Rape Is/Not a Metaphor

1. 1. Let us start here, with a singular, (un)forgettable, and all-too common event: I was raped. I was in my late twenties and he was twelve years my senior, a prominent Asian American artist and activist.

2. 2. Although I may not have been cognizant then, but certainly upon reflection since, the sexual assault and my rapist's subsequent stalking hastened my departure from national Asian American arts and activist spaces and into my current academic trajectory. I am now a professor who studies and teaches on race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality.

3. 3. Sometimes the mind/body split is wanted, a reprieve.

4. 4. Is it too late to provide a performative land acknowledgement? How to tell the story of rape while occupying Native land? This is, this was, this occurred on Dakota homelands, which is itself a violent absenting. Consider this foreshadowing.

5. 5. In the aftermath of the rape, I turned to an anti-carceral form of response and protection: two dozen friends and activists signed on to a letter validating that I was sexually assaulted and committed to protect me from the man who had raped me. This community-based restraining order proved ineffectual, however, and my rapist proceeded to harass me at national activist and arts gatherings for the next several years.

6. 6. Tell me I am brave, I dare you.

7. 7. Even my strategic transition to academia was all for nothing: imagine my palpable alarm, rage, and dread to learn that at my first time presenting for an academic conference, the Association for Asian American Studies, he would also be attending, on a noted activist panel.

8. 8. I am hesitant, but disclose to my advisor that I am a survivor of sexual assault. I ask my advisor if I should prepare a statement asking my rapist to leave if he shows up at my panel. She tells me that would be unprofessional, and instead we focus on staying calm and practicing my paper.

9. 9. How does restorative justice fail us, in idea and practice, when what is restored is the larger Asian American community, above and over the individual?

10. 10. I am approached by an editor to share my community restraining order for what will become the excellent anthology The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities.¹ I have just returned from an Asian American activist conference where my rapist kept showing up at all the panels I attended, and I ended up being escorted to and from different rooms, the bathroom, and the water fountain. I never respond to the invitation to submit and they don't follow up.

11. 11. Spare me your indignant anger against my advisor. Now that I'm a professor, I might do the same. Not to professionalize a student but to spare them the response.

12. 12. This happens on at least three occasions after I become a professor: a student comes to my office and discloses that they have been assaulted or harassed within an activist community. I pull a copy of The Revolution Starts at Home off my shelf to give to them.

13. 13. Does one story of sexual violence matter within seemingly larger formations and calls for social justice?

14. 14. In the years my rapist stalked me, he repeatedly contacted me over phone and mail, announcing that my politics were liberal and separatist and demanding that I engage in criticism/self-criticism with him in order to overcome my bourgeois tendencies. He stole my address book and contacted my friends. He showed up at panels I was on, workshops I presented, and started making my hometown a new base for his artist residencies. In the years my rapist stalked me, after community accountability had failed, I never considered getting a legal restraining order.

15. 15. When is my body my body my body?

16. 16. Complicating the feminist intervention (and condition) that the personal is political, experiencing sexual assault is at once emblematic and constitutive of larger structures of dominance but also remains a site of personal violence that cannot be fully apprehended by a systemic framework. Such a political or...