i come from a country (Rwanda) where HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of women have
been subjected to mass rapes.
As a friend of mine puts it: "how come it is precisely in times of mass
killings that mass (violent) reproductive activities do occur"?
Since -for the time being- i am far from home,
i thought that , for a start, i should explore how this difficult theme has
recently been explored/debated in the Western world.
___________________________________________________________
Just-the-violence-approach or rape as "a punch in the face"
___________________________________________________________
"Does rape represent loss of control less over 1's aggressive drives than
over 1's sexual passions?";
this question was reflected upon as Foucault was consulted in a number of
proposed reforms in the laws of French penal code pertaining to sexuality;
1 of the difficult questions was the suggested reclassification of rape as
a pure crime of violence rather than a sexual offense ; see <collectif
CHANGE>, 1977a)
- sexuality, commonly thought to be a natural as well as a private,
intimate matter is the product of public institutions through a set of
efficient and pervasive techniques within the framework of
juridico-discursive fields (see first volume of Foucault's History of
Sexuality).
-the prohibitions and regulations pertaining to sexual behaviors, whether
spoken by religious, legal, or scientific authorities, far from
constraining or repressing sexuality, have on the contrary produced it, and
continue to produce it.Hence the notion of a "technology of sex".
-Those techniques are involved the elaboration of discourses
(classification, measurements, evaluation, etc.) about 4 privileged
objects of knowledge:
i) the sexualization of children and of
ii)the sexualization of the female body,
iii)the control of procreation,
iv)and the psychiatrization of anomalous sexual behavior as perversion.
...through pedagogy, medicine, demography, and economics, ...by the
support of the institutions of the state.
The Social/Sexual Panopticon appears here: This technology "made sex not
only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well; to be more
exact, sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and
virtually all of its individuals, to place themselves under surveillance."
In the terms of Foucault's theoretical analysis, his proposal (legal
desexualization of the category of rape, i.e.: rape should be reconsidered
as a genuine assault rather than a sex act, with the connotations of
pleasure) may be understood as
- intended to combat the disciplinary inscription of sex upon the social
body as an omnipresent and dangerous text, one most intensely concentrated
on and mediated through the bodies of official sex criminals;
- an effort to counter the technology of sex by breaking the bond between
sexuality and crime;
-an effort to enfranchise sexual behaviors from legal punishment, and so to
render the sexual sphere free from intervention by the state.
-Foucault's own concern is the cultural conditions that have historically
prompted changes in laws concerning sexuality: fear of homosexuality and
anxiety concerning children's sexual activity. Foucault fears the tendency
of many contemporary political movements to reify "sexuality" as an entity
inhering in certain kinds of bodies or certain body parts, a danger
requiring constant management and supervision, invested in amorphously
"dangerous individuals" who represent a threat to society.
____________________________
The sexual approach of rape
____________________________
(True:rape & sexual harassment are power plays; however
rape is more a crime of sexual passion than a crime of violence)
In spite of the evidence that Foucault's radical politics and anti-humanist
theory have revealed to be a powerful tool of social critique for feminists
[Martin (1982) and Doane, Mellencamp, and Williams (1984)],...
...
1)Rosi Braidotti remarks that
-Deleuze(displaces the question of gender onto an ahistorical, purely
textual figure of femininity;a body-site of undifferentiated affectivity,
and hence a subject freed from (self-) representation and the constraints
of identity),
-Foucault (shifts the sexual basis of gender quite beyond sexual
difference, onto a body of diffuse pleasures),
-Lyotard (shifts the sexual basis of gender quite beyond sexual difference
onto libidinally invested surfaces),
and Derrida...
...all consistently refuse to identify femininity with real women. It is
only by giving up the insistence on sexual specificity (gender) that women,
in their eyes, would be the social group best qualified (because they are
oppressed by sexuality) to foster a radically "other" subject, de-centered
and de-sexualized.
-"Taking rape from the realm of 'the sexual', placing it in the realm of
'the violent', allows one to be against it without raising any questions
about the extent to which the institution of heterosexuality has defined
force as a normal part of ((hetero)sexual relations)" (MacKinnon 1979,)
see also Brownmiller (1975)
2)Monique Plaza (1980):
it is social sexing which underlies rape;
While it may not be exclusively practiced on women, "rape is sexual
essentially because it rest on the very social difference between the
sexes... It is social sexing which is latent in rape. If men rape women,
it is precisely because they are women in a social sense"; and when a male
is raped, he too is raped "as a woman"
3) de Lauretis theresa (1987):
-Foucault unwittingly ends up defending rapists in the name of "bodies and
pleasures", he implicitly limits "pleasure" to the pleasure of men. He
likewise implies that "men" are the primary targets of the deployment of
sexuality, and that men are the persons who need to be protected from its
inquisition. For instance, according to The History of Sexuality, both the
creation of the "pervert" and the cultivation of concern regarding
children's sexuality were species of the deployment of sexuality. Yet
Foucault cites the pedophile Jouy as his example of a newly scrutinized
sexual type (1978, 31-32), rather than the children whose trauma or early
initiation may have brought them into conflict with social or internal
expectations regarding the practice of pleasure, or whose sexual
experiences were being overdetermined and scrutinized due to the
pedagogization of children's sexuality;
- in his characterization of hysterization of women as 1 of the 4 unified
strategies in the deployment of sexual power/knowledge, Foucault seems not
to consider that rape could be the primary tool through which women are
"hysterized".
-there is a contradiction at the heart of Foucault's modest proposal, a
contradiction which his analysis of sexuality does not serve to resolve:
To release "bodies and pleasures" from the legal control of the state, and
>from the relations of power exercised through the technology of sex, is to
affirm and perpetuate the present social relations which give men rights
over women's bodies. For sexuality, not only in the general and
traditional discourse but in Foucault's as well, is construed not as
gendered (as having a male form and a female form) but simply as male (the
male or male-sexed subject).
-The interests of men and women, or of rapists and their victims, are
exactly opposed in the practices of social reality, and cannot be
reconciled rhetorically.The blind spot in Foucault's work is precisely his
unconcern for what de Lauretis calls "the technology of gender" - the
techniques and discursive strategies by which gender is constructed and
hence, violence is en-gendered.
4)TONG Rosemarie (1984):
-the aggression of so-called anger rapists and power rapists is directed
against *female sexuality*. The Anger -Rapist's aggression seeks to hurt
precisely those parts of a woman's body that distinguish her as a woman.
The Power-Rapist's aggression seeks to control women in particular.
For both the choice of the vagina or anus as the object of aggression is
not accidental but essential.
-rape is very much related to this culture's view of women as persons who
exist to serve male sexual desires & interests no matter the cost to their
own female sexual desires & interests.
-since many victims of rape are not subjected to beatings and bruisings, a
redefinition of rape as assault may have the effect of further trivializing
it ("penis in vagina didn't hurt"; "he's not trying to kill her, only
giving her a good time").The harm peculiar to rape is not so much physical
harm as a type of psychological harm, consisting of fear of death and
feelings of degradation & humiliation sustained during the rape as well as
after it. No less devastating.
(If the law's to be altered to accommodate psychol. as well as physical
harm, then the problem is the overreliance on psychiatric testimony).
Predictable are the possible messy arguments between the psychiatrist for
the prosecution and the psychiatrist for the defense over the cause of the
rape victim's distraught mental condition, with the defendant's freedom in
the balance and with the victim's image & livelihood at stake. The more
unstable, overwrought, and unbalanced the woman seems, the greater the
chances not only of her rapist's conviction, but of her being stigmatized.
Hence the need of an a priori assumption within the assault law of
practical existence of psychological effect: all cases of rape cause a psy
trauma even when unreported. Therefore the focus of the court's proceedings
should shift from the victim's psy conditions back to the defendant's
conduct.
5)Laura HENGWHOLD (1994):
- The fact that rape victims, unlike the victims of other assault crimes,
are so disproportionately female, forces one to consider the role of rape
as structural symptom of gender inequality;
- about Foucault's proposal: such a "liberation" of sexuality from the
context of punishment (unlike Brownmiller's proposal) would only be of
practical benefit to men.
Of course, not all rapes involve violence. In many cases, women (sensibly)
refuse to risk violence and comply with their attackers'demands.
-Foucault's theoretical work detailing the interdependence of coercion,
discipline, and the production of truthful discourse in the exercise of
state and social power provides the basis for a more thoughtful analysis of
rape and rape law than the philosopher himself seems to grant in this case.
Rather than separate the "sex" from the "violence", one might expect a
foucauldian analysis of rape to investigate the ways in which rape and rape
trial process reinforce a discursive formation in which women are made to
appear less coherent than the men from whom they are differentiated by
their status as victims.
-Using Foucault's own enunciative modality: his proposal ignores the
potential impact of rape as a practice-not just a criminological category-
on the communicative structures of a male dominated society. No discourse,
such as sexology, criminology, or law, is produced as truth without an
exercise of power, and no exercise of power, such as systematic violence
against women, can survive without contributing toward and being supported
by a discourse that renders it legitimate and true. To view rape purely as
a physical assault denies the role that rape might play in the production
or maintenance of a particular discursive regime. In fact, rape and the
legal process that gives rape a public form and inscribes it within
discourse function hand in hand as practices which force women to present
an inadequate, hysterical subjectivity, in comparison to which men's
discourse and subjectivity appear far more stable and reasonable.
Likewise, the "sex" and "violence" in rape are recognized and shaped in
discursive contexts such as the law and psychiatry.
-Foucault therefore ignores both the discursive process that accompanies
and interprets the act of rape and the effects of this physical violence
within the discursive arena.He wreathes in silence the sociodiscursive
effects peculiar to the phenomenon of rape-a phenomenon perpetrated in part
by the legal institution.
-Foucault obscures the role of gender in the deployment of sexuality. It
is not women who (as feminists) are the points of dispersion for a form of
power/knowledge directed against rapists and, by right-wing association,
against homosexuals and sexual minorities, but rapists who are among the
many points of dispersion for a deployment that enforces heterosexuality.
Rape and the rape trial function as a privileged forum on the meaning of
sexual difference for rational discourse in Western culture.
aha!
cyuma.
been subjected to mass rapes.
As a friend of mine puts it: "how come it is precisely in times of mass
killings that mass (violent) reproductive activities do occur"?
Since -for the time being- i am far from home,
i thought that , for a start, i should explore how this difficult theme has
recently been explored/debated in the Western world.
___________________________________________________________
Just-the-violence-approach or rape as "a punch in the face"
___________________________________________________________
"Does rape represent loss of control less over 1's aggressive drives than
over 1's sexual passions?";
this question was reflected upon as Foucault was consulted in a number of
proposed reforms in the laws of French penal code pertaining to sexuality;
1 of the difficult questions was the suggested reclassification of rape as
a pure crime of violence rather than a sexual offense ; see <collectif
CHANGE>, 1977a)
- sexuality, commonly thought to be a natural as well as a private,
intimate matter is the product of public institutions through a set of
efficient and pervasive techniques within the framework of
juridico-discursive fields (see first volume of Foucault's History of
Sexuality).
-the prohibitions and regulations pertaining to sexual behaviors, whether
spoken by religious, legal, or scientific authorities, far from
constraining or repressing sexuality, have on the contrary produced it, and
continue to produce it.Hence the notion of a "technology of sex".
-Those techniques are involved the elaboration of discourses
(classification, measurements, evaluation, etc.) about 4 privileged
objects of knowledge:
i) the sexualization of children and of
ii)the sexualization of the female body,
iii)the control of procreation,
iv)and the psychiatrization of anomalous sexual behavior as perversion.
...through pedagogy, medicine, demography, and economics, ...by the
support of the institutions of the state.
The Social/Sexual Panopticon appears here: This technology "made sex not
only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well; to be more
exact, sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and
virtually all of its individuals, to place themselves under surveillance."
In the terms of Foucault's theoretical analysis, his proposal (legal
desexualization of the category of rape, i.e.: rape should be reconsidered
as a genuine assault rather than a sex act, with the connotations of
pleasure) may be understood as
- intended to combat the disciplinary inscription of sex upon the social
body as an omnipresent and dangerous text, one most intensely concentrated
on and mediated through the bodies of official sex criminals;
- an effort to counter the technology of sex by breaking the bond between
sexuality and crime;
-an effort to enfranchise sexual behaviors from legal punishment, and so to
render the sexual sphere free from intervention by the state.
-Foucault's own concern is the cultural conditions that have historically
prompted changes in laws concerning sexuality: fear of homosexuality and
anxiety concerning children's sexual activity. Foucault fears the tendency
of many contemporary political movements to reify "sexuality" as an entity
inhering in certain kinds of bodies or certain body parts, a danger
requiring constant management and supervision, invested in amorphously
"dangerous individuals" who represent a threat to society.
____________________________
The sexual approach of rape
____________________________
(True:rape & sexual harassment are power plays; however
rape is more a crime of sexual passion than a crime of violence)
In spite of the evidence that Foucault's radical politics and anti-humanist
theory have revealed to be a powerful tool of social critique for feminists
[Martin (1982) and Doane, Mellencamp, and Williams (1984)],...
...
1)Rosi Braidotti remarks that
-Deleuze(displaces the question of gender onto an ahistorical, purely
textual figure of femininity;a body-site of undifferentiated affectivity,
and hence a subject freed from (self-) representation and the constraints
of identity),
-Foucault (shifts the sexual basis of gender quite beyond sexual
difference, onto a body of diffuse pleasures),
-Lyotard (shifts the sexual basis of gender quite beyond sexual difference
onto libidinally invested surfaces),
and Derrida...
...all consistently refuse to identify femininity with real women. It is
only by giving up the insistence on sexual specificity (gender) that women,
in their eyes, would be the social group best qualified (because they are
oppressed by sexuality) to foster a radically "other" subject, de-centered
and de-sexualized.
-"Taking rape from the realm of 'the sexual', placing it in the realm of
'the violent', allows one to be against it without raising any questions
about the extent to which the institution of heterosexuality has defined
force as a normal part of ((hetero)sexual relations)" (MacKinnon 1979,)
see also Brownmiller (1975)
2)Monique Plaza (1980):
it is social sexing which underlies rape;
While it may not be exclusively practiced on women, "rape is sexual
essentially because it rest on the very social difference between the
sexes... It is social sexing which is latent in rape. If men rape women,
it is precisely because they are women in a social sense"; and when a male
is raped, he too is raped "as a woman"
3) de Lauretis theresa (1987):
-Foucault unwittingly ends up defending rapists in the name of "bodies and
pleasures", he implicitly limits "pleasure" to the pleasure of men. He
likewise implies that "men" are the primary targets of the deployment of
sexuality, and that men are the persons who need to be protected from its
inquisition. For instance, according to The History of Sexuality, both the
creation of the "pervert" and the cultivation of concern regarding
children's sexuality were species of the deployment of sexuality. Yet
Foucault cites the pedophile Jouy as his example of a newly scrutinized
sexual type (1978, 31-32), rather than the children whose trauma or early
initiation may have brought them into conflict with social or internal
expectations regarding the practice of pleasure, or whose sexual
experiences were being overdetermined and scrutinized due to the
pedagogization of children's sexuality;
- in his characterization of hysterization of women as 1 of the 4 unified
strategies in the deployment of sexual power/knowledge, Foucault seems not
to consider that rape could be the primary tool through which women are
"hysterized".
-there is a contradiction at the heart of Foucault's modest proposal, a
contradiction which his analysis of sexuality does not serve to resolve:
To release "bodies and pleasures" from the legal control of the state, and
>from the relations of power exercised through the technology of sex, is to
affirm and perpetuate the present social relations which give men rights
over women's bodies. For sexuality, not only in the general and
traditional discourse but in Foucault's as well, is construed not as
gendered (as having a male form and a female form) but simply as male (the
male or male-sexed subject).
-The interests of men and women, or of rapists and their victims, are
exactly opposed in the practices of social reality, and cannot be
reconciled rhetorically.The blind spot in Foucault's work is precisely his
unconcern for what de Lauretis calls "the technology of gender" - the
techniques and discursive strategies by which gender is constructed and
hence, violence is en-gendered.
4)TONG Rosemarie (1984):
-the aggression of so-called anger rapists and power rapists is directed
against *female sexuality*. The Anger -Rapist's aggression seeks to hurt
precisely those parts of a woman's body that distinguish her as a woman.
The Power-Rapist's aggression seeks to control women in particular.
For both the choice of the vagina or anus as the object of aggression is
not accidental but essential.
-rape is very much related to this culture's view of women as persons who
exist to serve male sexual desires & interests no matter the cost to their
own female sexual desires & interests.
-since many victims of rape are not subjected to beatings and bruisings, a
redefinition of rape as assault may have the effect of further trivializing
it ("penis in vagina didn't hurt"; "he's not trying to kill her, only
giving her a good time").The harm peculiar to rape is not so much physical
harm as a type of psychological harm, consisting of fear of death and
feelings of degradation & humiliation sustained during the rape as well as
after it. No less devastating.
(If the law's to be altered to accommodate psychol. as well as physical
harm, then the problem is the overreliance on psychiatric testimony).
Predictable are the possible messy arguments between the psychiatrist for
the prosecution and the psychiatrist for the defense over the cause of the
rape victim's distraught mental condition, with the defendant's freedom in
the balance and with the victim's image & livelihood at stake. The more
unstable, overwrought, and unbalanced the woman seems, the greater the
chances not only of her rapist's conviction, but of her being stigmatized.
Hence the need of an a priori assumption within the assault law of
practical existence of psychological effect: all cases of rape cause a psy
trauma even when unreported. Therefore the focus of the court's proceedings
should shift from the victim's psy conditions back to the defendant's
conduct.
5)Laura HENGWHOLD (1994):
- The fact that rape victims, unlike the victims of other assault crimes,
are so disproportionately female, forces one to consider the role of rape
as structural symptom of gender inequality;
- about Foucault's proposal: such a "liberation" of sexuality from the
context of punishment (unlike Brownmiller's proposal) would only be of
practical benefit to men.
Of course, not all rapes involve violence. In many cases, women (sensibly)
refuse to risk violence and comply with their attackers'demands.
-Foucault's theoretical work detailing the interdependence of coercion,
discipline, and the production of truthful discourse in the exercise of
state and social power provides the basis for a more thoughtful analysis of
rape and rape law than the philosopher himself seems to grant in this case.
Rather than separate the "sex" from the "violence", one might expect a
foucauldian analysis of rape to investigate the ways in which rape and rape
trial process reinforce a discursive formation in which women are made to
appear less coherent than the men from whom they are differentiated by
their status as victims.
-Using Foucault's own enunciative modality: his proposal ignores the
potential impact of rape as a practice-not just a criminological category-
on the communicative structures of a male dominated society. No discourse,
such as sexology, criminology, or law, is produced as truth without an
exercise of power, and no exercise of power, such as systematic violence
against women, can survive without contributing toward and being supported
by a discourse that renders it legitimate and true. To view rape purely as
a physical assault denies the role that rape might play in the production
or maintenance of a particular discursive regime. In fact, rape and the
legal process that gives rape a public form and inscribes it within
discourse function hand in hand as practices which force women to present
an inadequate, hysterical subjectivity, in comparison to which men's
discourse and subjectivity appear far more stable and reasonable.
Likewise, the "sex" and "violence" in rape are recognized and shaped in
discursive contexts such as the law and psychiatry.
-Foucault therefore ignores both the discursive process that accompanies
and interprets the act of rape and the effects of this physical violence
within the discursive arena.He wreathes in silence the sociodiscursive
effects peculiar to the phenomenon of rape-a phenomenon perpetrated in part
by the legal institution.
-Foucault obscures the role of gender in the deployment of sexuality. It
is not women who (as feminists) are the points of dispersion for a form of
power/knowledge directed against rapists and, by right-wing association,
against homosexuals and sexual minorities, but rapists who are among the
many points of dispersion for a deployment that enforces heterosexuality.
Rape and the rape trial function as a privileged forum on the meaning of
sexual difference for rational discourse in Western culture.
aha!
cyuma.