Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television's Public Spheres

2. The Feminist Subject of Rape

A horrific social stigma accompanies rape in Kosovo, bringing lifelong shame to a woman and her family. It is the biggest problem that rights groups face as they begin to collect information on whether Serbian forces used rape as a premeditated tactic. —New York Times1 An Italian court of appeal overturned the conviction of a driving instructor, ruling that it is impossible to rape a woman wearing jeans. —The Associated Press2 These two statements reveal the contradictory ideas that continue to mark the field of rape. People respond with horror and revulsion at the spectacular and routinized use of sexual violence in war zones, whether it is in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo, to name just a few instances from the 1990s, calling for legal punitive measures. Nevertheless, in instances of “everyday,” individual rape, the Italian court of appeal’s ruling reveals the manner in which entrenched attitudes about female sexuality continue to inform legal (and commonsense) understandings of sexual violence.3 The statements underscore the success that the women’s movement in the United States and elsewhere has achieved in raising public consciousness about the crime— international war crimes tribunals have been vested with the responsibility of ensuring that rapists are punished—and its inability to alter attitudes that underpin such behavior. I do not intend to level differences in the ways in 39 2 The Feminist Subject of Rape which sexual assault is understood in the United States and elsewhere; nevertheless , I do want to mark how the media are able to be critical of certain interpretations of rape when they emerge from “out there” but are reluctant to turn a similarly critical view when covering sexual violence “at home.” In this chapter I trace some of the feminist writings that have enabled this change in public awareness about the crime, and I highlight the problematic issues in these theories that could account for the inertia that resists change in individual attitudes. Since the 1970s, feminist scholarship on rape has resulted in new understandings of sexual violence and the social hierarchies that underpin it. In this chapter I provide an overview of the multiple understandings of rape promoted by different strands of feminist theories, emphasizing those that locate it as a form of violence embedded in interlocking systems of gender, race, and class oppression. The narrative of feminist rape literature that I outline shows that the majority of contemporary understandings emerge from a conceptualization of universal woman, a female counterpart to the modern male subject . Consequently, most feminist theories tend to privilege gender over race. I highlight the exclusions and erasures that are enabled by such a formulation and show how feminist theories can move beyond this impasse. Necessarily, the field of feminism that I map in this chapter is partial. While I tend to highlight the lacunae, the history of feminist engagement with sexual violence is more complicated. I have tried to provide here a sense of the issues that have been taken up and popularized by the media, primarily explanations for rape that resonate with dominant ideas of individualism, national values, and femininity. As we will see in the next four chapters, this has important consequences for the kinds of rape narratives that prevail on television, as well as its representational practices. The more complex feminist ideas that engage with the intersections of gender, race, class, and other issues of social identity tend to be marginalized. I discuss the consequences of these erasures in the last section of this chapter. There is no single definition that can encompass the many meanings associated with the word “rape.” At different sociohistorical moments, it has signified different things to different people—in ancient civilizations, rape was considered a violation of man’s property, and today some would theoretically define all heterosexual intercourse in a patriarchal society to fall under the rubric of nonconsensual sex.4 Legally, in the United States, while there are variations across jurisdictions, rape is defined as intercourse with force or coercion and without consent. In terms of social definitions, on the one hand, rape is understood as a charge that can be easily made against men but one that is difficult for them 40 COLOR OF RAPE to deny. We see this belief echoed in the Italian judge’s ruling. In this school of thought, an act is considered rape only if the victim is above reproach and the perpetrator is a psychopathic...