder version of Butler’s Shori, Calle brings us into the subjective universe of her own predatory
behaviour. (I wonder if it’s eerie for Henri B being a man stalked by a woman.) It is B here who has
his borders drawn and his world embodied as a rapable subject. For the purposes of this essay I argue
that the book’s framework acts as one of patriarchal prohibition, administering definitions around
what is permissible or not (Bray 2003). Unable to apprehend patriarchy’s expanse, Henri B will
apprehend it in the experience of Calle’s non-absence, and if not there then I apprehend it in the
energetic charge of his not-experienced. Here the interrogative energy of rape’s eerie ingraspability
charges my thinking. The remoteness of the event might occasion disbelief but in some way it will
make itself experience-able. In the next section I will discuss how traumatic events, even remote ones,
might be experienced on the body and transmitted through time.

14
The body remembers trauma

Dressed in a maid’s uniform, indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffatt plays the sole protagonist in
her 2017 photography series ‘The Body Remembers’, exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale. The
series is set in what appears to be a rural landscape. It is not depressed necessarily, just Australian: dry
and apart from the maid absent of life. There is a rocky ruin of a house façade against which the
woman or her shadow is cast dramatically. (The site is a place from Moffatt’s past.) Some of the
images are of inside the house, no longer a ruin. The images are sepia-paletted and cinematic but if
there is a nostalgia here, it is misplaced. The visuals don’t add up; time is dislocated. The maid should
not be here in these ruins, nor does she belong inside this sparsely furnished house by the window
soaked in buttery European light. This series complicates the concept of an individualised experience
of trauma – sexual or otherwise – and, subsequently, the experience’s orientation to time.

Thinking around how trauma works on the body has come into public consciousness episodically
since the late-1800s according to Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery (1992). What is now known
as PTSD first surfaced as hysteria, which was defined as an ‘archetypal psychological disorder of
women’ that came out of France; then as shell shock, where it was studied in England and the US
after the First World War and where it became particularly associated with the Vietnam War; and then
was identified in relation to sexual and domestic violence (Herman 1992, 5). PTSD was added to the
American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III)
in 1980, and in 2017 moved from the anxiety disorders category to the newly created ‘trauma and
stressor-related disorders’ category, within which exposure to a stressful event, such as rape, is a
precondition (DSM-V).

People who have experienced sexual violence and its subsequent trauma are told that they need to
bring their bodies back. Herman talks about fragmentation, whereby trauma tears apart the body’s
complex system of self-protection that normally functions in an integrated fashion (1992). Traumatic
symptoms can become disconnected from their source and take on a life of their own, and traumatic
memories are preserved in an abnormal state – set apart from ordinary consciousness. Psychotherapist
Pierre Janet named this state dissociation, whereby people lose the capacity to integrate memories of
overwhelming life events (1889). Dissociation or ‘freezing’ is a universal fear response available to
all mammals that can begin when violation occurs (Levine 1997). While freezing is one of the three
primary threat responses, along with fight and flight, it is the only one characterised by dominance of
the parasympathetic nervous system, meaning that the heart rate decelerates (Roelofs 2017 (no
pagination)). Therapist Peter Levine claims that one might heal trauma by making sense of its primal
quality physiologically as well as psychologically. ‘The heart of the matter lies in being able to
recognize that trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can be

15
used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of well-being’ (1997, 32). A
‘return’ to wellbeing sounds quite straightforward: by mobilising the same immense energies that
make traumatic symptoms, one can transform the trauma that resides within the body and ‘propel us
into new heights of healing, mastery, and even wisdom’ (2005, 19). In Healing Trauma Levine
introduces grounding as a technique for the trauma survivor. Via seemingly banal exercises such as
the repeated touching of a chair or stroking of a piece of soft material, the person ‘bring themselves
back’ to the present – away from the PTSD flashbacks, for instance – by connecting to material
objects, sights, sounds and smells in the everyday. Just as the rabbit twitches after being seized by a
fox then released, Peter Levine believes that ‘the key to healing traumatic symptoms in humans lies in
our being able to mirror the fluid adaptation of wild animals as they shake out and pass through the
immobility response and become fully mobile and functional again’ (1997, 17).4

But I want to know what Levine’s unexplained traumatic symptoms in the body look like when
experienced across generations, and what a transformed state of healing would look like to an
individual who has experienced complex intergenerational trauma. Indigenous Australians growing
up from the late-1800s through to the 1970s were at great risk of complex trauma. The Australian
government’s policy of forcible removal of ‘fair-skinned’ Indigenous children from their families into
institutional care was a practice of long-term state-sanctioned genocide or ‘systemic dispersal’ with
the intention to extinguish Aboriginal existence (Read 1981 (no pagination)). Children not only
underwent a ‘totality of separation’ from culture, language, history, family, but were also at increased
risk of experiencing sexual violence according to the 1997 ‘Bringing Them Home’ report – the
national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their
families.5 Of the people interviewed for the report, one in ten boys and three in ten girls reported
experiencing sexual assault in foster homes (1997, 142). Given that for personal and procedural
reasons interviewees weren’t asked directly whether they had experienced sexual violence according
to the report, it’s reasonable to assume that statistics would be far higher if they weren’t collected
based on volunteered information (1997, 142).

I can remember a piece of wood shaped like a walking cane only on a smaller scale, like the candy
striped lollipops they make today approximately 30cms long. She was telling me all about the time she
was with my mother when she died and how my mother had told her how much she loved me … All

4
Note: I don’t abide the notion of ‘functional’ bodies, as it ties in with disability stigma that locates bodies that
function differently as worth less than others. If I am blind or if I have a neurodegenerative disease, for instance,
does not mean I don’t want to ‘heal’ from trauma.
5
Torres Straight Islander people are indigenous to the Torres Straight Islands, which are a geographical part of
the Australia. They are culturally distinct from Aboriginal Australia.

16
 this time she was inserting this cane into my vagina. I guess I was about 9 or 10. I know she did this to
me many times over the years (Anon, cited in Australian Human Rights Commission 1997, 141).

When the British invaded Australia in 1788 they declared it terra nullius. Without acknowledgement
of one’s existence there can be no habeas corpus under Western law, and so it seems devastatingly
unsurprising that circumstances of sexual assault against indigenous people, as we’ve seen, was
commonplace alongside the other atrocities that have occurred since settlement. The fact of the terra
nullius ruling resulted in a settler-nation building its very identity on a perversion of indigeneity. Take
as a contemporary example the Australian Border Force, a branch of the immigration department that
exists to ‘protect Australia’s border and manage the movement of people across it’ (2018 (no
pagination)). The greatest threat to indigenous Australian life has been the English empire and the
Australian state, which proclaims protector status. Terra nullius was upheld within the constitution
until 1967 and today Indigenous Australians are up to four times more likely to experience sexual
assault than non-indigenous Australians according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2016 (no
pagination)). Such details illustrate how the trauma and dispossession of settler-colonialism is
embedded and reiterated in the contemporary Aboriginal Australian experience generations on.

Consider the dislocated temporal atmosphere that saturates ‘The Body Remembers’ and how it relates
to the dissociation that the body produces in response to traumatic events. Now try to understand that
sense of pervasive dislocation if the foundations of one’s existence were grounded in traumatic events
such as those described above. Trauma echoes. If ‘The Body Remembers’ is about loss, it’s not clear
whether it is the body, land, culture, language or something else that is being mourned. Whatever it is,
there can be no altar to mourn at for the viewer, for it’s impossible to grasp where we are or how time
operates. The cinematic atmosphere contributes to the spectator’s sense of temporal fragmentation.
It’s as if there are entire scenes missing, as if we should be looking at a film not a collection of
images.

Judith Butler questions what is won by reducing a history of oppression to the discourse of trauma.
‘Although the struggle for the history of the oppressed is surely assisted by the acknowledgement and
working through of trauma, sometimes the history of the oppressed continues in the present forms of
oppression’ (2012, 129). She claims the past is never over in trauma, but in the histories of the
oppressed, the past never was, and it is that ‘never was’ that becomes the condition of the present
(ibid.). While I resist the delineation she makes between traumatic past and the histories-of-the-
oppressed past, her concept of the ‘never was’ as a condition of the present gets at my point about
Moffatt’s series. In an interview about the show, Moffatt emphasises the photograph is ‘a story not-
quite-told. It is what we can’t see in a photograph that holds my fascination’ (cited in Lehan 2017).
Such fragmentation speaks to history’s lack and to Butler’s ‘never was’.

17
Peter Levine argues for the subject’s reintegration of traumatic event but, as we have seen, such an
approach has its limits in the individualised experience of trauma. In the ‘The Body Remembers’
Tracey Moffatt not only tests these limits formally, but we are also reminded of them in her presence
as an indigenous Australian female artist with a complex, traumatic history. She is a testament to
these limits. Using the photograph as form and visual signifiers that disorientate one’s relation to
time, the series asks: how can one integrate traumatic circumstances when so unrelenting, embedded
and plural?

18
Having been raped as interruption

My skin tingles when I watch the documentation of Dominique Ashaheed speak-yell her poem ‘Star
Gazer’. Performed at the Women of the World Poetry Slam in 2012, it is a spoken-word poem about
her first experience of consensual sex and ‘the girl who goes back for her body’. It is a poem about
retrieval, but it is also about paedophilia. In the version that I watch online Ashaheed performs with
an intensity of self-possession, defiance, sorrow, and I wonder where she gets the energy, and how
she feels after.

Ashaheed arrives on stage, adjusts the microphone and steps back. Away from the microphone, head
down and hands beside her, she pauses before beginning. For nearly twenty seconds the pause lasts, in
which time she breaths, slowly, four times. The breath before speaking, the comma between ideas –
the pause brings to mind anthropolosgist Tim Ingold’s take on the breath. He says that it is in ‘those
moments when we take the world into ourselves that performance, speaking, playing, whatever, gets
its actual vitality’ (2016). The pause animates life, for the breaths are when ‘you take the world in for
a while, consider, gather, and then go forward again’. Life pours in.

How does her pause before delivering a redemptive poem about sexual assault complicate the position
of having been raped, and the temporal aftermath of rape that is trauma? I want to think through the
concept of HBR as an interruption and the form of Ashaheed’s taut pause before ‘Star Gazer’ guides
my path in. Her breathing in is in interruption to the anticipated poem but the pause is nothing without
her words.

The interruption is temporal. It can shock or cause a jolt, and for good or for bad it has the capability
of startling the interrupted out of a stupor, torpor or reverie. So what of the temporal conditions of the
experience of rape, of how it is experienced through time and as trauma? Rape’s poignancy is
precipitated by the fact that it generally presents as a deviation from the day to day. As a deviation,
the experience delineates a before and after. Ashaheed identifies as a person who has experienced
sexual assault, but she refuses identification with the experience itself: for ‘only molested children
love so well, or forget so quickly’ (2012). Her hymen ‘applauds the first consensual contact she has
ever known’ and she will ‘begin the arduous ritual of disremembering the one who came before’
(2012). By articulating her desire to reject event, to forget interruption, Ashaheed seeks to nullify the
experience’s horrifying effects. But of course – of course – the poem is contingent on the
disremembered event.

What if Ashaheed’s poem serves as both the embodiment of experience, the original interruption, and
an interruption to said experience? The event Ashaheed recounts is written across her body –

19
possessed, honoured and exorcised in her pause, her voice, her stage presence. ‘Glory be the girl who
goes back for her body,’ she yells, arms flung open (2012). There is embodiment everywhere. And yet
she interrupts the logic of her own disremembered rape experience by claiming something for herself
after its occurrence, after she loses her virginity. ‘It’s dawn now and there are a thousand poems
waiting in the space between his cheek and my collarbone I’ll write them down later they are mine for
the rest of my life’ (Ashaheed 2012). The poem speaks to the inescapability of the before and after,
how future and past flow into the present as Eros and Mnemosyne, desire and memory (Deleuze 1994,
85). The memory of assault flows together with the desire to disremember, which is itself a
reclamation of body and sexuality.

This tangling of embodiment and interruption that is expressed in ‘Star Gazer’ complements the
topsy-turvy temporal conditions produced by trauma and how it manifests in the present. As Judith
Herman showed us, trauma disrupts time (1992). Following this line of thinking then, the after having
been raped cannot be linear. It cannot be an after at all.

I’m reluctant to advocate for the sequencing of time or the institution of amnesia, but I’m not sure that
Ashaheed is doing it either. Her words and gestures – her poem – create something new, an image of
a past not gone but reconceived or made afresh. According to philosopher and cultural critic Walter
Benjamin, articulating the past historically ‘means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a
moment of danger’ (1969, 255). According to Judith Butler, this moment might be ‘a memory of
suffering from another time’ in which case it interrupts and reorients the politics of ‘this time’ (2012,
124). Memory collapses time. So to remember or even articulate a forgetting of sexual violence is to
interrupt the experience in the present day. Even if Ashaheed’s poem adheres to a before and an after
and advocates in words disremembering and redemption, it still fucks with time, creating a new time.

To speak from the position of having been raped has broader interruptive potential: it is to contribute
to a history that works against the washing tide of ‘progress’. History is not a homogenous site, it is
the subject of a construction that is ‘filled full by now-time’ or jetztzeit (Benjamin 1969, 261). Now-
time is that charged moment flashing up, full of subversive potential, that can interrupt the continuum
of history. This flashing up constitutes a ‘cessation of happening’. Judith Butler extrapolates:

Only such a cessation of happening can produce “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the
oppressed past”. It is only modes of progressive history that reinstitute amnesia with every
step “forward.” Thus, stepping forward has to be stopped if the history of the oppressed is to
come to the fore. The point is not for that history to lead to revenge (which would be a
cyclical form of history that Benjamin would reject), but rather to an active battle against
those forms of political amnesia that “found” progress. If one temporality emerges within

20
 another, then the temporal horizon is no longer singular; what is “contemporary” are forms of
convergence that are not always readily legible (Butler 2012, 124).

Let me back-pedal a bit. This is not to place the individual’s experience of rape into the revolutionary
realm of now-time in which it threatens the status quo, but rather to understand it as an individually,
affectively charged interruptive force with the cumulative potential for social change when examined.
In this sense, works such as ‘Star Gazer’ that don’t adhere to stories told ‘from above’ are vital to
counter historical progress and its narrative of the singular temporal horizon. That said, if the
experience is unrelenting or unaddressed, its force has the potential to interrupt in the way of
exacerbated and intergenerational trauma.

As seen in the section ‘Why I have a body, kind of’, structural assignation of value and humanity
come to bear on paradigms of knowledge and how history is recorded. There can be no such thing as a
universalised, naturalised experience – of rape or anything else – and complexity of experience that is
deserving of historical circumscription is certainly not exclusive to those who fall into or behave
according to European models of thought. And as we saw with Moffatt’s ‘The Body Remembers’, a
plethora of artworks, stories and accounts of complex experience, angry, ambiguous and
contradictory, go broadly towards enriching mutual human understanding, diversifying the hegemonic
European cultural complex, and allowing for nuanced approaches to the notion of historical progress.

21
Frankenstein’s form fell through the cracks

I start this section with my end-thoughts: the other day I wondered what would happen if the language
around having been raped were itself ephemeral and the experience made material. Later I was
anxious-skimming Bodies that Matter and learned that feminist philosophers have traditionally sought
to show how women have been associated with materiality and men with rationality (Butler 1993,
12). When put this way it seems obvious (the body is figured as ‘feminine’ etc.) and my thinking as a
female-identifying person around materialising an experience of sexual violence at the hands of men
seemed wrong (but not for reasons that align). Would such a move equate with my shape-shifting into
a site that is already laden with rational, ‘masculine’ inscription? Regardless of whether materialising
experience is about bodily representation, I had in mind Scarry’s notion of ‘intense embodiment’
described in ‘Complicating subjecthood, locating body’ that holds that to be embodied is the
equivalent of being unrepresented (1985).

Luce Irigaray argues that it is ‘the feminine’ that is in fact excluded in and by the material-rational
proposition. As an écriture feminine6 theorist, she says that one can interpret the philosophical relation
to the feminine ‘through siting the feminine as the unspeakable condition of figuration’ and as that
which cannot be figured within the terms of philosophy itself ‘but whose exclusion from the propriety
is its enabling condition.’ (Irigaray, cited in Butler 1993, 12) I felt check-mated.

Backtrack to how I imagined beginning this section. I would attempt to trace the boundaries of the
rape experience via feminist theorist Hélène Cixous’s writing around the limits of language and her
(and Annabelle Bray’s consequent) interpretation of Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to
GH, in which the protagonist confronts a cockroach in the empty room of her departed maid
(eventually smashing and ingesting it). Cixous reads this novel as an exploration of the ‘phallocentric
prohibition’ against contact with the unclean, and how phallocentric law defines what is unclean. 7
What is outlawed for Cixous is not just a cockroach but rather those subjects who possess the uncanny
power of the profane (Bray 2003, 113). ‘I associate women and writing with this abomination … It is
my way of indicating the reserved, secluded, or excluded path or place where you meet those beings’
(Cixous, cited in Bray 2003, 113). Writing into this site is the feminist event, according to Griselda
Pollock, whereby the woman claims writing to write her body in a succession of women’s bodies
(2009, 209).

6
Translates to ‘feminine writing’. By breaking from conventional writing methods, écriture féminine
foregrounds how women are positioned as ‘other’ within the ‘masculine symbolic order’.
7
Cixous, also a literary critic and poststructuralist feminist, coined the term écriture feminine.

22
Power is always in part linguistic. Judith Butler responds by asking how the assignation of a feminine
‘outside’ is possible within language. She goes on: ‘is it not the case that there is within any discourse
… a set of constitutive exclusions that are inevitably produced by the circumscription of the feminine
as that which monopolizes the sphere of exclusion?’ (1993, 15–16) So what if the language around
sexual assault were to disintegrate, then, not in order to ‘test’ language, but for it to become
ephemeral somehow. A puff of smoke or drift of sound, a disintegration would realign the way in
which femme experience were constituted.

My earliest thought about this section was as follows: I want to return to the energetic charge of non-
apprehension of HBR but can’t apprehend my thoughts. What is unknowable absence if not loss?
What is this eeriness or charge if not a question posed? If I were to commit to inhabit the eeriness of
the experience, what would happen to language? I would take my time with not knowing, to not know
where its charge might take me. (That felt gentle, experimental.) Slowness, following Cixous, is ‘the
slow time that we need to approach, to let everything approach, life, death, time, the thing; all the
slowness of time that life must take in order to give itself without hurting us too much’ (1992, 62).
But then Cixous’ approach is linear. The waiting denotes an end to waiting: as simple as a therapist’s
door opening and a memory returning.

So mine was an attempt to picture thought in constellation, to make a disfigured form out of the
position of having been raped. Right from the beginning, as we’ve seen, I found myself tangled up in
essentialist feminist and heterosexist thought-lines. I felt the entire inquiry was a bit delayed. Like I
had received an invitation to the late-twentieth-century language-feminist party decades late, got all
dressed up to attend, and on arrival discovered it had little to offer me in the way of complicating the
rape experience. Philosopher and feminist theoretician Rosi Braidotti rightly questions the
‘deconstructing, dismissing, or displacing notion of the rational subject at the very historical moment
when women are beginning to have access to the use of discourse, power, and pleasure’ (2011, 267).
Further, to ‘practice’ or speculate on the dissolution of language in this context would be to fall into
the trap of thinkers such as Irigaray and Cixous who emphasise the notion of the feminine as speaking
from and of the sphere of the excluded or the ‘elsewhere’– at the expense of intersectional figurations
that account for the gender queer, the trans-femme, the racialised Other, etc (1993, 21).

In her 1980 text, queer feminist Monique Wittig picks up on Simone de Beauvoir’s line ‘One is not
born a woman’.8 ‘Men’ and ‘women’, she argues, are historically constructed categories that
naturalize a social phenomena of oppression, a masculine/masc–feminine/femme binary (1980, 2).
Ultimately, she calls for the destruction of heterosexuality ‘as a social system that is based on the

8
Thank you Jonathan Baumgärtner for the thought-line.

23
oppression of women by men’ that produces a doctrine of difference between sexes to justify that
oppression (1980, 11). By reading Wittig in the framework of the methodological gesture it becomes
clear that the notion of the female is important not for the binary, but in the way of realising that
‘woman’/‘women’ is not the opposite of ‘man’/‘men’ – that it is also a valid ‘the Other’ just as the
racialized or the queer is.9

In the gesture, my responsibility is to explore the disarrangement of thought and feeling produced by
the experience of HBR, which is what I am doing. But now I want to consider what happens to my
writing under the scrutiny of the gesture. The gesture works on on my writing, on this writing here, by
reiterating the ‘being-in-language of human beings’ (Agamben 2000, 57). Thus the backwards and
forwards, the eruption and breakdown of my thinking is supported because my writing acts as a ‘site
for imaginative potential’ (Rodríguez 2008, 282).

9
I am sensitive to my being socialised and perceived as a woman but because of my whiteness, my
cis-ness, and my history of dating men I often choke on this obvious binary, as if it’s worth nought.
Such a feeling is in part related to the violence and discrimination I have experienced as a woman, but
it also tangles with a socialised misogyny that points inwards.

24
An encounter with a shit-cunt

I have a note that reads ‘my sense of self is not safe’. I don’t know if I wrote it but it rings true. One
reason my sense of self isn’t safe is because I think of my rape experience as fertile thinking ground.10
Does Yoko Ono feel the same way about her 1964 work ‘Cut Piece’, in which she sits alone on a
stage with scissors resting on the ground before her? In this early performance work the audience was
instructed ‘that they could take turns approaching her and use the scissors to cut off a small piece of
her clothing, which was theirs to keep’ (MoMALearning (no date)). In the online documentation I
watch audience members approach (2013). They start slow with Ono, each person taking their time
with the scissors, making delicate, tentative cuts, but they grow bolder as the performance unfolds. At
minute eight of the video, a smiling man squatting before her cuts down the middle of Ono’s chest
and then cuts away the front of her singlet top (2013). I am horrified. Where did he get the chutzpah,
or is he just a shit-cunt greedy on opportunity?

Even if solicited or sanctioned, this brutal-gentle encounter is hard to make sense of. By different
degrees such encounters are connected to our relationship to ourselves, and in turn how we measure
the shifts between us and the world can be understood via the theorists and artists we fall out of love
with. Bracha Ettinger is a painter and psychoanalyst who I became interested in 2017 (or was it 2016).
Her concept of the matrixial, which uses the ‘mother and child-in-utero’ as model in order to move
away from the ‘phallic logic’ of subject formation, theorises a primordial encounter of the mutual but
different (2001, 96). Pollock calls it a space ‘in which the subject is fragile, susceptible, and
compassionate to the unknown other’ – the ‘non-I’ – ‘who is, nonetheless, a partner in the situation,
but a partner-in-difference’ (2009, 5–6).

The matrixial allows me to think about the shit-cunt with the scissors compassionately, for it
recognises a dimension of subjectivity (and in turn fantasy and thought) that to different ends and
effects is about encounter (2009, 14). Mutually unknowable partners in difference will always register
shared events differently (Pollock 2009, 14). The shit-cunt with scissors is remembered for his
behaviour, which was enacted in the spirit of the performance demands. Has he considered his role in
it since? Has he felt remorse or embarrassment? In her book on love, bell hooks argues that relating to
another person lovingly is a process of knowledge sharing. ‘I am continually challenged to open,
engage, and occasionally disembark from myself as new knowledges from others turn into new ways
of being.’ A liberating concept. I could love the shit-cunt, I could love my rapists. By summoning
love for these people and our shared encounters, I could defy the disconnection so inherent in

10
The note ‘My sense of self is not safe’ immediately raises the question of the state of the equal civil subject
and the assigned role of the female body as a legal subject, as discussed in the previous section.

25
patriarchal relationships and so integral to sexual assault. In doing so I comprehend complex
situations with nuance without judgement of the sexual aggressors I encounter.

Imagine my excitement when I saw Ettinger speak publicly in 2017. I was going to share a
borderspace in Amsterdam with the woman who taught me I could displace the phallocentrism of my
rape encounter. During the talk I was struck by the limits of the theory – or the way in which I had
interpreted it. It had edges that could be walked off and was reliant on the murky concept of mutual
consent, which I’ve shown to be contingent on certain characteristics of power and identity. Nervous,
I asked Ettinger to elaborate on sexual assault within the matrixial stratum. She was horrified. The
chutzpah! Compassion for her is to suffer with, mutually. You cannot enter matrixial relations via the
cut of the bomb, she responded (2017). Nor, by extension, an act that is experienced by one person as
violent.

I eventually fell out of love with Ettinger, but my encounter opened me up to the concept of trans- and
intra-subjectivity – and the possibility that through thinking rape I could share and seize knowledge
from a variety of places: theory wombs, pulpit rages, scissors on stages.

26
Do it, damnit: the experience formally known as rape

There is a scene in Fledgling in which it seems as if one of the human symbioants attempts to rape
Shori, the vampire protagonist. ‘He shook me awake, shook me hard, saying, “Do it! Do it, damnit! I
should get some pleasure out of all this if I don’t get anything else.” […] He rolled onto me, pushing
my legs apart, pushing them out of his way, then thrust hard into me. I bit him more deeply than I had
intended’ (Butler 2005, 91).

The way Butler renders the physicality of these two characters already establishes a complex context
for the reader to place the two’s sexual relationship within. Wright is a white human adult male and as
we know, Shori a black female Ina (vampire) who appears to be pre-pubescent. Shori’s figure
combined with her strength immediately test received ideas on what it is to be powerful and what it is
be able to consent. One thing is clear though: in the ‘failed’ rape attempt we see a dispassionate
evacuation of white-male entitlement. For all Wright’s intention, he would not be capable of
overpowering Shori.

Shori and Wright’s relationship is symbiotic – both need each other for different things and these
things entangle at the point of intimate exchange. Drinking blood is necessary and pleasurable for the
Ina and the saliva omitted while doing so produces for the human an intense aphrodisiac. The Ina’s
wellbeing is reliant on the wellbeing of their symbioant-dinners, so making the human feel good
pleases the vampire.

Later in the scene Wright asks Shori if he hurt her:

I pulled myself onto his chest and lapped at the ragged edges of the bite. ‘You didn’t hurt me,’
I said. ‘‘Were you trying to hurt me?’
‘I think I was,’ he said (Butler 2005, 91).

I see this as a speculative portrait of the experience previously known as rape. In Shori we are
confronted with a super-Ina, the living result of vampire science experiments who is almost
impervious to injury and attack. This Ina guineapig is resistant to daylight (a real vampire threat) and
seductive to her symbioants (she has potent venom). By collaborating with the race that usually serves
as their prey, the Ina produce a more resilient version of themselves. Shori appears unrapable. The
Ina-human grafting has me thinking about The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist
Anna Tsing’s book on the cultural, economic and ecological life of the matsutake mushroom, in
which she makes a case for ‘contamination as transformative encounter’ (2015, 28). The evolution of
our ‘selves’, Tsing argues, is polluted by histories of encounter: ‘survival is subject to the

27
indeterminacy of self-and-other transformations … Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-
conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through
contamination’ (Tsing 2015, 28). Shori is the sci-fi equivalent of Tsing’s mushroom. She is the
successful result of vampire experiments that seek to advance the Ina species. A human-hybrid too
strong to be raped; a sensitive vampire with needs too complementary to her victims’ to make her a
predator; a complex, relational female black protagonist that, like Tsing’s theory of contaminated
diversity, is emergent from histories of imperialism and slavery and ‘recalcitrant to the kind of
“summing up” that has become the hallmark of modern knowledge’ (2015, 33).

Such recalcitrance to summary is emerging as a recurring theme throughout this essay and not only in
relation to language and interpretation. As eeriness it concerns the unknown. In Moffatt’s photographs
it concerns the limitations of the subject’s ability to integrate traumatic events. In Suite Vénitienne it
concerns narratives around female subjectivity, and in Ashaheed’s ‘Star Gazer’ it concerns HBR
tropes such as before and after, and remembering and forgetting.

28
Threatened by pedagogy, I can’t find desire

The experience of HBR is a real libido killer. Two years ago, having been quite uninterested in sex, I
was in two open relationships. It was my first time in a polyamorous situation and it came after
‘getting’ PTSD. As a self-diagnosed jealous monogamist, it had become necessary for me to question
the circumstances under which I had learned to love. I understood better how sexual love had been
sequestered by heteropatriarchal forces, institutionalised monogamy its crowning jewel, and its
relationship to possession and jealousy. (In Eros: The Bittersweet Anne Carson names jealousy as an
emotion concerned with placement and displacement (1986).) As a person who HBR, I knew-felt its
connection to entitlement, chattel, private property. Polyamory was one way to practice queering my
relationship to sexual desire. (Here I follow Jose Esteban Muñoz’s definition of queerness, who sees it
as ‘a possibility, a sense of self-knowing, a mode of sociality and relationality’ (2008, 6).)

So HBR created an urge in me (a survivor’s urge? yuck but possible) to expand the way in which I
apprehended the world. In his essay ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, Foucault said that ‘the
world regards sexuality as the secret of the creative cultural life; it is, rather, a process of our having
to create a new cultural life underneath the ground of our sexual choices’ (1998, 164).

Organised, eroticised violence is another way to ‘complicate’ or queer consensual exchange of erotic
power (Call 2011). I should emphasise: I delineate the consent described in the ‘Legislating consent,
rationalising power’ section as distinct from the kind of accordance described here, as it enables
relations of erotic power exchange that are informed by desire (Call 2011, 133). For Lewis Call, kink
theory theorises itself as an ethical alternative to the non-consensual power structures that permeate
life. Foucault is struck by how S&M differs from social power, arguing that social power ‘is a
strategic relation which has been stabilized through institutions’, while S&M ‘is a strategic relation,
but it is always fluid’ (1998, 169).

The difficult part about locating desire is letting it flow together with memory, into the present
moment, and letting it be its own thing: to locate desire and create something while the not dragging
along, stamping on or ignoring memory. To insist on understanding and experiencing sex as acts of
interpretation, argues Juana María Rodríguez, is to ‘make evident the need and the possibility to
disentangle bodies and acts from preassigned meanings, creating meaning and pleasure anew from the
recycled scraps of dominant cultures’ (2007, 286).

In her essay on Afro-Latina pornstar Vanessa del Rio’s autobiography, Rodríguez investigates how
del Rio mines the connection between sex and violence for its erotic potential. del Rio recounts how a
Spanish wrestler got tangled up in her fantasies, and she ‘developed scenarios about being

29
overpowered by masked rapists based on his image, which I later played out with my lover, Reb’
(cited in Rodríguez 2015, 323). In her essay on Rihanna, erotic violence and black female desire,
Nicole Fleetwood challenges the coercive agenda of ‘black recuperative heterosexuality’ to offer
alternative forms of understanding erotic attachments to violence that are neither predicated on
narratives of pathology or victimising, nor conforming to dominant forms of exploitation, racial uplift
and respectability’ (2012, 422).

Del Rio’s narration of every day forms of trauma without recourse to ‘fixing’ ‘reorients feminist
sexual politics away from gendered norms of protected white womanhood’ thus putting those who
have been violated, colonised abused at the heart of feminist politics and the norm of what constitutes
gendered experience (2015, 323). Again and again, what becomes apparent here is that an emphasis
on plural and colliding sexual experiences that range from the sticky, queer and Black, to the
ambiguous, erotic and female is imperative if one wants to complicate the state of having been raped.

30
Conjuring disgust

According to psychologists Rozin and Fallon’s paper ‘A Perspective on Disgust’, disgust affects the
body of the disgusted in four ways – in characteristic facial expressions; in certain actions like
distancing self from the offensive object; in distinctive physiological manifestations like nausea; and
in particular feeling-states like revulsion (1983, 2). Reflecting on these physical states, Sara Ahmed
points out that by their very nature they work to align social and bodily space (2014). Consider the
scene in which the protagonist crushes the cockroach in Lispector’s The Passion According to GH,
the book discussed in the section ‘Frankenstein’s form fell through the cracks’. ‘The cockroach’s
pulp, which was its insides, raw matter that was whitish and thick and slow, was piling up on it as
though it were toothpaste coming out of the tube’ (Lispector 2014, 54). The affective charge of this
passage is visceral and mobile: one doesn’t need context to experience an involuntary curl of the lip
or a shudder of the body when reading how the whitish pulp piles up. Understood in the framework of
mobility (or transplantability), the object here is not Cixous’ feminine writer in exile but rather an
object that is, potentially, exiled then and there by the repulsed reader. In her 2005 book, Sianne Ngai
makes a case for disgust as the ‘ugliest’ of ugly feelings, claiming that it’s never ambivalent about its
object, like paranoia or anxiety is for instance (335). By defining a space between the affected person
and the object of disgust, disgust strengthens and polices subject-object boundaries (Ngai 2005, 335).
This produces, as a result, certainty. Of not wanting the cockroach’s whitish paste in my mouth I am
certain. Legal scholar William Ian Miller claims in The Anatomy of Disgust that an avowal of disgust
‘expects concurrence’ and this seeks to draw others into disgust’s exclusion of object (1997, 194). In
this instance, my expectation that others too will find the notion of the innards of a cockroach or of
the actions of a rapist vile enables ‘a strange kind of sociability’ that I would like to explore via
haunting (Ngai 2005, 336).

First thought. Neither nebulous nor vague, in disgust we see an energetic tug-of-war that orientates
bodies in space. If it evokes in its subjects an apprehension of feeling that demands distance from the
object in question, it also anticipates a response from others that calls on the concurrence of
bystanders.11 This energy locates bodies in space between a point of production/the site of disgust (get
away!) and reception/the subject of disgust (get over here!)

Second thought. Unlike disgust, in Agamben’s gesture nothing is produced or received but rather it is
‘endured and supported’ (2000, 56). By allowing the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human

11
To see how disgust has been appropriated at a grand scale one need only look at its instrumentalisation by the
political right throughout history to reinforce boundaries between self and ‘contaminating’ others: that is, in a
perpetuation of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and homo- and transphobia (Ngai 2005, 338–39).

31
beings it thus becomes a sort of gag reiterating the failure of speech. While there is nothing
transcendent about the gesture, it is marked by an endless mediality (Agamben 2000, 57).

To locate disgust within the context of the gesture where its mobility can know no end-location is to
deny it the energetic orientation that seems to be so constitutive of disgust. In doing so, disgust’s
hard-edged subject-object boundaries dematerialise, transforming somehow. In the gesture, disgust
not only changes form but also loses its directionality. Direct sunlight cast into a dusty room reveals
itself as a ray of light teeming with dust mites. In motion and in the realm of communicability, disgust
simply exists here – as if for its own sake.

The eerie returns. Speculative and suspenseful, as we’ve seen the eerie is a particular kind of aesthetic
experience constituted by a failure of absence or a not-nothing. In it there must be a sense of alterity, a
feeling that its enigmatic quality involves ‘forms of knowledge, subjectivity and sensation that lie
beyond common experience’ (Fisher 2016, 62). As I’ve discussed, in the stages after HBR eeriness
manifested for me in my cognitive apprehension of events coupled with an awareness of an absence
of sensation in what had been a very bodily experience.

Eeriness has driven much of this essay’s enquiry and it has been supported or kept in motion by the
gesture. The enigma at eerie’s core, like a haunting, is the question of whether or not there exists in it,
behind it, a deliberative agent or an unrevealed entity (Fisher 2016, 63). Here the question of agency
meets with the imaginative potential of the gesture and as we’ll see it becomes possible to
speculatively haunt my un-felt disgust upon the reader.

Accounts of rape, like mentions of HBR, haunt. They call up details that evoke disgust. In the face of
received ideas on HBR victim ‘normativity’ – battered then recovering, battered then never the same
– I propose disgust-haunting as a site for the reoccupation of a public and contradictory ‘post’-HBR
state of being, as a site that continues to be occupied unpredictably. Disgust is one of the least
nebulous of the affective indications. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed looks at how signs
– that is, words – become sticky through repetition (2014). In repetition there is a binding effect,
meaning that words resist acquiring new meaning (Ahmed 2014, 91–92). In the word rapist, it is the
literal not the metaphorical meaning that is sticky. Consider Ahmed talking about the word disgusting,
and consider the ways it also relates to the word rape:

To say something is disgusting is to ‘make something’; it generates a set of effects, which

then adhere as a disgusting object. Indeed, the word ‘disgust’ is itself a sticky sign, insofar as
other signs stick to it (‘yuk’, ‘bad’, ‘savage’), and insofar as it sticks to some bodies and
objects (‘the naked savage’), rather than others. To name something as disgusting is to

32
 transfer the stickiness of the word ‘disgust’ to an object, which henceforth becomes generated
as the very thing that is spoken (2014, 93–94).

So stickiness, which Ahmed sees as a subgenre of disgust, involves a form of relationality, or a

‘withness’, in which the elements that are ‘with’ get bound together (2014). The haunting is in the
binding. It is these formal, sticky qualities and their associated mobility that I harness and throw in
your direction. Again there is sociability here – an expectation of concurrence via the social coding
that occurs in the repetition of a sticky word like rapist. When they wonder where those bruises came
from, are readers disgusted by my rapists? Do they place themselves over here, with me, their brain
ghost, and distance themselves from the site of conjured disgust, those men?

With its tracing out of subject-object borders, readers might apprehend, bodily, a repulsion for my
rapists that I cannot feel. Ours becomes a surrogacy arrangement of the senses: via a non-
collaborative encounter I might contaminate you with an affective apprehension of disgust for my
rapists so that in my place you may feel a delineated border between you and the rapists, you and the
squashed cockroach. Not only might this disgust-haunting emerge as a public, contradictory and
unpredictable site where the experience of HBR could be distributed but also, in my conjuring of
disgust in you, perhaps I may be able to sit down and rest from this essay’s endless, tangled subject
matter – if just for a little while.

33
CONCLUSION

I strapped bottle tops to the bottom of my bare feet last year, because I had an urge to tap dance. The
bottle tops were taped sharp side upward but I felt a peculiar joy tap dancing. As a result of my
reading, writing, thinking, talking over the last two years, live performance has become for me a type
of world-making, an open place in which I might index my experiences, memories and modes of self.

What has become clear to me throughout this thesis-writing process is that there are countless
available ‘frameworks of intelligibility’ through which to extend the messy experience of HBR
(Rodriguez 2007, 286). As experiences of sexual violence come into language, these frameworks take
hold. The trick is to be faithful to the experimental ethos of thinking through experience. The
endeavour is kept in motion.

In this essay I’ve thought through the unintelligibility of sexual experience, using Shori as my
springboard. We’ve seen how authoritative language and the interpretation of the rape event mask the
traumatic paradoxes of asymmetrical structures of power, and these paradoxes are encompassed in
different assignations of value to individual persons based on cultural, historical and socio-political
contexts. The conundrum’s beating heart, which is the place from where I write, is the subjective
universe of European rationality which masquerades as a universal paradigm of knowledge. The
Eurocentred human being is not neutral. And while Sophie Calle shows us that female subjecthood is
complex, I close this thesis with the knowledge that she and I are model citizens of race and class and
so can rely on ascribing and having importance ascribed to our experiences – be they of sexual
violence or other nature. It is for this ironic reason that I am best placed to test the boundaries of the
HBR experience, too.

We’ve seen how the limits of trauma psychology are themselves tested when applied to questions of
plural or intergenerational trauma, making linear promises of ‘healing’ come off as naïve. Similarly,
we’ve seen how (sexual) trauma scrambles temporal conditions and one’s relationship to the present,
but that in addressing memory, feeling, and events past, one can interrupt hegemonic historical
progress and its narrative of the singular temporal horizon. Inscrutable world of lived experience how
you boggle the mind and scramble words. The écriture fèminine gang showed us that, but contra them
we saw how self-formulations of selves as ‘the Other’ must to be intersectional to be relevant. My
dalliance into contemporary iterations of psychoanalytical theory taught me I might love my
aggressors and also taught me I might outgrow the people I read. But by coming back to Octavia
Butler and adding in Anna Tsing’s mushrooms, my mind was blasted open by the possibility of
collaboration through contamination. A diffracted version of Ettinger’s matrixial, perhaps. What if
there were an experience formally known as HBR?

34
Disgust and desire are two sides of the same coin, one fawned over in popular culture and the other,
with its sharply delineated lines, very unpopular but with huge haunting potential. On eeriness I’m
keeping the story open.

The thinking won’t stop here, and some of the many questions and thought-lines that have emerged
that I would like explore further in writing, thinking, making include the following:

• Embodying sexual experience and violence as and within the archive;

• Speculative defamation via affect-haunting;
• Expanding my enquiry into intuition. If it is a collision of individual and collective biography
as Laurent Berlant names it (2005), then how can I break it open to recast received ideas
around sexual violence?
• Examining material. It is here we can see the different ways individuals articulate their own
poetics of living and the way that affect and cognition take form;
• To further investigate HBR’s associations with and distances from desire;
• Indexing traumatic pain alongside social pain.

The state of HBR continues and I world-make in its ebb and flow. If trauma represents itself in a
changing way, then this essay is an attempt to embody one such impossible representation of the HBR
experience. It’s a speaking of the unspeakable, a representing of the un-representable and placing
these speaking-representing gestures in constellation with each other in a ritual that calls into being its
own public moment. And while chaos has not been good for the adrenal gland, in this instability I
have found richness of thought and feeling. The challenge now proves to be in learning how to live
differently and at the same time finding solid ground on which to gather my thoughts. My concluding
lines are a retrospective request: that the thesis be read as a process of emergence that not only bears
the mark of and complicates the experience of HBR, but also bears the mark of a lived life since.

35
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Marina Vishmidt for being so cool and teaching me so much over the past two years,
to Jonathan Baumgärtner for their beyond generous engagement since Barcelona and to Hannah
Kindler for being such a considered and supportive second reader.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, G 2000, Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated from Italian by Binetti, V and
Casarino, C, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Ahmed, S 2014, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh

Australia Border Force, 2018, ‘Who We Are’, (online), accessed 15 April 2018,
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au

Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016, ‘Victims of Crime, Indigenous Status’, (online), accessed 15
April 2018,
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4510.0~2016~Main%20Features~Vi
ctims%20of%20Crime,%20Indigenous%20Status~5

Ashaheed, D C 2012, ‘Star Gazer’, Women of the World Poetry Slam, (online), accessed 20 May
2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmLyumKQr4M

Baldwin, J 1962, ‘The Creative Process’, Creative America, The National Cultural Center & The
Ridge Press, New York

Benjamin, W 1969, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,
translated from German by Zohn H, Schocken Books, New York, pp 253–68

Braidotti, R 2011, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
Theory, Columbia University Press, New York

Bray, A 2003, Héleène Cixous: Writing and Sexual Difference, Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Berlant, L 2011, Cruel Optimism, Duke University Press, London

Brinkema, E 2014, The Forms of the Affects, Duke University Press, London

Australian Human Rights Commission 1997 ‘Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry
into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’,
Commonwealth of Australia, Sydney

Brown, W 1995, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton University Press,
New Jersey

Butler, J 1993, Bodies that Matter, Routledge, New York

Butler, J 2012, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press,
New York

36
Butler, O 2005, Fledgling, Seven Stories Press, New York

Call, L 2013, BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Palgrave Macmillan, LOCATION

Call, L 2011, ‘Structures of Desire: Postanarchist Kink in the Speculative Fiction of Octavia Butler
and Samuel Delany’, in Heckert J and Cleminson R (eds.), Anarchism & Sexuality: Ethics,
Relationships and Power, Routledge, New York, pp 131–153

Calle, S 2015 Suite Vénitienne, Siglio, Catskill

Carson, A 1986, Eros: The Bittersweet, Princeton University Press, New Jersey

Cixous, H 1992, Coming to Writing, Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Cixous, H 1990, Reading with Clarice Lispector, translated from French by Conley, V A, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Conrad, C A 2009, ‘You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby’, interview with Myles, E, The Poetry
Foundation (online), accessed 17 September 2017
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69419/youve-come-a-long-way-baby

Cvetkovich, A 2003, An Archive of Feelings, Duke University Press, London

Deleuze, G 1994, Difference and Repetition, translated by Patton, P, Columbia University Press, New
York

Ettinger, B 2001, ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze: From Phantasm to Trauma, from
Phallic Structure to Matrixial Sphere’, parallax, 7:4, pp 89–112

Ettinger, B 2017, ‘Een Racha’ (public talk), 11 September 2017, DAS (Academy of Theatre and
Dance), Amsterdam

Fisher, M 2016, The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater Books, London

Fleetwood, N R 2012, ‘The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire’,
African American Review, 45:3, pp 419–35

Foucault, M 1998, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, in Rabinow, P (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity
and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1), The New Press, New York, pp 163–73

Gogarty, L A 2017, ‘Usefulness’, Contemporary Art and Politics, 31:1, pp 117–132

Graham, C 2018, ‘Apartheid State: Compensation For Sexual Abuse Victims, Betrayal For Stolen
Generations’, New Matilda, (online), 11 February, accessed 14 March 2018
https://newmatilda.com/2018/02/11/apartheid-state-compensation-sexual-abuse-victims-betrayal-
stolen-generations/

Haggerty, G E & McGarry, M (eds.), A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and
Queer Studies, Blackwell Publishing, West Sussex, pp 282–93

Haraway, D 2015 ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’,

Environmental Humanities, 6, pp 159–65

Haraway, D & Wolfe, C 2016, ‘Companions in Conversation’, Manifestly Haraway, University of

Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

37
Hartman, S 2008, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 12:2, pp 1–14

Hartman, S & Moten F 2014, ‘Fugitivity and Waywardness’, Episode 6: Make a Way Out of No Way,
(online), 27 September, accessed 10 December 2017 http://arika.org.uk/archive/items/episode-6-
make-way-out-no-way/fugitivity-and-waywardness

Herman, J 1992, Trauma and Recovery, Basic Books, New York

Ingold, T 2016, ‘The Knowing Body’ (online), 11 May, accessed 10 December 2017,
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OCCOkQMHTG4

Janet, P 1889, ‘L’Automatisme psychologique’, doctoral dissertation (online), accessed 7 June 2018
https://www.psychaanalyse.com/pdf/janet_automatisme1.pdf

Lehan, J 2017, ‘Tracey Moffatt Imagines an Uncertain Future’, Aperture, (online), 27 June, accessed
17 April 2018, https://aperture.org/blog/tracey-moffatt/

Levine, P 1997, Waking the Tiger, North Atlantic Books, California

Levine, P 2008, Healing Trauma, Sounds True Publishing, Louisville

Lispector, C 2014, The Passion According to GH, translated from Portuguese by Novey, I, Penguin
Modern Classics, London

Lugones, M 2008, ‘The Coloniality of Gender’, Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, 2:2, pp 1–17

Mackinnon, C A 2017, Butterfly Politics, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts

Miller, W I 1997, The Anatomy of Disgust, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts

Moffatt, T 2017, ‘The Body Remembers’ (series of digital photographs), in My Horizon, The
Australian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2017, Venice

MoMALearning, (no date), Museum of Modern Art, (online), accessed 15 January 2018,
https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/yoko-ono-cut-piece-1964

Morris, S M 2012, ‘Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's
Fledgling’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, (online), 40: 3–4, pp 146–66, accessed 8 February 2018,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/493871/pdf

Mulvey, L 1999 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings, Braudy L & Cohen M, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 833–44

Muñoz, J E 2008, ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts’, Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8:2, pp 5–16

Ngai, S 2005, Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts

Ono, Y 1964, Cut Piece, ‘vabethany’, documentation published 28 July 2013 (online), accessed 15
January 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ3dPwa2tI

Pollock, G 2009, ‘Mother Trouble: The Maternal-Feminine in Phallic and Feminist Theory in
Relation to Bracha Ettinger’s Elaboration of Matrixial Ethics/Aesthetics’, Studies in the Maternal,
1:1, pp 1–31

38
Quijano, A 2007, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies, 21:2–3, pp 168–78

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), 2017, ‘What is Consent’, (online), accessed 7
January 2018, https://www.rainn.org/news/what-consent

Read, P 1982, ‘The Stolen Generations: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales
1883 to 1969’, New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs, archived from the original pdf on
20 August 2006 (online), pp 1–29, accessed 7 June 2018
https://web.archive.org/web/20060820150941/http://www.daa.nsw.gov.au/publications/StolenGenerat
ions.pdf

Rodríguez, J M 2015, ‘Pornographic Encounters and Interpretative Interventions: Vanessa del Rio:
Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 25:3,
pp 315–35

Rodríguez, J M 2007, ‘Gesture and Utterance: Fragments from a Butch–Femme Archive’, in

Haggerty G E & McGarry M, A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer
Studies, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp 282–91

Roelofs, K 2017, ‘Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing’,
Philosophical Transaction B, (online), 372(1718): 20160206, (no pagination), accessed 6 June 2018,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5332864/

Rozin, P & Fallon, A 1987, ‘A Perspective on Disgust’, Psychology Review, (online), 94:1, (no
pagination), accessed 20 May 2018,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/19339241_A_Perspective_on_Disgust

Scarry, E 1985, The Body in Pain, Oxford University Press, New York

Scott, J W 1991, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17:4, pp 773–97

Sharpe, C 2003, In the Wake, Duke University Press, London

Stiles, K 2016, Concerning Consequences, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Tsing, A L 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Princeton University Press, New Jersey

Von Gleich, P, 2017, ‘Afro-pessimism, Fugitivity, and the Border to Social Death’, E-International
Relations, 27 June, accessed 16 April 2018 http://www.e-ir.info/2017/06/27/afro-pessimism-
fugitivity-and-the-border-to-social-death/

Wittig, M 1981 ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, Anarchist Zine Library, (online), accessed March 28
2018, http://azinelibrary.org/other/wittig-print.pdf

Wolfe, P 2006, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research,
(online), 8(4), December, pp 387–409, accessed 15 April 2018
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623520601056240

39