The story of the Leviteâs concubine1 appears in the biblical Book of Judges. A woman and her husband are returning from her fatherâs house in Bethlehemjudah, and they stop on the way at the home of an old man in the city of Gibeah. After they have washed and eaten and drunk, some of the men of the city come to the house and demand that the Levite be given to them so that they may âknow himâ. The old man goes out to them, and begs them to leave the man alone. In his place, he offers his daughter and the Leviteâs wife. But the men paid no attention to him, so
⊠the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the manâs house where her lord was, till it was light. (Judges 19:24â26)
In the apparently pragmatic sacrifice of the concubine, the householderâs offer of his own virgin daughter to protect a man who is a stranger to him, and the erasure of the womenâs subjective experience, the absence of human value attached to the women is succinctly expressed. Yet this erasure, this absence of representation in the text, simultaneously offers a gap for the reader to imagine the womanâs terror at being forced out of the security of the house to the street and the gang of rapists, her desperation, and the physical violence that leaves her dead or dying. When she is released, she has nowhere to go but back to the man who gave her to her torturers. But of course the story is not about the concubine: her body is a message between men, a metaphorical site for a public or political struggle. The Levite brings her body home and cuts it into twelve pieces, sending one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel: as Mieke Bal notes, the body is thus literally transformed into a message (1991, 86). The expected reception of the text is clearly constructed within it: the householder offering his daughter; the brief description of the concubineâs death; the fact that she is never named and the earlier characterization of her having âplayed the whoreâ (Judges 19:1), all encourage the reader to focus on the impersonal, political significance of the story in which all the valuable characters (the men and the virgin) are saved, and only the dishonoured woman is punished.
Although this story is separated from us in time and culture by more than two thousand years, it demonstrates common literary and dramatic representational strategies that use rape and sexual violence to communicate an idea or message that may have little to do with rape per se. These include the silencing of the victimâs voice, the erasure of her subjectivity, the use of her body as a site for the enactment of conflict between male protagonists, and the use of rape as a metaphor (for war , defeat, political oppression, colonization, and so on), that frequently displaces the ârealnessâ of rape as a lived, personal, embodied experience. These issues recur in the plays explored here. Sometimes, these works seek to reclaim or reinstate the victimâs subjectivity; sometimes they use rape as a metaphor, or for other dramaturgical purposes; sometimes they seek to challenge dominant cultural stereotypes to capture or interrogate the lived, bodily experience of the rape survivor.
This book examines the representation of sexual violence on the Western Anglophone stage over the past three decades, with the main focus on work performed in Britain and Ireland. The sheer numbers of plays that include rape scenes or narratives, even within a relatively narrow time-line and limited to the British and Irish stages, makes an exhaustive survey impossible; but here I draw upon examples by both male and female authors and directors, selecting work that has been widely produced and/or controversial or influential for scholarship and theatre practice. Working on the understanding that theatre is dialogic and that it speaks to its own social moment, that its process of reception and meaning-making is culturally and historically specific, and artistic choices made will tend to reflect or respond to tensions within a society, this study seeks to explore the following questions: How is rape to be understood in its relationship to the cultural representations of gender, sexuality, power and the body in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? How do theatrical and dramatic representations of sexual violence reflect the dominant metanarratives of our own cultural context, and how can they be remade to challenge those narratives? And how is sexual violence to be understood against a contemporary scholarly understanding of gender as performative and of the importance of performance in the materialization of the gendered body? Finally, how might any of these speculations and investigations meaningfully influence anti-rape activism?
Feminist Theories of Rape
Rape became an increasingly urgent subject of public debate during the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminists campaigned strongly on the issue of violence against women, particularly domestic abuse and rape, seeking changes in the law, increased support for women from social services, and changes in cultural attitudes and practices. Early examples of activism include the âTake Back the Nightâ or âReclaim the Nightâ marches which began in the mid-1970s and which assert womenâs right to occupy public space, including after dark; the foundation of the first womenâs shelter by Erin Pizzey in England in 1971, and the opening of the first Rape Crisis Centre in England in 1973 and Ireland in 1979. Emerging from this backdrop, Susan Brownmillerâs 1975 book Against Our Will was a ground-breaking study in the field and remains an important source of early second-wave anti-rape analysis. It makes the influential statement that rape is a form of systemic violence , âa conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fearâ, rather than an act of interpersonal violence as it had been understood (1975, 15) (italics in original). Her reading of rape, though now often critiqued, has fundamentally shaped feminist analysis and theory. By identifying rape as a systemic form of violence, Brownmiller shifts the focus from the credibility of the individual rape victim and the scrutiny of her behaviour to a structural examination of gendered power structures and relationships. Furthermore, by identifying the threat and perpetration of sexual violence as systemic, she points to the way it operates invisibly to limit womenâs freedom , as is still reflected in advice given to women on how to avoid rape. By refusing a formulation whereby rape is a consequence of the actions of an individual (immoral) female or an atypical, brutal male and is instead part of the functioning of normative gender relations, Brownmiller opened new ground for feminist strategies to address shortcomings in legislation and to formulate methods to campaign against violence against women. Although she does not address male/male rape in her analysis, subsequent scholarship has argued that male/male rape operates to express and enforce power differentials between men, often by feminizing the victim (Projansky 2001; Coulthard 2010; Mardorossian 2014). In the light of Brownmillerâs argument, this is unsurprising: feminizing the victim becomes a way of identifying him as the cause of the violence , or at least as having provoked it through non-normative behaviour that undermines normative gender identities; and it reiterates the issues of structural power that underpin gender violence . In this study, two graphic depictions of male/male rape are discussed: Howard Brentonâs Romans in Britain and Sarah Kaneâs Blasted .
Brownmillerâs work was aligned with the feminist campaign against pornography, which produced the powerful slogan that âPornography is the theory, rape is the practiceâ (Morgan 1977/2014). Morgan writes, âSo we can admit that pornography is sexist propaganda, no more and no lessâ, and she takes care to distinguish between pornography and âgenuine erotic artâ (Kindle 3247â3249). The archives at the Womenâs Library in London contain materials on the Campaign Against Pornography and the counter-campaigns against censorship as they unfolded.2 What is perhaps most striking to a contemporary reader about the material from the 1970s and 1980s is the transformation wrought by digital technologies in terms of the ubiquity of porn, the ease of secret access to it, and the levels of violence depicted in it. In the 1970s, pornographic material was mostly in the form of still images in print magazines like Playboy or Penthouse, with some film that in the main would have been viewed in the public space of a cinema (though at-home video viewing first became available circa 1972 with the development of the VCR). An example of ââmassiveâ exposureâ was 4 hours 48 minutes over a six-week period. The majority of the images were not violent (Baxter 1990, 37), though the archival material evidences growing anxiety about an increase in depictions of various kinds of fetish material including sado-masochism. As several commentators have pointed out, the situation changed during the 1980s and 1990s, with feminist opposition to censorship gaining momentum and a debate emerging between those who favoured censorship and those who argued that censorship rarely benefits women and minorities. This debate continues in the work of legal scholars like Clare McGlynn whose research has been very significant in the past decade for the regulation of violent pornography and revenge pornography in the United Kingdom, and in other ongoing legal debates about the status of sex workers and crimes of trafficking human beings within the sex trade.
While the Campaign Against Pornography was centrally concerned with the relationship between pornography and rape, a debate which remains unresolved, certain pornographic tropes are reflected in common myths about rape. These tropes may shape womenâsâespecially young womenâsâunderstanding of their sexuality, a question that Anna Jordan explores in Freak (2014). But more troublingly, it may also influence popular understanding of female sexuality and sexual consent. Cultural beliefs about female masochism, the âsleeping beautyâ conception of female sexuality as passive, and the idea that female sexuality needs âawakeningâ by force all shape commonly held attitudes to sexual violence. Batailleâs Eroticism includes extensive discussions of violence and a comparison of sexual intercourse to the sacrifice of the woman. Its emphasis on female physical vulnerability as erotic and its concomitant representation of female sexuality as helpless and masochistic is important in the reception of narratives of rape, and is a factor in the difficulty of signifying sexual violence on stage. These rape myths are reiterated in pornographic material online, in performance, and in pulp fiction. Despite the emphasis in many texts, critiques, studies and performances on empathetic engagement with the victim of sexual violence, rape remains a potentially erotic subject for representation. The exposure of the (usually female) body to the spectatorâs gaze can, deliberately or otherwise, titillate, and imagery of endangered or violated women is frequently used in promotional material for film and television for this reason.
Although rape has a long history of representation in the high culture forms of visual art and theatre, the ubiquity of rape narratives in other forms of entertainment including television drama, film, video and online digital content, is important to note. Like theatre, mediatized performance represents fictional worlds in which sexual violence, or the threat of it, are common. The constancy of violence of all kinds is signified in the performances of gendered characters who threaten physical violence or who cower from it, employing everyday gestures that speak powerfully to gender roles and normative gender constructs. Simple visual sequences such as the camera following a woman down a dark alleyway indicate sexual danger while positioning the spectator in the perspective of the attacker. Actor Doon Mackichan has queried the ubiquity of rape and murder in British television drama, pointing to the graphic and often overtly titillating representation of violence against women (BBC 2015). She notes that it is now âde rigueurâ to start a drama series with the body of a raped and murdered woman, and that rape is increasingly incorporated into storylines in costume dramas and soap operas as well as crime dramas and thrillers. Her interviews with television critics note that the British and Irish consumer now has acces...