Theorizing Sexual Violence

Renée J. Heberle, Victoria Grace, Renée J. Heberle, Victoria Grace

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415898539
• eBook ISBN: 9781135218836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Sessualità umana in psicologia

Taking sexual violence in the form of rape and hetero-psychological/physical abuse, trafficking, and harassment as a point of departure, the authors of this volume explore questions about the relationship between sex, sexuality and violence in order to better understand the terms on which women's sexual suffering is perpetuated, thereby undermining their capacity for personhood and autonomy. This volume perceives that while sexual violence as a phenomenon is heavily researched, it remains under-theorized. With anti-essentialist views of gender identity, of subjectivity and agency, and of rationality and consent, the essays study both the dynamics and consequences of sexual violence. The contributing authors blend the insights of postmodern critique with the common goal of theorizing and acting effectively against the material and psychic suffering perpetuated by the rigid rituals of gendered and sexed life.

1
Sexual Violence and Objectification

Ann J. Cahill

Amidst all the cultural noise about ours being a ‘postfeminist’ age—a time when women have, allegedly, achieved such social and political equality so as to make feminism obsolete and unnecessary—the rates of sexual violence against women serve as a palpable reminder of women’s continued oppression.¹ In an earlier work, I called for a retheorizing of this entrenched social phenomenon and argued that utilizing some conceptual tools developed by continental feminism would result in a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding.² Specifically, I claimed that the approaches of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon, two of the most recognized feminist thinkers on this subject, were both flawed in their incomplete appreciation of embodied subjectivity and the complex ways in which bodies, power, individuals, and social discourses interact.

Here I continue my thinking on sexual violence, with a particular eye toward the role the concept of objectification has played in our understanding of it. This piece is part of a larger exploration—and critique—of the notion of objectification that I am currently developing. In short, that critique will claim that the philosophical baggage associated with objectification has become overly cumbersome, weighted down as it is with various kinds of assumptions that most contemporary feminist theorists would find untenable, and that it should be abandoned. In its place, I will offer a new concept, ‘derivatization,’ which, I argue, characterizes the social phenomenon often associated with the objectification of women, but without those questionable assumptions. As feminists have generally defined ‘objectification’ as ‘treating a person as an object,’ I suggest defining ‘derivatization’ as ‘treating a person as a derivative,’ where the ethical principle being violated is not that persons are not things (a principle that denies the materiality of human existence) but rather that persons should not be reduced to other person’s desires, wishes, or projects. In short, I understand derivatization as a violation of a distinctly Irigarian ethics of (sexual) difference. To derivatize is to portray, render, understand, or approach a subject solely as the reflection, projection, or expression of another subject’s being, desires, fears, etc. The derivatized subject becomes reducible in all relevant ways to the derivatizing subject’s existence—no other elements of her³ being or subjectivity are perceived to be relevant. Indeed, it is most likely that aspects of her subjectivity that do not reflect directly the derivatizer’s subjectivity won’t be perceived at all, and may in fact be suppressed or even disallowed.

The derivatized subject is not quite a nonperson. She may express desires, emotions, and preferences; she may articulate consent or the lack thereof (especially when the lack of consent only heightens the erotic nature of the encounter); she may even play a role of alleged dominance in relation to the derivatizer. One may understand a dominatrix, for example, as a derivatized woman; despite the explicit power differential between the dominatrix and the submissive, still the overall dynamic exists for the satisfaction of the submissive; the being and behavior of the dominatrix is ultimately reducible to the needs and desires of the submissive. There are few if any ways, then, in which the derivatized subject functions in ways similar to inanimate objects. The derivatized subject inhabits a particular kind of subjectivity—a subjectivity that is stunted, or muted, as I shall argue below, but a subjectivity nonetheless.

The questions at the center of this particular chapter, then, are the following: how has objectification been deployed in feminist understandings of sexual violence, and to what degree does it succeed or fail in illuminating that phenomenon? And: can derivatization function more effectively? Before exploring those questions, however, I should briefly define some terms. For the purposes of this discussion, I will often use the terms ‘sexual violence’ and ‘rape’ interchangeably. The definition of the latter term has been of particular interest to philosophers and legal theorists,⁴ and in many ways the difficulty of arriving at a consensus definition of the term speaks to the murky intertwining of sexuality and violence that marks the current construction of heterosexuality. After all, if coercion is understood as a defining element of rape, what are we to do with all the myriad ways in which women are, in Adrienne Rich’s famous analysis,⁵ compelled to become, be, and act heterosexual? Moreover, the term ‘sexual violence’ is usually understood to be somewhat broader than ‘rape,’ which almost always indicates bodily penetration of some sort. Sexual violence, on the other hand, could describe forms of molestation that do not include penetration, or even (again, depending on one’s definition) violence that does not include physical contact, such as verbal harassment.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am concerned with all forms of sexual violence, although for the most part I am assuming an element of physical contact. Rape shows up as a particular form of sexual violence, one that is, perhaps, more readily recognized as the act of violence that it is than are some other forms of sexual violence. In speaking of sexual violence, I am referring to situations wherein one or more persons impose a sexual interaction upon another unwilling person.

Of course, the social and political meanings and dynamics of sexual violence are heavily dependent upon their context. The ways in which a particular culture defines and organizes a host of institutions—gender, sexuality, familial relations, property law, and ethnic identity, just to name a few—shape individual experiences of rape as well as community responses to them.⁶ Although I suspect that derivatization could potentially illuminate the ethical harms in rape in a variety of historical and social contexts, my analysis below is generally limited to the phenomenon of sexual violence as currently experienced and constructed by contemporary Western society. Thus I am understanding sexual violence as a phenomenon that occurs mostly, but not exclusively, between individuals acquainted with each other; that is imposed disproportionately against women; that serves as a force that shapes the topography of virtually all women’s lives; that inspires social (and legal) reactions that range from horror to outright tolerance; and that represents a significant trauma to victims, with negative psychological and physiological effects that can persist for considerable lengths of time.

Finally, I will regularly refer to assailants as male, and victims as female. This level of generalization is not entirely empirically accurate—boys and men are vulnerable to sexual violence, and girls and women are capable of enacting sexual violence. Moreover, transgendered persons, who may not fit neatly into either category, can be found on either side of the equation. However, that members of all sexes are theoretical candidates for either role does not justify treating the phenomenon as a sex- or gender-neutral one. The vast majority of sexual violence is perpetrated by men, and the vast majority of the victims are women. To ignore this disproportionality (which, of course, I do not view as natural or biologically necessary) is to misunderstand the phenomenon at the outset.⁷

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE VICTIM OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE

What do feminists mean when they say that victims of sexual violence are (sexually) objectified? There are (at least) two ways to understand this claim. One could argue that the assailant views his victim as a mere thing, a being who is either not human or less than human. Thus defined, the victim becomes a justifiable target for violence and harm, since she is not accorded the moral status of a full human person. In this way, the objectification that occurs within the phenomenon of rape is directly linked to other forms of objectification:

In stark contrast to the old perspective on rape and rapists, the feminist analysis located the cause of rape in the culture in which it is embedded. As the myriad manifestations of a misogynist and patriarchal culture were articulated, it became increasingly clear that rape could be reasonably defined as a concrete acting out of culturally normative beliefs and images. The objectification of women in culture-wide images, such as in advertising, the denigration of women in pornography, and the institutional oppression of women as it is encoded in the legal system were all documented as examples of cultural norms that directly and inexorably lead to rape. In this new context, rapists were seen not as pathological deviants from societal norms but, rather, as normal men who act out in individual dramas what their surrounding culture perpetrates institutionally.⁸

From this perspective, a rape victim is a thing to be used according to the rapist’s wishes with no regard for her own well-being, safety, or subjectivity: in fact, because she is less than human, such factors barely if at all register in the calculus of choice. Her well-being simply doesn’t matter because, from the perspective of the objectifying assailant, it almost literally doesn’t exist. In particular, her body is constructed as pure materiality, uninhabited by human consciousness or worth: the victim becomes a ‘thing object,’ morally similar to other inanimate entities—at least those that are ownable, and can be broken without grave consequences.

Alternatively (and historically, somewhat more problematic in feminist theory), the rape victim could be seen as a sex object. This status differs somewhat from the objectification described above in that it is explicitly and clearly sexualized; thus, the victim is not only seen as a thing, but as a thing-for-sex. In this sense, the victim may be understood to be sexually appealing to the assailant—perhaps even so much that, from the perspective of the assailant and often that of society in general, she bears the blame of her own victimization. When feminists understand the rape victim as sex object, of course, they do not imply that it is the victim’s sexuality that is the cause of the violence. Rather, they claim that the construction of heterosexuality in contemporary Western culture demands that sexuality and dominance are so deeply intertwined as to be inseparable, such that to be a sex object, to be on the receiving end of a sexualizing, male gaze, always comes with the threat of violence.

It is interesting to note that both kinds of objectification can be understood as causes and effects of sexual violence. To be a ‘thing object’ and to be a sex object, in some horrifically a priori sense, makes one eligible for sexual violence: such a being is in the category of ‘rapeable,’ whether consciously or unconsciously. The specific act of sexual violence can also be understood as transforming that eligibility into actuality: by raping a person, an assailant not only recognizes her as a ‘thing object’ and/or sex object, but actually transforms her into such. Sharon Marcus emphasizes this point when she argues that:

Social structures inscribe on men’s and women’s embodied selves and psyches the misogynist inequalities which enable rape to occur. These generalized inequalities are not simply prescribed by a totalized oppressive language, nor fully inscribed before the rape occurs—rape itself is one of the specific techniques which continually scripts these inequalities anew … Masculine power and feminine powerlessness neither simply precede nor cause rape; rather, rape is one of culture’s many modes of feminizing women.⁹

The woman’s inferior status as ‘thing object’ and/or sex object is reified, incarnated, made real through bodily, sexual violence.¹⁰

These two approaches to objectification and sexual violence can, in general terms, be mapped on to the two contrasting theoretical models about rape that I mentioned above. Theorists such as Susan Brownmiller argued famously that sexual violence was primarily about power and violence, not sexuality.¹¹ To ask questions concerning sexual appeal in relation to sexual violence—to question whether, for example, the victim was sexually appealing to the assailant, or whether the assailant was sexually aroused by the encounter—was to miss the point entirely (and, perhaps more relevantly, was to risk blaming the victim for inciting the violent behavior in the first place). Sexuality was at most a means of effecting violence and expressing power, and the specificity of that means was considered to be fairly irrelevant, both in the motivation of the assailant (i.e., he wasn’t primarily seeking a sexual partner, but rather a person to dominate) and the experi...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Gender and Society
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Sexual Violence and Objectification
• 2 Gendered Violence and Sacrificial Logics
• 3 ‘Reality Check’
• 4 Of Shards, Subjectivities, and the Refusal to ‘Heal’
• 5 Fighting Rape
• 6 Rethinking the Social Contract
• 7 Feminist Interrogations of Democracy, Sexual Violence, and the US Military
• 8 Feminism, International Law, and the Spectacular Violence of the ‘Other’
• Contributors
• Index