How do we settle on an interpretation, a word, even, when we articulate experiences of sexual violation? Both advocates and critics often want us to hurry up, quit stalling, name the event, name names, and never, heaven forbid, change our story. Sometimes such pushing is helpful, but not always. And this is not just because the person who has been pushed around sexually needs no more pushing around, but because we need to honor the complicated nature of our experiences of sexual violation as well as the process, sometimes quite drawn out, by which we come to name it. The experience even of rape, I'm afraid, is not always a case of black or white.
Sexual violations are experiences, first-person experiences. This means they are subject to general epistemological questions about the nature of experience formation and interpretation. If our experiences are discursively and historically constituted, even in part, by the happenstance of the cultures we are born into, by what Foucault (1972) wonderfully called our historical a priori, how does this alter the epistemic status, and fruitfulness, of experience claims?
The manner in which we answer these questions will have an obviously critical impact on the epistemic authority accorded to reports by victims. How we characterize the cause of their experience will be especially important. We may well take people at their word about the subjective nature of the experience they had – or the meaningfulness of the experience as they lived it – and yet retain a hermeneutics of suspicion about the etiology of this meaningful experience. We may wonder, in other words, about the grounds of our subjective perceptions of the events of our lives, the reasons why we interpret them as we do, and the reasons they affect us as they have. If this seems odd to do in regard to sexual violations, consider the ways many of us routinely perform just such a hermeneutics of suspicion in regard to the assertions of perpetrators when they claim to have genuinely experienced their victims as inviting the encounter, as not being harmed by it, or even enjoying it. Many are no doubt lying, but perhaps some are accurately reporting their subjective experiences. If we believe that perpetrators can genuinely experience such “invitations,” but only because of their socialization within rape cultures, then we have ceded ground to the idea that the meaningful nature of subjective experiences can be constituted by one's social milieu.
Experience is a slippery word, and it is not one that philosophers today generally like. It can be used to refer very minimally to the contents of one's perception, or, more maximally, to a thick and rich set of sensations, or to a cognitively and affectively loaded attitude about an event. The word is sometimes used similarly in everyday speech to signify something like the subjective side of an event, or the side that we, so to speak, experience. Much recent work in philosophy and neuroscience is focused on demonstrating how subjective experience can be significantly disconnected from the objective facts, as when we think we see a shadow that isn't there, or a gun that is in fact a wallet, or we miss a gorilla in the middle of the screen. Since the linguistic turn, a turn that affected both Anglo-American and continental traditions in philosophy, experience has sometimes been taken to be so mediated that it can veer toward solipsism. The genealogy of our experience in the larger world is off the table of analysis.
However, following William James and John Dewey, I would suggest that in most common ways of speaking, experience is a word that generally means more than a fleeting, possibly mistaken, perception, or an entirely internal sensation. Rather, it includes my perceptual sensations, affective responses, and cognitive attitudes as these are clustered within a particular time and place. As Dewey puts it, “experience is of as well as in nature. It is not experience which is experienced, but nature. …Things interacting in certain ways are experience; they are what is experienced … they are how things are experienced as well” (1958: 4a). For example, we commonly say we had “an amazing experience,” that we have learned from experience, or that we simply have no experience in regard to a given matter. Hence, in referring to experience, one generally refers to more than something that is simply in the content of one's head. Purely subjective experience, or an experience that may only be “in my head,” thus requires a modifier, a qualifying term. In everyday speech, then, experience will always involve subjectivity, but is not generally assumed to be exclusively subjective. As Dewey says, we have an experience of something. Our sensations are attached in some way to events, either those occurring now or our memories of events from the past. The idea of experience in this way ranges beyond a solipsism of the individual and encompasses a relationality between ourselves and events specific to a time and place. We may not have the capacity for a full linguistic articulation of an experience, or a fully adequate description of it, and yet the experience can still be meaningful, if only partially intelligible and beyond our capacity to verbalize.
This rather large and broad take on experience is not in vogue among many philosophers today, who prefer more scaled-down, empirically measurable objects of inquiry such as perception and consciousness. As James Gibson (1979: 1) noted, even visual perceptual experience gets scaled down to an aperture, a snapshot, for the purposes of analysis, as if the human head were like a stable camera on a tripod opening for a single instant rather than part of a body in continuous movement in which we can move toward or around an object.1 And yet the puzzles we might explore about the nature of experience would unite philosophers with the rest of the world: it's hard to get students animated about the possibility that my perception of a cow might actually be a goat painted to look like a cow, but it is easy to get them interested in discussing how to assess the differences between individual experiences of an event. And of course, in reality, there are different views among us in regard to how to demarcate benign sexual interactions from sexual coercion. In many real-world cases, our experiences substantially differ, and in the case of sexual violation the difference can be both significant and complex.
If philosophers today don't much like the concept of experience, and have generally minimized it to refer to perceptual content, social theorists have had their own worries, principally over the meaningfulness of our experiences. How does this meaningfulness arise? In political life, we often speak as empiricists when we take experience to ground knowledge, to explain political orientation and conversion, to serve as the basis for developing standpoints for critical thought, and also to provide a way to criticize the limited understandings of the dominant class. And yet experience in and of itself is unreliable as either prediction or explanation: those with similar experiences can come to think quite differently about events. How can we concede to Dewey that experiences are of something and still account for such variability?
In particular, much of feminist theory has been, for quite understandable reasons, suspicious of experience claims for the last quarter-century. The experiences of women and men, as gendered subjects, are not to be trusted when it comes to our acceptance of the myriad conventions concerning gender-related experiences, including, of course, sex. At the deepest level of feeling and response, as well as our interpretations and understandings of events, women in particular may be subject to the weight of ideological socializations that direct us to experience abuse as deserved, or as not abuse at all.
Though many philosophers continue to use common intuitions as a touchstone to test the plausibility of theories through thought-experiments, intuitions are also unreliable sources in politically charged domains such as gender relations. And intuitions among the general public swing dramatically over such critical issues as whether an inebriated woman is fair game or a 14 year old can authentically choose to work as a prostitute. Mobilizing our intuitions, as ethicists are wont to do, may be revelatory in some respects but settles nothing. In matters regarding sex, intuitions are mainly useful for the purposes of ideological critique.
Consider the discussions that swirled around the news in April 2011 that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the President of the International Monetary Fund and then-expected next President of France, had sexually assaulted and attempted to rape a Guinean immigrant hotel maid. Nassifatou Diallo reported that Strauss-Kahn had grabbed her as she came to clean his New York hotel room, forced her to perform oral sex, even trying to tear off her clothes before she was able to escape. Yet the specter of cultural relativism was raised in subsequent debates that revived old tropes about how sexual interactions differ between the United States and France. Before what came to be known as “the DSK scandal,” many continued to believe that Americans are still infected by their puritan past in matters sexuel, while the French are just chaud lapins: “hot rabbits.” The difference between the two cultures was thought to affect how they demarcated benign sexual interaction from harassment, possibly even assault.
The number of women speaking out in France after the scandal broke quickly called into question this easy embrace of relativism. French women, as was discovered, don't appreciate uninvited groping any more than anyone else does. One of Strauss-Kahn's victims who subsequently came forward described him as a “chimpanzee in rut,” drawing a much less sympathetic picture than anything to do with rabbits. Although some continued to hold that the French have a higher level of tolerance for extramarital affairs and a greater respect for a politician's right to privacy, they argued that neither of these differences can render grabbing and groping by strangers (or co-workers) benign.
But what if not only the denial of abuse is subject to problematic processes of interpretation, but also the positive identification of abuse? After all, the process of defining and demarcating the boundaries of those domains we generally assign to the non-benign category of sexual experience – harassment, sexual coercion, sexual abuse, even sexual violence, all of which I want to define as forms of sexual violation – is an interpretive process. Could it be that offensiveness is relative to the perspective of the recipient, based on her own context-based sensibilities? More broadly, and more troubling, could it be that our very experience of an encounter might be significantly affected by the arbitrary particularities involved in what Foucault called our discourse?
Violent and brutal sexual encounters, even for sado-masochists, are less likely to be subject to widely variable interpretations. But many events in the domain of sexual violation are cloudier: many instances of date rape and sexual harassment, as well as the category of statutory rapes, can be subject to multiple interpretations. And such variability is, no doubt, what lies behind the different attitudes people take to specific high-profile cases as well as policy proposals and remedies: there is a great deal of uncertainty out there about whether the statistics are really as high as some claim, and how events are being interpreted. Even those who would not presume to question the trauma of a victim may silently wonder about the genealogy of her trauma.
Survivors themselves are among those who wonder about the neatness of our categories. This is what has given rise to the new term popular on college campuses –“gray rape.” As I discussed in the introduction, the writer Mary Gaitskill (1994) famously argued some years back that the binary categories of rape/not-rape were simply insufficient to classify the thick complexity of her own experience. She hadn't wanted the sex, but had been incapable of articulating her will. As a result, the meaning of her experience felt ambiguous, resistant to closure, not black or white, but gray.
Gaitskill's case suggests that the term “gray rape” might usefully characterize the disconnect that sometimes exists between our current conceptual repertoire and our experience. If the available terms don't quite fit one's experience, then Gaitskill's refusal of the binary makes sense and in fact bespeaks her integrity. But the term “gray rape” could itself have more than one meaning. It could be understood as a marker of an ineliminable ambiguity, or as a placeholder until we develop better concepts, or as a type of experience somewhere on a continuum between existing categories. The first possibility – the issue of ambiguity in experience – is not simply prompted by the particularly extreme complications of a set of special cases, but may represent a more general question. If experiences gain their meaning from contextually relative and arbitrary background conditions, or what Foucault calls the historical a priori, is there a necessary ambiguity to the truth about our experiences, based on the ways in which their meaningfulness is discursively dependent?
Some might hold that this is an argument not worth having, that sexual violence, if not sexual interactions more generally, does not admit of enough variability to engender serious possibilities of relativism. Yet the issue of complexity in our experiences of sexual violence arises not only from philosophers and theorists – that is, from those about whose skeptical doubts we may, like Wittgenstein, entertain skeptical doubts – but also from survivors, as Gaitskill (1994) indicates. Sometimes the full and adequate description of events belies simplistic classification. Sometimes our understanding of events changes over time. Well-meaning supporters and advocates may resist such complexities, urging us to make the accusation and decisively name the event, and they may entertain skeptical doubts about our skeptical doubts. But rejecting the possibility of ambiguity or complexity, or writing this off as the product of denial, feminine socialization, patriarchal machinations, or psycho-pathology, has the unintended consequence of shutting down the explorations of survivors: that is, our own processes of making meaning. Listening to survivors means according us the credible capacity to theorize complexity, as well as the ability to live with our sometimes indeterminate conclusions.
When we think about a memorable and significant experience in our lives such as sexual violence, we often have experiences of the event through time, and these experiences can vary. We have an experience at the time of the event, in the immediate aftermath, then of the memory of the event, and there is also the continuous temporality of its physical, psychic, and emotional after-effects. I have tried to pare back my memories of my experience as a nine year old from my later narrativized interpretations; I believe I simply experienced terror, fear, confusion, physical distress, and the acute sense that what I wanted – which was to get out of that room and get out of his grip – made no difference. My ability to cognize the event beyond this was very limited since I did not have the words at the time to name it, much less understand it. I subsequently experienced an extreme dread toward the perpetrator. My sensations and perceptions had a content and also a relationality to the particular event in that space and time, including its location, lighting, color, sound, timing, and, unfortunately, the especially difficult memory of touch or physical contact. This memory has been with me now for over 50 years, and it has provoked a diversity of responses and questions for me. Like many others, I have also experienced certain other sexual events in my life, after I was beyond the special vulnerability of childhood, that contained more ambiguity and complexity, ones for which the term “gray rape” seems apt. How do we come to interpret our experiences in the way that we do?
Foucault's contribution to this discussion comes fundamentally in his claim that experience has a history (Foucault 1986; O'Leary 2010). To say that experience has a history is to say that the common ways in which we respond to and understand certain kinds of events need to be understood as produced, in some sense, at least in part if not as a whole, by various elements of the time and place in which they occur. Experiences of disgust, elation, fear, shame, and so on, are not shared by all people in all historical periods. In the 2000 movie version of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth (1905), the two main characters press their hands together while sitting under a tree, and their accompanying heavy breathing and heaving bosoms make it seem as if they are necking or even making love. Perhaps in this period it took less stimulation to experience the passionate intensity of sexual connection.
Foucault argues in The Use of Pleasure (1986), volume two of his history of sexuality, that the way in which we experience events arises out of the interplay of three elements:
There is little doubt that the evolution of Christianity's self-directed examinations in the form of confessionals constituted a particular form of relation to one's self, and that this form is continuous with a psychological mode of detailed interior inventories. In both cases the relation to one's self is mediated by authorities who judge and evaluate – the priest or the therapist – thus opening individuals to influence from the discourses of powerful institutions that then shape our experiences in new ways.
This trilateral approach of knowledge, forms of normativity, and relations to one's self provides a useful way to think about the historical constitution of experiences, to understand how we come to focus on particular elements and interpret them in specific ways, and why those who have different responses talk past each other and may yet feel quite certain that their experience is obvious and objective. It also helpfully explains why freedom cannot be equated with license, or the capacity to do whatever comes into one's mind. If experience is historically constituted within the interplay of these three elements, then what looks to be (or feels to be) unconstrained freedom retains heteronomous elements. For Foucault, the solution to heteronomy is not individual empowerment, but attaining a critical distance from the forms of subjectivity, domains of knowledge, and modes of normalization in a given power/knowledge regime. Our capacity to critique is related to a capacity to imagine things differently, and thus to participate in transformations. Thus, Foucault aims to write histories of the present that will help us detach from the current configurations that block such transformations, not as a means to break free into an empty space with no signification, but so as to imagine new ways of signifying our experiences. We will return to this idea in chapter 4 as a feature of sexual subjectivity, or the capacity to engage in practices of self-making. Here, however, I want to focus on the question of experience.
What follows from Foucault's account of how experience can be affected, or constituted, for how we understand the epistemological status of experiential claims? In particular, what follows in terms of how we understand the experiential claims that have to do with sexual violation?
One idea that has emerged in the aftermath of Foucault's work is the idea of “rape scripts.” Gender scripts and identity scripts of all sorts have become a commonly used way of imparting the claim that individuals conform to recognizable patterns of behavior appropriate to their categorical designation, as black or white, male or female, even gay or straight. Anthony Appiah (2005) refers to a “social scriptorium” that norms collective identities, and that can follow us across different domains of our lives, affecting both our own self-formation and how others interpret our actions. He defines oppression in just this way: when our scripts follow us through every domain of interaction, so that I am always seen as a Latina, whether dancing, parenting, or teaching philosophy. Working in the discipline of social psychology, Virginia Valian (1999) uses a related idea of gender schemas to suggest ways in which gender-based interactions involve a prior dynamic that needs a more systemic analysis than a reduction to individual agency or discrete decision-making. These schemas are generally unarticulated, below the level of consciousness, and their content may even be consciously disavowed, yet they can affect how we view and treat others and ourselves. The idea of scripts is related to, and perhaps a loose application of, the idea of schemas.
Sharon Marcus (1992: 387) has applied this idea to sexual violence, suggesting that feminist accounts of rape work to script our experiences, and even endow them with “an invulnerable and terrifying facticity which stymies our ability to challenge and demystify rape.” Marcus is concerned in part with the idea that rape is “a fate worse than death.” She suggests that the “apocalyptic tone” taken in regard to rape disables our resistance, either to physically fight off a rape or to seek legal remedies. Marcus is clearly targeting old ideas that would make a woman's virtue more important than her life. But rather than thinking that the apocalyptic tone taken in regard to rape is the product of problematic rape scripts, we might consider Orlando Patterson's (1985) concept of “social death” as a way to understand the phenomenology of sexual violation, in which the self is made into a mere instrument for another. Patterson argues that the social death induced by the utter instrumentalization of slavery has both external and internal effects, changing the way one is viewed both by one's self and by others. Given this, it becomes easier to understand how one might wish for actual death as preferable to this experience of being treated as meat while still alive, as those experiencing slavery or torture have reported.
The concept of “social death” may seem misapplied to discrete acts of rape, and yet, of course, many victims experience sexual violations over long durations. But the experience of even a discrete and singular event of totalizing instrumentalization can produce a traumatic break in one's self-narrativized life-flow that can be difficult to repair (Brison 2002).
At its strongest, Marcus' suggestion is that characterizing rape as an apocalyptic event is itself a contributing cause of the victimization of victims, disabling their agency. If we abandon the “apocalyptic tones,” she suggests, more transgressive resistance by victims may result as they go off-script. I share Nicola Gavey's skepticism toward this suggestion. Discussing Marcus' argument, Gavey says “It is not entirely transparent exactly how this sort of transgression could take place” (2005: 188). But Gavey also supports the idea that “it may be possible to conceptualize rape differently in a way that somehow renders it less powerful without trivializing it” (2005: 188). Here the idea of the script is applied not to a series of actions during or immediately after the event, but to longer-term responses, both affective and cognitive. The suggestion is that survivors – victims – are following scripts about how to respond to such events.
The idea that something like “scripts” or “schemas” plays a role in experiences of rape may be useful to pursue. Consider shame. Shame is a self-directed feeling with both moral and cognitive content. It involves a sense of one's own state in relation to a world of others, one's physical as well as moral state. It is necessarily, as Bernard Williams (1993) argued, relational: one does not feel shame in front of a tree. It is a condition long attributed in many societies around the world to the victims of sexual violation by a logic that many now consider absurd. Yet the fact that victims sometimes experience shame in place of anger looks to be a good candidate for the claim that they are following a conventional script. Shame is not a spontaneously emerging experience: one can easily imagine being the victim of sexual violation without feeling shame at all. One might well feel humiliation caused by the distress of being treated as if one's status was so low that one could be treated as an object of disdain, but humiliation does not involve the self-incriminating aspects of shame.
It is also possible that as sexual violation has entered public discourse over the past 40 years, certain norms have emerged about how one would “normally” respond to such events in one's life. Nancy Whittier (2009: 129), though a critic of the “moral panic framework” for downplaying real dangers and over-emphasizing the power of suggestion, herself suggests that the self-help books about dealing with the aftermath of sexual violence that began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s may have “created a stronger norm about what those experiences should be like and laid out a path that survivors might expect to follow.” Especially in conditions where one has never had an opportunity to talk to a living soul about the experience, has never had the ability to engage in the process of narrative-making for one's self in regard to the event and its effect on one's life, such public discourses can, perhaps, have a more powerful influence. Perhaps.
To sum up what has been discussed thus far, it seems that some aspects of past and present experiences of sexual violation may be usefully brought under critical scrutiny with an approach that views experience as constituted in the nexus of knowledge, forms of normativity, relation to self, and conventional schemas or scripts. But we still need to consider: how far does this go? Might terror and an “apocalyptic” sensation be explained fully in this way? Can we apply this analysis to the significance of the harm itself? Where does this leave the meaningfulness of the experience?
The most influential feminist questioning of experience came from Joan Scott's 1992 essay “The Evidence of Experience.” Scott is a well-known historian and philosopher of history who is concerned in this essay with the “appeal to experience as uncontestable evidence and as an originary point of explanation [or] a foundation upon which analysis is based” (1992: 24). Such a view would amount to a version of empiricist foundationalism or old-style positivism in which experience is taken to be pre-theoretical or pre-linguistic. Scott's critique of this view is both philosophical and political. She argues that such an approach can only produce liberatory projects centered on “making experience visible.” In the context of social movements, this means making visible that experience of heretofore invisible identities. The problem with such projects is that they preclude an analysis of the way in which discourses construct identities, experiences, and, indeed, differences. Thus, Scott says, the project of making experience visible renders invisible the historicity of experience and reproduces the very terms and conditions upon which that experience is in fact founded. What we need to do politically is transform experience, not simply reveal it, but a faulty philosophical understanding of the genealogy of experience will block this transformative work.
Scott's alternative account of experience is articulated as follows: “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. Experience in this definition then becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced” (1992: 26). “Experience is,” in short, “a linguistic event. … The question then becomes how to analyze language” (1992: 34). In this way, Scott turns the naïve, positivist account of experience on its head. If experience is an epiphenomenon, originating outside of the individual as the end-point of a process, then its explanatory value is eclipsed by a theoretical analysis of that process itself. On some views, that process can be referred to as “language.” A concern I would raise here is that if experience is only that which we must explain, and never that which contributes to explanation, it is disallowed an epistemic contribution as a player in the formation of knowledge.
To some extent, these recent discussions sound like a replay of old modernist debates between empiricism and rationalism. On the empiricist view, all knowledge is ultimately grounded in sense experience, while on the rationalist view, in some important cases knowledge can be gained independently of experience, and experience requires interpretation before it can contribute to knowledge. The broadly Hegelian tradition made some headway toward overcoming this dilemma with the concept of Erfahrung, a meaning-laden experience. For Hegel, experience is taken to be epistemically indispensable but never epistemically self-sufficient; we can explore the constituting conditions that make of an experience the experience it is, but these conditions are understood as part of an immanent world, neither merely discursive nor completely ahistorical.
In analyzing the conditions of experience, we are analyzing a socially specific world, and thus the attempt to change experience cannot occur simply through changing our projections or interpretations or schemas. One might think this is the view Scott is aiming for, but by her account, it is experience alone that needs explanation and not the process of theoretical analysis, whereas in Hegel's view both require a critical interrogation and can be most fruitfully analyzed in conjunction, with something like a “reflective equilibrium” or coherentist hermeneutic approach. Just as experience is mediated by concepts, so too are concepts interpreted through our experiences. Hegel thought, following Kant, that our experience always comes “under a description,” as more recent philosophers have put it, but that meaningfulness emerges in interactive encounters. It was this sort of approach that inspired James and Dewey.
However, Hegel departed from Kant in suggesting that conceptual formation is a process that occurs within specific contexts, and that these contexts affect the specificity of the concepts developed. Cultures vary in their ideas about time, or space, or identity. Hence, despite Foucault's spirit of rapprochement with Kant in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1984), one can draw a line much more easily from Hegel to Foucault than from Kant to Foucault. Unlike Kant, Hegel and Foucault share the view that experience has a history and that this affects the formation of concepts that inform meaning and interpret experience.
In the spirit of this mediated approach to experience, then, let me offer an alternative set of suggestions for how we may avoid eclipsing the contentful nature or meaningfulness of events and restore the epistemic authority of survivors, without reducing the complex processes of meaning-making. Feminist work in phenomenology is a fruitful place to begin.
Judith Butler has largely rejected the use of phenomenology, since she views it as a philosophy of consciousness overly reliant on the concept of expression and thus overly uncritical of the epistemic use of experience (see, e.g., Butler 1988). Her signature concept of performativity was meant precisely to replace expression as a way to understand subjectivity and identity and human experience in general. Expression assumes an innate self that is merely made visible or manifest, whereas performativity implies a creative process of self-making. The latter would help to explain that variability we all observe in the effects of experience: the twins who end up with opposing politics, or the war refugees who adopt conflicting interpretations. The phenomenology of experience itself plays no explanatory role in this sort of view: it is all in how one interprets one's past.
Phenomenologists, from Sara Heinämaa to Lanei Rodemeyer and Linda Fisher, have been contesting this account as a bad interpretation of the phenomenological tradition. As they point out, this tradition is not about uncritical expression, much less an empiricist foundationalism, but actually, following roughly in Hegel's footsteps, about the constitutive conditions that make experience possible. These constitutive conditions come in two categories: the transcendental, on the one hand, and the immanent or contextual, on the other. Immanent or contextual conditions allow us to animate, and scrutinize, such socially variable experiences as racial fear or feminine bodily comportment. Experience is, however, at the center of this analysis – neither unproblematized nor merely epiphenomenal.
Consider this passage from Simone de Beauvoir (1969: 19–20):
I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives it its color and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of times past.
Here Beauvoir is invoking the idea that our experiences of the past make substantive contributions to our experiences of the present, including those elements of experience that include perceptual sensations, affective responses, and cognitive attitudes clustered in a particular time and place. Past experience colors the present and thus contributes to the processes by which meaningfulness emerges.
In other words, the temporal nature of experience is a crucial constitutive condition forming the way in which a given event becomes contentful for us. This does not make its meaningfulness in “our heads,” but it means that we should understand the world itself to be temporally unfolding and always situated or particular. Sara Heinämaa and Lanei Rodemeyer (2010: 5) express this as follows: “In the genetic perspective, the transcendental ego is not an empty pole but a process of habitation. Experiences build upon each other, are sedimented, so that the ego gains a certain temporal depth and an integration into its past.” Such an approach, I would suggest, explains both the inevitable differences of interpretation individuals can have of shared experiences and the epistemic relevance of experience. We approach the present differently on the basis of a host of elements that contribute a texture to our perceptual and affective orientation. A personal history that includes rape or sexual abuse can indeed color our perception, not necessarily causing us to jump to conclusions, but perhaps yielding insight into likely outcomes. We may be more aware of the signs of abuse, more distressed at what we know will be a long-term trauma, even more willing to accept the long process of meaning-making we can guess a survivor will have to go through. But any given experience of sexual violation is then added to a host of other experiences, contributing an element to a complex and shifting horizon. This sort of approach captures the everyday way in which experience is used to explain, precisely, the variability of interpretations.
The idea of our past producing a set of sedimentations that contribute to interpretive processes brings the tradition of phenomenology into line with the tradition of hermeneutics. Meaning is processed not through “an empty pole” or unencumbered self engaging in rational deliberation based on perceptual input, but within a horizon with layers, a contributing background that is generally receding, as Beauvoir noted, but occasionally brought into relief. Yet this picture of interpretation needs an embodiment, a better understanding of the way in which the materiality of experience is manifest. It is not that materiality lies inert until we bring meaning and form and language, as Aristotle once pictured the earthy content of the womb being delivered the form or soul by which new being is brought forth, but that materiality itself, the womb, as it were, shapes and pushes back and founds. Consider the phenomenon of touch.
Sexual violations occur in one form or another through the abrogation of physical intimacy, usually in the form of touch. Phenomenologists from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty highlighted touch as an experience of worlding. The touch of others reveals a structuring of the world beyond one's own self and is quintessentially described as a form of alienation, even though in some case the alienation from one's own solipsism can be welcome. For Sartre, most extremely, touch is an avenue always tinged with sadism, in which we turn the other into an unfree object, or try to become unfree ourselves. The touch of the other is an experience through which we learn of our mortality, our facticity, and our instrumentality for others. Touching others always seems to be a way in which we play out subjugation in one way or another. For Merleau-Ponty, in marked contrast, touch is more dialectical. Being touched is always a touching alongside: in every encounter I touch that which touches me. Being touched is thus an animation of my own capacity to touch another, problematizing the idea of agency as necessarily originating in an autonomous act.
Feminist phenomenologists have found bodily experiences to be an opening to understanding how the world is organized and affectively attuned, how our place within a social space is politically prefigured. The sedimentations of past experience undergird the bodily practices that become habitual, from inadequate effort at sports to racial distancing. Alia Al-Saji takes up this mode of analysis specifically with the issue of touch. She suggests that “what is important to notice is the way in which a particular mode of touching becomes normalized as the model of touch” (2010: 33). This should remind us of Foucault's idea that experience is a product in part of modes of normalization, which may include moral norms centered on one's physical position in sexual acts. He raises this possibility to make a contrast with the present, in which moral norms are obsessed with the genitals of one's lover more than the nature of the physical engagement. We might suggest, however, following Al-Saji, that the norms or “rules” of engagement today affect the expectations of practice as much as the contours of participant physiologies. Norms exist in embodied habits; rendering this apparent is what makes it possible for experience to become a ground of knowledge.
Al-Saji offers the germ of what could be a combination of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, or another version of the hoped-for rapprochement between post-structuralism and feminist social theory, when she says that “sociality, history, and culture are not external to touch but configure its shape, texture, and sense from within.” What follows from this is that “it is not simply the social context of touch that is in question. What is at stake is the social reference and positionality constitutive of touch” (Al-Saji 2010: 35). In other words, sociality, history, and culture are constitutive of subjectivity and experience itself, from within, as Al-Saji puts it. In this context, she insightfully suggests that the free way in which women's bodies are made subject to touch in many modern Western cultures can produce a responsive defensiveness. “Within a social field where it constantly risks unwanted and intrusive touch, feminine embodiment seems habituated to a certain defensive tactile self-containment” (Al-Saji 2010: 33). It can also become habituated to failure in its defensive efforts. In this way a co-worker's exuberant hug may be felt as an incursion not because I have imbibed scripts, but because of the phenomenal content of my horizon of experience. A hug that presses hard on my chest may animate my justifiable sense that the co-worker is copping a feel. This is knowledge based on experience.
I want to add an element to this analysis that should become plausible when we consider sexual violation. While the experience of undesirable touch may indeed bring to mind Sartre's definition of sadism as the making of another into a thing, it also renders apparent our subjectivity, as Sarah Miller (2009) has insightfully suggested. I am that which does not want that. I am that person who resists, who is repulsed by the touch. Assertion has long been taken by philosophers as involving a simultaneous declaration of self; as Ricoeur put it, “attestation is fundamentally attestation of self” (1995: 22). To accuse is, as Levinas (1998) emphasized, to say something like “me voici” – or, it's me here! Miller's point is, as I understand it, to take this general idea into a more bodily realm, beyond the linguistic remonstrance, so that it is operative even when there is in fact no remonstrance actually uttered. A touch that is unwanted renders the self–other relation acutely perceptible, highlighting the separation of self from other. This can make our wants visible to ourselves, whether or not we are in a position in the moment to give actual voice to our preference.
Undesirable touch thus awakens my relation to my self, as Foucault might put it, insofar as I understand myself in resistance, as a subject with its own preferences and its sometimes divergent experiences of a touch. With unwanted and intrusive touch, I become not simply the object as the other makes me but that which exceeds objecthood precisely because I experience the touch as unwanted and intrusive, and then perhaps interpret the experience as a violation. But it is the touch that can begin the process. Unwanted touch produces the sense of first-person subjectivity, it poses the question of my desire, it prompts a formation of will, or a reassertion of it.
Add to this the idea of affordances, developed by environmental psychologists such as Gibson, and we can further amplify or broaden out the nature of experience. The idea of affordances, I suggest, can help us account for variability of meaning and allow victims a stance of authority over the meaningfulness of the event, allowing space for the process-based work of meaning-making. Meaningfulness is not a response to stimuli, nor does it produce only a binary of acknowledgment or denial. Rather, meaningfulness involves practical activity. Affordances, Edward Reed writes, are “opportunities for action, not causes or stimuli; they can be used and they can motivate an organism to act, but they do not and cannot cause even the behavior that utilizes them” (cited in Janack 2012: 154). Hence the concept of affordances makes manifest the agential practical activity that meaningfulness always involves and resists the idea that we are subject to the causality of a determinant externality whose mono-dimensional meaning is fully contained prior to the relational engagement. Experience occurs within the always already of a worlding practice, a world pregnant with plural meaning-making opportunities. Experience is not the stimulus-response of a subject, nor is it a subject encountering an undecidably ambiguous or content-less event. Experience is richer than a stimulus-response model can convey, but not an empty canvas on which to project the phantasmatic.
The practical activity of perception in this kind of account is sometimes called “enactive.” Perception enacts rather than merely receives, as Marianne Janack explains with a discussion of the work of Alva Noë (Janack 2012: 165–9). The image of an aperture opening for a second is inadequate to explain the multiple and sequential activities involved in perceptual experience. Such an idea lends support to an overly simplistic understanding of perception that overlooks the learned nature and specificity of forms of perception, how it becomes a skillful activity and hence a kind of know-how. But if we take up the idea of perception in relation to affordances, we can give multiplicity over to the world without deconstructing epistemic authority: my seeing is a particularized skilled practice, and so may yield different perceptions than yours, but not because I am projecting or imagining.
One might read this line of argument as a crucial addition to or correction of Foucault's analysis, especially given the common reading of his work as supporting a “script” approach: one is given a script, one follows a script, or at most, perhaps, one revises a script. The script is the norm or the discourse. Arguably, Foucault's tripartite approach to experience – involving domains of knowledge, forms of normativity, and relation to one's self – is badly represented by the script model. What Foucault gives us is an account of the formation of problematizations, not of scripts, of skilled activities more than set schemas. Yet his account, too, needs a phenomenological supplement, as it were. The subjectivation effects of touch, together with the notion of enactive perception and multiple affordances for meaning-making, help us see how feminist agitation around rape has produced in us all a new “know-how” or skilled agency in experiencing the world of sexual violations as an opportunity for action.
Sexual experiences of all sorts are opportunities for the practical activity of interpretive articulation. There is no single “know-how” to be privileged above all others, and yet the process itself cannot be represented as a projection untethered from the specific and contentful domain about which it is seeking to know. The activities of those most fully connected to the event will have best access to all that made up, makes up, the experience.
To conclude, experiences of sexual violations are never just “in the head.” They are not produced out of whole cloth from feminist scripts, susceptible to any interpretation a discursive environment makes available. Our experiences, including those of sexual violation, are always experiences of as well as in the social world. Yet that world is a meaning-rich environment. Survivors endeavoring to make sense of their experiences and to find adequate terms and concepts are in a privileged position to do so, since what they are endeavoring to make sense of is their experience, a relation between themselves and events that occurred in a specific time and place. The fact of variable interpretations and even of a historically specific social etiology of meaningful experience does not contradict the fact that the survivors retain best access to the contentful nature of that which they are processing.
What feminist theory and practice has added is a new know-how by which we make our way through this interpretive process. To use the language of the environmental psychologists, feminism has created a new set of ways to enact perception and understanding. Social, collective influences can be more or less epistemically reliable, truth-conducive, or constructive. We can be misled to overlook, misapprehend, jump to conclusions. We can exist in a context with an arid conceptual repertoire where affordances are foreshortened. Today our know-how concerning how to interpret sexual violations, how even to experience them, is undergoing a long-overdue contestation, within feminism as well as beyond it. But without a doubt, these are debates in which survivors’ first-person experiences, and their interpretive analyses, will be critical. The following two chapters will begin to craft a new know-how in regard to sexual violations.