Public Rape

Representing Violation in Fiction and Film

Tanya Horeck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135143411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire féministe

Second-wave feminism fought to end the blanket silence shrouding rape and bring it to public attention. Now feminist critics must confront a different issue. In Public Rape Tanya Horeck considers the public investment in images of rape and the figure of the raped woman. Introducing the idea of 'public rape', Horeck looks at how images of rape serve as cultural fantasies of sexual, racial and class difference. Looking at rape in real life as well as in literature and films such as The Accused and Boys Don't Cry, Horek reveals how representations of rape raise vital questions about the relationship between reality and fantasy, and between violence and spectacle

Part I

PRIMAL SCENES

1
ORIGIN STORIES

Rape, fantasy and the foundations of feminism

The search for origins, especially when it takes the form of reconstructing a hidden or forbidden scene, is one of the most seductive of all narratives.

John Fletcher

Rape reached widespread public attention with Susan Brownmiller's best selling study Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975). Credited as the book responsible for ‘uncovering the existence of rape as an important element in world history, one which historians have ignored or trivialized’, Against Our Will was one of the first feminist texts to attain great mainstream success (Hartmann and Ross 1978: 932). In 1976, Time selected Brownmiller as one of its ten ‘women of the year’, summarizing her contribution to the women's movement as follows: ‘Four years ago, Susan Brownmiller, one of feminism's most articulate and visible activists, disappeared into the library stacks. She surfaced last fall with Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement’ (‘A Dozen’ 1976: 20).

In this chapter, I want to return to Brownmiller's work in order to question the role that rape plays in establishing and grounding feminist discourse. There is little doubt that rape is central to the feminist attempt to trace the origins of women's oppression. If ‘all questions relating to the role and position of women in society… founder on the bed-rock of “When did it all start?”’ twentieth-century feminism has tended to pose the question of origins through an image of rape as primal scene (Mitchell 1974: 364).¹ The ‘Founding Mother of the anti-rape movement’² in America, Brownmiller provides feminism's classic, paradigmatic representation of rape as the primal scene of culture. ‘Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’. The conclusion to the first chapter of Against Our Will, this is one of feminism's most famous declarations.³ Brownmiller's provocative, if problematic, text deals with the question of origins; it seeks to reveal how an original scene of rape recurs throughout history and throughout culture, determining the present-day treatment of women.

Moreover, Brownmiller's book is itself a point of origin, the beginning of an era of new critical thinking on rape. Against Our Will is the text used by theorists to mark the point when rape begins to be thought of as a ‘major social force’ that ‘must be understood in terms of gender relations and sexual politics’ (Porter 1986: 216). Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, editors of the anthology Rape, situate the book's importance as follows:

Against Our Will proved a turning-point by focusing public attention upon rape, by demonstrating the seriousness of the problem and by demanding a rethink of the crime: after reading her book, and others like it, no one can continue to see rape as an isolated incident, simply as one man — a “sex maniac” — sexually assaulting one woman.

(1986: xi)

Brownmiller's book is not just a historical relic; in its construction of a universal story about rape, and in its exposure of how social bonds are established through sexual violation, Against Our Will has continuing critical relevance.

Recently Brownmiller has re-evaluated the status of her work and its contribution to a wider public understanding of rape. In Our Time: Memoir of A Revolution (1999), Brownmiller's account of the Women's Liberation Movement in America, states that ‘rape theory was conceived of and developed by the American movement’ and remains one of radical feminism's most important and ‘successful contributions to world thought’ (194). Brownmiller's memoirs provide us with an engaging account of how she came to write Against Our Will, and of how the women's movement came to fight against rape. However, there is little sense of how her argument that rape is a ‘process of intimidation’ impacted upon the understanding of sexuality, gender and race in feminism. By this I mean that while there is a strong sense of rape as a real event that feminism was forced to respond to, as well as of the important, concrete changes made in the way cases of sexual violence are handled by legal and social authorities, there is little sense of how feminism itself structures rape.⁴

It is significant that two issues return to haunt Brownmiller in her account of the experience of writing Against Our Will. The first, and the most upsetting for Brownmiller, which I will discuss in some detail later, is the question of race; specifically, the accusation that her text contains racist elements. The second has to do with the complaint that her work portrays all women as victims. According to Brownmiller, this criticism is over-simplified. She explains:

Our goal in politicizing rape had been to illuminate the role of the male aggressor, not to train a perpetual spotlight on women as victims. Of course, the political explication of male violence proved infinitely harder to keep in the public eye than the victimization of women, but the failure to do so wasn't the movement's fault.

(1999: 251)

Reference to ‘failure’ and ‘fault’ is significant here. The question of who is to blame, and Brownmiller's attempt to exonerate feminism on the ground of its good intentions gone awry in the face of the media's ‘own agenda and interests when it came to rape’ (ibid.: 250), once again overlooks an important and politically pertinent question — about how rape is constructed by feminism.

In his discussion of Brownmiller as the writer who ‘first mobilized the imaginative power of rape for a significant spectrum of feminism’,William Warner suggests that ‘in Brownmiller's hands, the scene of rape, like the primal scene in Freud, becomes self-constituting for her feminism at the moment it is uncovered and projected back as the moment of an original wounding or trauma’ (1983: 26). Against what he sees as Brownmiller's restrictive focus on ‘reality’, Warner calls for work that recomposes this ‘founding myth’ and addresses how rape has an ‘important role in individual and collective life, as myth, imagination, and fantasy’ (ibid: 13). But what does Warner mean by fantasy? It is worth noting that one of the writers he holds up as exemplary is Helen Hazen, author of the anti-feminist tract, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination (1983). ‘Fantasy’ in Hazen s work translates loosely as ‘romance’: her argument is that a woman's desire to be sexually dominated by men is, in fact, biological. Hazen attacks feminism for confusing a distinction between violent crime and women's wish-fulfilment and argues that the feminist critique of rape ignores women's true masochistic sexuality.

In his rather reductive reading of what he calls Brownmiller's ‘little narrative of rape’, Warner tellingly neglects to mention that the idea of ‘fantasy’ is present in a great deal of second-wave feminist work. In Sexual Politics (1970), Kate Millett refers to the ‘sadistic character of such public fantasy as caters to male audiences in pornography or semi-pornographic media’, and writes that a publicized rape case elicits a ‘collective frisson not unlike that that occurs in racist society when its members have ‘perpetrated a lynching’: ‘unconsciously, both crimes may serve the larger group as a ritual act, cathartic in effect’ (1977: 45). Brownmiller uses the term ‘public fantasy’ in a similar way, with her discussion of the prevalence of images of rape in popular culture focusing attention on the ‘private and public fantasies of the men who dominate and define the culture’ (1991: 288). Far from being understood as make-believe or harmless sexual role-playing, fantasy is understood in both its private and public dimensions, as a potent psychic and social force. In both Millett and Brownmiller public fantasy is a male concern, and fantasy is something to be abolished on the way to attaining greater knowledge about reality and political consciousness.

The problem is not that fantasy is thus ignored by second-wave feminist discourse on rape but that it is seen as something that comes from masculine culture. As Jacqueline Rose argues, radical feminism's discarding of the concept of fantasy locates violence solely on the outside — ‘an outside that then turns into man posed in his immutable and ahistorical essence as man’ (1989: 31–32).This is most clearly evidenced in Brownmiller's call for the destruction of the female rape fantasy: ‘The rape fantasy exists in women as a man-made iceberg. It can be destroyed — by feminism (1991: 322, her italics). As Brownmiller continues: ‘Our female sexual fantasies have been handed to us on a brass platter by those very same men who have laboured so lovingly to promote their own fantasies’ (ibid.: 323). Speaking about such retrograde masculine fantasies is seen to be a thoroughly uncomfortable matter, with potentially dangerous consequences. As John Forrester observes:

Many feminists have written as if the very existence of rape fantasies were an embarrassment, a collective shame of women, as if admitting their existence might give hostile men, or even simple sceptics, cause for returning to one of the male myths that all women (or, more moderately, those women who have rape fantasies) want to be raped.

(1986: 63)

According to Forrester, the difficulty with the feminist response to rape fantasy, as epitomized by the above statement from Brownmiller, is that it repeats ‘the disowning of the responsibility that lies at the heart of the rape fantasy itself (ibid.). In other words, if the appeal of the rape fantasy is that it affords pleasure while at the same time freeing the individual of responsibility for her desire (which is attributed wholly to the active other), then to say that this fantasy is itself an imposition from the external world is to perpetuate, rather than explore ‘the common fantasy that sexuality is introduced into the woman from “the outside”, by an external force (“man-made”)’ (ibid.).⁵ It is to put women on the ‘outside’ of fantasy.

Psychoanalytic feminists have challenged the traditional feminist view of fantasy, arguing that to talk about fantasy and violence is not to weaken feminism's political struggle. Rather, as Rose suggests, to discuss the psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy and the unconscious is ‘a way of allowing that women might be mentally playing out, or with, the positions that they are simultaneously condemning and trying to exclude’ (1993: 239). Rose takes this point even further when she argues that it is ‘precisely because it is so clear that in certain contexts women are the victims, this, then, should be seen as releasing a permission internal to the discourse of feminism to talk about fantasy’ (ibid.: 240). For the purposes of my examination of rape as an imaginary within feminism, what is most suggestive and meaningful about Rose's argument is her idea that we need a ‘language’ in which we can talk about women's oppression and, at the same time discuss the complicated and contradictory aspects of women's fantasy lives (ibid.). Part of my concern in this book is to reappraise the separation between reality and fantasy in feminist discourse on rape in order to tackle the difficult question of how we can approach these two matters — the reality of woman's victimization and the ambivalence and complexity of fantasy. For feminism is not — however much some feminists might wish to be so — on the ‘outside’ of public fantasies or narratives of rape.

In what follows, I want to look at how rape functions as what John Fletcher calls the ‘mise-en-scene of stories of identity, desire, and death’ in a selection of American feminist and female-authored texts (1995:341).The subject of rape serves as a focal point for a range of disputes at the heart of the women's movement.What does it mean to think of rape as the primal scene of feminism? In their influential discussion of ‘primal phantasy’ in Freud, J Laplanche and J-B Pontalis suggest that fantasies or myths of origins claim ‘to provide a representation of, and a solution to, the major enigmas which confront the child. Whatever appears to the subject as something needing an explanation or theory, is dramatized as a moment of emergence, the beginning of a history’ (1986: 19). Hence, in ‘the primal scene, it is the origin of the subject that is represented; in seduction phantasies, it is the origin or emergence of sexuality; in castration phantasies, the origin of the distinction between the sexes’ (ibid.). Drawing on this discussion, I want to examine the myth of origins found in two of the best-selling white American feminist texts of the 1970s: Against Our Will (1975) and Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room (1977). In both of these founding feminist texts, a mythic scenario of rape as primal scene figures the origins of the social contract. But how has an image of rape as primal scene worked to secure feminism's own foundations?⁶ I would suggest that the images of rape found in these commercially successful and widely read feminist texts function as origin stories of feminism, figuring the origins of the female subject, the origins of sexuality, and finally, the origin of the relations between the sexes.

The ‘Question of Race’, to borrow the title of Brownmiller's controversial chapter on the subject, is another key feature of the origin stories in these founding feminist texts. In the scenarios of rape offered by Brownmiller and French, the story of white feminist origins is secured through an elision of concern for racial issues. Exploring the criticism of Brownmiller by Angela Davis and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, among others, I want to suggest it in this body of writing on rape and lynching by black feminist thinkers, that we can begin to locate a politics of fantasy in feminism. What emerges through these accounts of the interrelation of rape, race and gender, is an understanding of sexual violence as a fantasy formation; a scene through which images of femininity and masculinity and racial and gendered identity are imagined.

I conclude this chapter with a discussion of two novels that further problematize second-wave feminist founding narratives on rape — Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1988) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993).⁷ Originally published in the same year as Against Our Will, Corregidora tells the story of a black female blues singer and her struggle to come to terms with a legacy of slavery and sexual abuse. More recent is Allison's novel, which tells the story of Bone, a young girl who comes from a poor Southern ‘white trash’ family, and who is sexually abused by her stepfather. In acknowledging how fantasy is constitutive of woman's identity, these texts reveal how the ‘“real world” is not all that is real for us’ (Burgin 1992: 87). They challenge the idea of a simple origin in which woman is cast as the eternal victim, left in what Mandy Merck has referred to as ‘an immutable present of male oppression’ (1993: 214).While both Jones and Allison have been criticized for bringing together sexuality and vio...