It cannot be assumed that there is one aspect of that person's being that is untouched by the experience of rape. There is no pristine, untouched corner to which to retreat.
These traumas were fundamental to respondents’ developing sexual selves.
… the physical and moral body are fused. … What makes the effort of degradation possible in cases of rape and torture is that the human standing is compromised, conditioned from the inside. Our shorthand for this thesis is that first persons are second persons.
Sexual violations transform us. Both victims and perpetrators are transformed, as well as their families, friends, and social circles. Just the knowledge that such events are real possibilities in one's life, however remote, has an impact even on those who have had no direct experience of them. But in this chapter my concern will primarily be with the consequences of sexual violations on victims, and the way it touches our sex lives, our capacity for pleasure, our ability to move about in the world and to trust others, our ability to trust our judgment and responses, and, thus, our relationship to our selves.
As Cahill, Plante, and Bernstein urge us to see, it is not hyperbole to state that these events act upon our subjectivities, since they change the way we inhabit our bodies, our neighborhoods, our families, our social networks, and our lives. Those who use rape and sexual torture to “groom” or “season” children and adults into performing sex work know all too well that rape can reduce self-regard and weaken resistance, encouraging a form of bodily alienation useful for a transactional approach to sex. This is not to say that rapists always succeed in their aims to alter their victims. But the events of violation themselves have effects on our sexual subjectivity, regardless of the intentions of the rapist. Bernstein's acute diagnosis of rape as a form of torture leads him to argue that, in fact, “the very idea of the human status as inviolable, although intended as an effort of raising and protecting, is, finally, a product of a form of mastery and domination over the living and embodied being housing the inviolable core” (2015: 172). So the very idea that one's subjectivity should persist unchanged after rape blames the victim once again for her psychic injuries.
Rebecca Plante, a sociologist who specializes in gender and sexualities, defines sexual subjectivity as “a person's sense of herself as a sexual being” (2007: 32). This involves more than our arousal patterns and our conduct or sexual choices. It also includes a complex constellation of beliefs, perceptions, and emotions that inform our intrapsychic sexual scripts and affect our very capacity for sexual agency. Because our sexual subjectivity is interactive with others and our social environments, it is always in process, changing in relation to our experiences. For this reason, our sexual subjectivities are constitutively or intrinsically vulnerable.
The numerous theorists, such as Plante, who have developed concepts of the sexual self and sexual subjectivity have been motivated by their concern with the reifying effects of the Kinsey data, drawn from the famous sexology experiments from the mid-twentieth century. The Kinsey scale is often interpreted as if a given individual's sexual identity can be portrayed as a fixed point on a scale from 0 to 6 (see, e.g., Daniluk 1998; Epstein 1991; Simon 1996). This was a novel way to capture the continuum of sexualities from homosexual to heterosexual, but it can lend support for objectivizing terms that drain our sexuality of its subjective, interactive, and agential dimensions.
In this chapter I develop the concept of sexual subjectivity, borrowed from this psychological literature as well as philosophers such as Ann Cahill, in order to more adequately characterize the harm of sexual violation. What is violated, I argue, is our sexual subjectivity, meaning our capacity for having sexual agency in our lives. Thus, as a concept, sexual subjectivity provides an alternative to the singular focus on the violations of our consent, desire, the capacity for pleasure, or will, as I'll discuss. But sexual subjectivity also has the capacity to envelop these aspects of our sexual lives. In essence, I'll argue, our central concern with sexual violations should be their inhibiting and transformative effects on sexual subjectivity or our self-making capacities. This can be thought about both on an individual and on a collective level. Collectively, the epidemic of sexual violation in the lives of specific targeted groups, identified by their age, gender, sexuality, and/or race, severely constricts the possibilities for their self-directed sexual formation. One might plausibly argue that everyone's sexual subjectivity is constrained by commodity capitalism, but certain specified groups face especially unequal conditions in their sexual lives because of their systemic vulnerability to violation.
To further develop the concept of sexual subjectivity, I will also be drawing once again from Foucault, and in particular his conception of the art of caring for the self (epimeleia heautou) as “the work of ourselves on ourselves as free beings” (2005: xxvii). Here, so I shall argue, we can find resources for a politically useful, open-ended account of sexual subjectivity that resists reification tendencies as well as normalizing approaches. Such an account can then help to articulate the precise effects of sexual violation, or of what it is that has been violated, without assuming a developmental teleology or that there exists a single norm for a “correct” or “well-formed” sexual subjectivity. The point is, then, to judge not how our sexuality develops – for example, along a normalizing process – but how our sexual subjectivity develops, as a practice of self-making.
The idea of the “care of the self” is a concernful relation that heightens self-awareness and assumes both agency and self-regard but has no given teleology. Foucault develops the concept through the problematics of ancient Greek and Roman texts that are primarily occupied with “the relation of the subject to his sexual activity” (1986: 36). The issue of concern is not, as in our time, the question of which particular sexual acts we engage in, or what kinds of persons we engage with. Rather, the concern is focused on “the actor, his way of being, his particular situation, his relation to others, and the position he occupies with respect to them” (Foucault 1986: 35). Sexual subjectivity in this sense is centrally a concept about a relation to one's self, but, because of the essential relationality of the self, this means that it is also concerned with how one's sexual activity affects, and is affected by, one's relations with others. For example, for the ancients, if one is receptive in the sexual act, one's status relations with others are affected: either affirmed or undermined. Even sex with oneself implies a certain relational stance to others, and involves arousal patterns, images, and practices that are socially available. Sexual subjectivity, then, is necessarily a form of intersubjectivity. This is a feature of Foucault's account that has not been well developed.
Another central feature of Foucault's suggestive accounts is the idea that our erotic lives are not hard-wired toward a singular mode of desire, but are subject to radical alteration. The ancient texts he surveys do present developmental teleologies wherein subjects aim for a given character virtue and to make that virtue manifest in their sexual activities. Such goals could be understood as a kind of rule-following or assimilation to proper, conventional norms for male citizens. And yet Foucault's interest lies less in their specific goals, or the normative way the actors in this case may have represented these goals, but rather (1) in the attentive relation to the self such practices involved, and (2) in demonstrating the imaginative divergence of their goals vis-à-vis ours, or those conventions taken to be normative today. Together these elements (the attentiveness to one's self, and the variability of sexual imaginaries) produce a picture in which human beings across historical and cultural differences imagine diverse aims and craft an attentive or reflective self engaged in practices of both thought and action in order to come to a certain kind of sexual subjectivity.
As I have been arguing throughout this book, the problem of sexual violation cannot be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the “facts” of pleasure and desire. Hence what must be brought into the frame of our analysis is what counts as normal, or commonplace, sex, as well as what counts as normative, or morally blameless, sex. What is the idea of sex, in any given time and place, that governs our self-regulation, informing our self-evaluations and establishing focal points of concern? And how do ideas about normative gender identities intersect with ideas about normative sex?
In recent decades, the work of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin has been most often associated with the idea that rape and sex overlap, and that male-dominant societies have crafted the conventions of heterosexual sex such that they enact domination (see, e.g., Dworkin 1989; MacKinnon 1989). Dworkin's and MacKinnon's critique of sex quickly became the object of scorn and ridicule both inside and outside academic and feminist circles. I'd suggest this is partly explained by the fact that their views were a catalyst for fear about the true nature of our quotidian sexual lives. To agree with their analysis even in part could make one subject to being seen as one of the infamous feminist harridans and killjoys that critics of feminism (and some feminists) portray as proscribing sexual pleasures. The retreat of some “pro-sex” theorists (e.g. Rubin, as discussed in the previous chapter) into a facile libertarianism reliant on overly simplistic notions of consent provides an alibi for the refusal to engage in the difficult work of critically exploring, and normatively evaluating, our own everyday sexual practices. This refusal is symptomatic of a foreshortened relation to one's self.
What is especially helpful in pushing back against an easy consent-based libertarianism, à la Rubin, and opening up a more productive debate is the new and better empirical work on sexual experiences and the new and better philosophical work that puts pressure on what we mean by “consent” (Burgess-Jackson 1999a; Cahill 2001; Gavey 2005; Kimmel 2007; Langton 2009). For example, when social scientists find that women report consenting, or giving in to pressure, as a way, in their mind, to avoid being raped, what is brought into relief are the fluid and overlapping realities of our categories of coercive and non-coercive heterosexual sex. If one has sex only to avoid being raped, the subsequent event is a violation of agency. The empirical findings also make clear that ideologies about gender and sexual differences have an impact on what things we do sexually, and who does them.
Interestingly, for the ancients whom Foucault studies, the placement of bodies with respect to each other (i.e. lying on top or on the bottom, as well as the form that penetration takes) must be carefully calibrated to the social identities and status of the participants. In the second century ce, Artemidorus, Foucault explains, “sees the sexual act first and foremost as a game of superiority and inferiority: penetration places the two partners in a relationship of domination and submission. It is victory on one side, defeat on the other. … [Hence] it is a status that one asserts” (1986: 30). The imperative is to maintain one's status by only performing those sexual acts and positions that accord with one's rank. Sexual activity should conform to the relationships between the participants in public, social life. The meanings of varied sexual actions are coordinated to social meaning systems involving gender but also the gradations of social status, and performing in the “wrong” way could upset the normative conventions, alter the prior relationship established and recognized between parties, even alter one's social identity. Clearly, the idea that normative practices in bed are given meaning by or correlated with social hierarchies is not original to Dworkin and MacKinnon.
Critics of Dworkin and MacKinnon have, however, voiced some concerns that I consider legitimate: that on some construals, their theories underestimated female agency and portrayed women in contemporary societies as having minimal pleasure and malformed desires. My concern here is not with reliving and reassessing these debates, or each side's (mis)characterizations of the other, but with exploring how sexual violations need to be understood in relation to our sexual lives in general, and how we understand, and operationalize, concepts of desire, pleasure, will, and, of course, consent. With Dworkin and MacKinnon, I hold that male-dominant societies with epidemic amounts of gender-based forms of sexual violence invite critical analysis of their norms regarding both sex (or what is considered morally blameless sex) and gender identity, but, like their critics, I take persons across the gender spectrum to have in most cases some agency in the “work of ourselves on ourselves.” Hence I want to follow Nicola Gavey's advice to resist using concepts of “false consciousness” to explain the ways in which women will sometimes avoid using the term “rape” for events that would seem to fall under this rubric, such as giving in to sex as a way to avoid being raped (2005: 181). We might be understandably tempted to describe the event in this instance as simply rape, but Gavey urges us to retain a sense of women's subjectivity or first-person point of view. Even within abusive relationships, women are sometimes busily engaged in interpreting their experiences to try to make sense of them and to find ways to protect themselves, as well as in trying to enlarge the range of their choices. Their interpretations of troubling events are themselves forms of agency that may exhibit self-care and not simply denial. Thus, it is not a mistake to theorize sexual violations in relation to sexual subjectivity, nor is it a way of blaming the victim. Rather, the point is that if we want to better understand the epidemic of sexual violation, we need to better understand the on-the-ground formations of sexual subjectivities.
To consider the relation between sexual subjectivity and sexual violation, I will begin with a story from the French writer Honoré de Balzac. Balzac's famous series of novels, the Comédie Humaine, is often said to presage the subsequent social realisms of Émile Zola and others, revealing the cruel underside of the polite and refined social classes. Novels of this genre imaginatively portray the inner life of protagonists living under conditions of injustice, and those that gain a wide contemporary public surely indicate something about the typical forms of subjectivity, relationships, and responses of a time and place. Of particular interest here is how Balzac's incisive and critical study of bourgeois relations in post-Restoration France highlights the transactional sexual politics common among the Parisian demi-monde in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Balzac draws vivid portraits of cross-generational relationships in which older men with money contracted out “girlfriends” for years at a time by setting them up with housing and sometimes small businesses. These arrangements were normalized in bourgeois society, well known to both women and men, even if rarely discussed in public. Balzac portrays poor and working-class girls and women with few prospects who readily accepted such patronage, providing regular sex and companionship in exchange for a regular income that sometimes included provisions for their families. In fact, parents often played a role in making the arrangements, presenting their daughters in their best light to prospective “patrons,” negotiating over terms, and helping convince their daughters to submit. Even husbands sometimes facilitated relationships between their wives and rich men, organizing their own conjugal lives in such a way that their wives would be easily, and discreetly, accessible. In exchange, such husbands would benefit in money or career advancement or both.
In the United States, Alexander Hamilton's prospects for the presidency were ruined by just such an arrangement when it was made public in 1797 that he was paying his lover's husband for the right of access (Chernow 2004). Whether this was the same sort of “pay to play” set-up Balzac describes, or a well-orchestrated scheme by a crafty couple to obtain blackmail from a vulnerable public figure, depends on how naïve we take Hamilton to have been. In any case, Paris was not the only city where such transactions regularly occurred, nor are such transactions rare today in many parts of the globe, including the global North.
In nineteenth-century Paris, as in New York, hypocrisy was a regular feature of this practice, as well as tacit agreements about public discretion, which indicates some degree of social disapproval. One could certainly argue that the hypocrisy was necessary for the purpose of maintaining the primacy of patriarchal marriage, the status and dignity of legal wives, and the exclusive power of the Church to sanction legitimate sexual unions. But there may have been more than instrumental or functional reasons for the hypocrisy, having to do with maintaining certain forms of sexual and social subjectivity and moral standing for the men as well, as we will see in Balzac's story.
Girls and women who became embroiled in sexual relationships outside of Church sanction or state recognition were quite unprotected from abuse. And the fact that such transactional relations were common knowledge and enjoyed a certain institutionalized status as ordinary practices among members of the bourgeoisie suggests that the institutions of civil marriage and the Church were not actually there to protect the vulnerable but to demarcate who was worthy and deserving of protection, and who was not. Despite the common knowledge about such transactions, Balzac's novels indicate that the participants were also vulnerable to blackmail and intrigue if the decorum of discretion was withdrawn.
At the centerpiece of the novel Cousin Bette is one of Balzac's most memorable characters: Monsieur le Baron Hulot d'Ervy, a Commissary General under the Republic who later became the head of one of the most important departments in the War Ministry (Balzac 1965). The Baron's distinguished title, regular income, and considerable power and influence within the government were all very useful in these sorts of transactions. Though Hulot is presented as happily married to a beautiful and adoring woman, and as the proud father of two, sometime in mid-life he becomes a serial philanderer, seeking out teenage actresses and singers from the working classes, some from ethnic minorities. By the time he is about 60, these activities become hampered by his declining resources; as a result, he has to engage in ever greater financial and professional risks to secure the necessary funds. Hulot also has to seek out more vulnerable girls whose procurement requires fewer resources. Balzac presents the Baron as a dupe who believes, implausibly, that the girls he chooses are genuinely in love with him, despite the fact that he is quite a bit older than them, sometimes by several decades, and their “favors” are only given for a price. But Balzac also suggests that the Baron is willfully ignorant. As his troubles increase, his colleagues, friends, and family chastise him for being a fool in his affairs, allowing his mistresses to run him into ruin, yet Hulot endeavors to hold on to his self-image as an attractive man whom younger women spontaneously desire.
Clearly, and plausibly, as Balzac paints the picture, the younger women in these transactions are not helpless creatures who lack all agency. They give their stated consent, and some of the older ones seem to take pleasure in the strategies of manipulation these arrangements provide for them to use against various members of the upper classes. We see in the novel how some of the women lie to gain more funds, to conceal other paramours, or just to minimize the amount of sex they must perform. Yet despite the fact that the women and girls are not powerless, I suggest we consider the nature of the relationships produced by this convention of patriarchal bourgeois societies, relationships not dissimilar from many sorts in many countries still today in which young people, both gay and straight, have “sugar daddies.”
In one scene toward the end of Cousin Bette, a girl who has just turned 15 is questioned by a religious social worker about her relationship with her 80-year-old “benefactor,” Monsieur Vyder, which is the alias Hulot has taken late in life:
My mother and father had had nothing to eat all week! My mother wanted to make something very bad of me, because my father beat her and called her names. And then Monsieur Vyder paid all my father's and mother's debts, and gave them money. … Oh! Whole bagful! And he took me away with him, and my poor Papa cried … but we had to part! (Balzac 1965: 433)
The social worker then asks the girl about the nature of the relationship between Vyder/Hulot and herself, and she answers:
“Am I fond of him? …” she said. “I should just think I am, Madame. He tells me nice stories every evening! And he has given me fine dresses. … And for the past two months I haven't known what it is to be hungry. I don't live on potatoes now! He brings me sweets, burnt almonds! Oh, what delicious things chocolate almonds are. … I do anything he wants for a bag of chocolates! … The only thing is he doesn't like me going out, except to come here. … He's a love of a man, really, so he does whatever he wants with me. … He told me that I was his little wife; but it's very tiresome to be a man's wife! Well, if it wasn't for the chocolate almonds!” (Balzac 1965: 433–4)
The nature of this relationship is clear. The Baron's straitened circumstances have curtailed his ability to secure relations with all but such girls as this one, too poor and naïve to manipulate him for better terms. As Balzac comments, the older and poorer the Baron gets, and the more wrinkled and redder his face, the more he is prone to younger, more vulnerable, and consequently more pliable concubines. He is driven to pedophilia, in effect, by a combination of his limited resources and his ongoing attraction to young flesh: we hear him rhapsodically describing a young girl presented to him as having “the exquisite face that Raphael found for his Virgins, with innocent eyes saddened by overwork … and a mouth like a half-burst pomegranate … and all this beauty was done up in cotton at seventy-five centimes a metre” (Balzac 1965: 346–7). The procurer of this girl tells the Baron that “it's guaranteed mint-new; it's a decent girl! And with no bread to eat” (Balzac 1965: 347). Ripe for the taking.
Even if there is some agency on both sides of these transactions, the young girl in this story has little chance for effective negotiations at the start of the arrangement, and almost no capacity to resist entering into it altogether. Like the respondents Gavey discusses, she “consents” under conditions of extreme constraint. But more than this, I want us to imagine the conditions of her developing sexual subjectivity, her sense of herself as having a sexual life outside of transactional relations, of having sexual pleasure on her own terms with partners of her own choosing, and a relationship to her body and face that does not involve judging its salability. One might also consider the way in which a figure such as Hulot is formed, under certain kinds of conditions, as a pedophile or pederast, stretching the decades between himself and his sexual partners until he begins to crave barely pubescent flesh. Interestingly, Balzac does not present us with a picture of a hard-wired obsession or congenital orientation for 15-year-old girls but a picture of a desire that transforms in ways that the reader can trace both to the development of habit and to the circumstantial conditions of increasing financial constraint.
Our sexual lives are changeable, and our sexual subjectivities can be discerned and assessed in the ways in which we manage and respond to changing conditions, new events. Younger people may be less practiced in the repetition of habits congealed over many years, and yet events that occur in their formative years may have more long-lasting results if, for example, what occurs encourages a relationship to one's sexuality that is alienating, entrepreneurial, or primarily driven by wariness and anxiety.
In Tricia Rose's collection of interviews about sexuality by black women, a woman named Luciana recounts an event in her early life that both revealed her sexual subjectivity at the time and subsequently affected its transformation. Luciana saw a guy she knew, started hanging out, and then followed him when he claimed to need to go to his place to pick up something. Since she knew him, she says, “I didn't even think in that direction, that he might cause me harm” (Rose 2003: 68). Instead of going to his place, however, he proceeded to take her to a hotel. Seeing this, Luciana initially declined to follow him into the room, but he said to her, in a tone she thought might be caring, that she “shouldn't just sit out in the car” (Rose 2003: 68).
And like a dummy, I went in with him. … And that hurt – it makes me more mad than anything else. Not even so much that he raped me, but for the fact that I was dumb enough to have let him put me in that position. … Of course, now I don't ride in anybody's car, I have very few dates. It still lingers. Now I'm kind of weird with all my friends. (Rose 2003: 68–9)
Luciana blames herself, and we might take this as internalized oppression, but it is also expressive of the understandable belief that she had not cultivated a sufficiently protective form of subjectivity and agency. In hindsight, she thinks she should have been more wary and more assertive. Luciana's shame is directed at her own actions and decisions, or her relation to herself, and her subsequent life is transformed by this determination to maintain a watchful and cautious eye on her own responses and choices in every interaction. Reporting the rape or even disclosing it to anyone would bring about nothing positive, she believes, so she endeavors to change herself. Hence we can attribute Luciana's transformed social interactions and personality both to her assailant's act but also to her heightened and judgmental vigilance toward her own choices and mind-set. The internal direction of her vigilance reflects her fatalism about any other manner of protection. This particular (and quite common) reaction to a rape needs to be contextualized, I'd argue, to the specific norms or conventions of female sexual subjectivity against which she judged herself inadequate, and found herself blameworthy for what she experienced. In this context, one may feel oneself to have only two choices: perpetual wariness and restraint, or repeated violation. But what over-determines Luciana's sense of having only this restricted scope of choice is the entirely reasonable assumption that no one will intervene and no social institution will provide protection or justice. Thus, it is not only the rape that changes her relation to herself, but the social context that protects rapists.
Such accounts of sexual subjectivity in formation may be helpfully unpacked by turning again to Foucault's idea of “technologies of the self” (1988a). This idea, based, somewhat loosely, on ancient ideas about “the arts of life,” is interesting precisely because of his prescient critique of neo-liberal self-management and the practices that aim toward a coercive normalization. Foucault saw the neo-liberal idea of the self as evolving from modern ideas of self-correction or self-perfection that objectify the self as if it were any other kind of natural object that can be measured, explained, and evaluated by external criteria. Today's mantra of self-actualization is a variation on this theme. In contrast, Foucault was interested in “how the self constituted itself as subject” (Martin et al. 1988: 4). In other words, he was interested in the agential process of constituting the problematics of self-production, of how the self is understood, how one relates to one's self, and how goals are formulated. In this light, he portrays the Greeks and early Christians as engaged in a concernful self-regard that is less techne than autopoiesis, working to improve one's habits and character without aiming for the achievement of a specific utilitarian outcome. Here the self is not taken to be a means to enrichment, or successful, competitive functioning, but simply as the overall end in itself about which we should be concerned.
By showcasing alternatives to our own technologies of the self, Foucault was likely attempting to dislodge current conventions and enliven our imaginations of the possible, turning our focus to our own powers of self-making. Hence he suggests that “the outcome of the argument of the Alcibiades on the question ‘what is oneself and what meaning should be given to oneself when we say that one should take care of the self?’ is the soul as subject and not at all the soul as substance” (Foucault 2005: 57). As substance, the soul would be restricted to discovery and self-acceptance, but as subject, the soul is open to a self-fashioning or self-making relation.
Although the Greeks set out specific norms guiding their care of the self, such as enkrateia and askesis, Foucault never presents these as universals. The point is to note their creative self-directed activity, a dimension he draws out through a contrast between the sciencia sexualis of our day and the ars erotica of times past and other cultures (and certainly of some counter-cultures within the West). Sciencia sexualis aims for an objective representation of the ahistorical or fixed truths about the deep nature of human sexuality, while ars erotica offers only a how-to manual with practical possibilities for sexual experiences, to be used as one likes. Hence, as I've said, by drawing from Foucault's late work, we can fashion a more open-ended conception of sexual subjectivity with guide-ropes but without scripts.
Sexual violations produce numerous harms, but I will argue in the remainder of this chapter that the most profound of these is the effect on our sexual subjectivity, or our concernful making relationship to ourselves as sexual subjects. Hence, the concepts of sexual violation and sexual subjectivity are necessarily intertwined.
To further clarify the relationship between sexual violation and sexual subjectivity, we need to unpack the topics of consent, desire, pleasure, and will. Each one of these might be put forward as relevant to delimiting the category of violation or establishing a criterion by which we can determine when a violation has occurred, but none, I shall argue, can do the job on its own.
To reiterate, the arguments I will be making here are not focused on the establishment of adequate or effective legal criteria, defining and demarcating the crime, or assessing responsibility. Before those tasks can be accomplished, I would argue, we must gain clarity on the nature of the harm itself.
I suggested in the introduction that the larger rubric of “sexual violation” is useful in capturing a broad set of events beyond those involving any explicit forms of violence. Violence is commonly understood as involving a physical force that results in physical harm, but this is not a feature of every instance I want to cover. Stretching the meaning of the word “violence” to include non-physical manipulation or structural constraints on consent seems unlikely to work effectively. Legal reforms have adjusted by producing a variety of defined categories that cover cases without physical violence, such as sexual abuse and sexual harassment. Hence, the legal arena does not require a single term. But my purpose here is to conceptualize in the broadest and most explanatory terms possible the nature of the problem. This, of course, raises the question: how should we define “violation”? More particularly, how can we define violation without assuming a naturalist approach to sex and sexual relations, or an approach that lifts these out of their historical and cultural contexts? Like Marx's critically useful concept of alienated labor, which implies the possibility of a non-alienated condition of labor, the concept of violation may appear to assume some benign or positive or natural state from which one has been alienated. Against this, I suggest we avoid approaches that take sex out of history, rendering it a constant whose moral contours are subject to universal norms, eliciting the kind of worrisome implications that cause some to turn against normativity wholesale. What is violated is not our natural sexual self but our making capacities in regard to our sexual selves.
This raises the question of how we understand the “making” capacity in regard to sexuality: if it is not merely a process of coming to discover our natural sexual self, or facing the facts about the fixed nature of human sexuality, how expansive can our own processes of making go?
To think of our sexual experiences, pleasures, desires, and identities as within rather than outside of history is not to assume that there are no normative parameters delimiting harm, exploitation, coercion, abuse, or violence, or that any action whatsoever can be rendered benign under the right historical or cultural conditions. The material realities of human embodiment counsel against thinking that bodily experiences are open to infinite reinterpretations. Yet the facts of materiality do not support a teleological developmentalism that would portray the process of developing sexual subjectivity as evolving in universal ways, or one in which the ultimate, normative goal is narrowly fixed. As Cahill helpfully explains,
The analysis of the embodied subject … indicates that while sexuality is an integral and inherent facet of personhood, the nature of specific sexualities is indelibly marked by the surrounding political and social discourse. There is no truly authentic level of sexuality that can be exhumed by mere, even if sincere, honesty and openness. The subjects undertaking that project of openness remain as mired in the discourse as they ever were; while local and partial acts of resistance to that discourse are possible, the attempt to step outside the totality of the discourse is nothing short of hopeless. (2001: 186)
Following Cahill (2001, 2014), I'll take sexuality as something that is socially constructed within the variable specifics of discourses but also as a process involving the phenomenological features of human embodiment. In order to discern the normative conditions of sexual subjectivity, we need to be attentive to the embodied nature of human life. Any understanding of bodily autonomy will be grounded in this material reality.
This approach helps to thwart theoretical approaches that ignore our embodied human differences. Cahill argues, for example, that rape is embodied for specifically sexed bodies, so we should not try to imagine the abstraction of a “universally experienced and imposed wrong of rape” (2001: 191). Her point is not simply about the objective, empirical features of bodies, such as vaginas and penises, though attending to the materiality of embodiment certainly pushes us to include these as well as considerations about which bodies may become pregnant and which may become seriously injured just by intercourse alone (such as small children). But Cahill insists that material embodiment is also discursive and situated and thus laden with meanings embedded within variable material as well as discursive systems. Embodiment, as Beauvoir argued, is always experienced and lived in specific situations. There is a tension here between the need to acknowledge inherent vulnerabilities of certain bodies in certain conditions even while we insist that such situations always involve various discursive effects. The meanings that can be foisted on bodies has to work within material parameters. In my view it is critical to remain attentive to the interactions between both elements – material bodies and discursive contexts – if we want to understand any given event.
It is also helpful here to add a hermeneutic dimension, as I have previously argued in the case of understanding social identities (Alcoff 2006). The available meaning systems are the product of differentiated linguistic communities organized through social ranking and segregations of varied sorts. Individual horizons of meaning today are often pluritopic, accessing multiple frameworks and conflicting interpretive approaches rather than a unified homogeneous tradition. Yet the horizons of meaning that inform and affect our capacity for assessing the meaning of new events are sometimes affected by what Miranda Fricker (2007) describes as “hermeneutic injustice,” in which varied groups are excluded from the process of establishing new concepts, definitions, and terms. Fricker argues that systematic hermeneutic injustice occurs when social inequalities prevent the participation of whole groups in the production of meanings, resulting in our misunderstanding of some significant areas of experience. What we today call sexual harassment or marital rape might in some discursive communities be unintelligible as a crime or even as an intentional form of harming; the recent introduction of these terms had to overcome the silencing of victims. The effort to maintain hegemony over mainstream narrative interpretation results in a hermeneutic injustice that impoverishes every public domain of discourse.
I believe what we are experiencing globally in regard to sex crimes is a cultural revolution involving linguistic innovations and reforms that have been developed in social resistance communities of one sort or another as survivors, activists, advocates, scholars, and theorists explore and sometimes vigorously debate new ways of naming and of characterizing these kinds of experiences. This cultural revolution is motivated by the realization that the persistent epidemic of sexual violation produces and contributes to a hermeneutic injustice affecting the collective processes by which ideas and meanings related to sexual violations are developed, circulated, and judged.
When victims are excluded from contributing to the production of new terms and concepts and understandings, this adversely affects the formations of their sexual subjectivity, their capacity for self-making, and their ability to contribute to the production of concepts and meanings. As I argued in chapter 2, central to expanding our conceptual repertoire will be the voices of victims because they alone have the first-person material and embodied experience necessary to understand, for example, how rape can occur within marriage and how sexual advances can be harassing. The massive effort to silence and discredit victims is an attempt to build walls against their input in collective hermeneutic horizons and conceptual or linguistic developments.
Imagining the possibilities of sexual subjectivity would require a democratized cultural space for participating in the formation of concepts and institutions by which diverse groups form diverse goals, norms, and constraints. This is not likely to produce global agreement. Our focus should be on thwarting the mechanisms by which victims and low-status groups of all sorts are excluded from participating in the formation of meanings.
We should expand the idea of hermeneutic injustice to include our visual (and otherwise perceptively accessible) landscape, since this will profoundly affect our ideational repertoire and the construction of desires and pleasures, as I will discuss below. If arousal is influenced by social conditions, then the market forces and otherwise undemocratic elements that create our everyday material cultures are a factor in a form of hermeneutic injustice that impacts what Foucault calls the hermeneutics of the self.
Let me now turn to the four elements of sexual relations that generally enter into our evaluative judgments: consent, pleasure, desire, and will. Each of these, or a combination, might arguably provide criteria by which to demarcate good from bad forms of sexual encounters. Although I find none fully satisfactory in demarcating the boundaries between benign events and violations, they constitute important components of our sexual subjectivity that merit exploration.
Consent is the central concept employed by most legal systems today as a way to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate sex, and in this legal realm consent is given a technical definition. However, it is not simply a legal term but also the central concept used in ordinary language to identify rape, assault, and abuse. We need to consider the real-world utility and effects of using consent as the definitive criterion, though these may vary in different locations and contexts. But I am also interested in the ideas about sex and about sexual relationships that are contained in operative meanings of the term as it is used in courts as well as in everyday speech. What does the contemporary reliance on the concept of consent reveal about our understandings of sex and of sexual violation?
As Estelle Freedman (2013) recounts in her history of rape in the United States, consent did not always play the central role. Rather, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept of “seduction” had primacy in establishing the right to legal redress, and it effectively set aside the question of consent. Seduction, which was applied generally only to white women, essentially meant breach of promise. Seduction laws were meant to address the problem of manipulation in such cases as when a man promised to marry in order to procure sex, but then reneged. Women's consent in such cases was based on an “understanding,” resulting from either explicit or implicit promises, that legal marriage would follow sex. Seduction could also be used in cases where a man drugged a woman's drink or otherwise engaged in a more physical coercion, so, in practice, seduction laws were used in cases that ran the gamut from deceit to force.
We may smugly imagine such Victorian ideas as seduction and breach of promise to be far inferior to our own enlightened age, and based simply on Christian anti-sex attitudes, but the reality is more complex. Seduction laws helped to redress the economic difficulties of women left pregnant by men who had abandoned them. During this period, pregnant women could be legally fired and discriminated against in the hiring process, so abandonment was generally catastrophic. Also interesting is the fact that the concern with seduction and breach of promise defined the problem in terms of male words and actions rather than female chasteness or virginity, effectively putting the onus on men to explain why marriage had not occurred after sexual relations. In effect, any sexual relations between unmarried partners placed men under threat of a possible charge of seduction, which factored into some men's agitation to overturn these laws (Freedman 2013: 45). Seduction laws were important checks on male power.
However, as Freedman argues, seduction laws also “bolstered patriarchal authority and retained the centrality of marriage as woman's vocation” (2013: 38). Men convicted under these laws could avoid going to prison or paying fines (often to be paid to fathers) by marrying their victims. Such coerced marriages did not guarantee support: some men married to avoid punishment and then still abandoned their pregnant wives. Hence, seduction laws did not always protect women, and feminists were able to gather wide support for their replacement. The feminist effort to switch to a focus on consent was a liberal reform that would recognize women's interest in sexual autonomy, and not simply in fair, economic transactions for the use of their body.
Seductions sometimes occurred in situations that involved the same sort of rape-avoidance strategies Gavey documents: women acquiesced to pressure simply in order to avoid a violent rape or a beating or to avoid losing their livelihood (Freedman 2013: 42–3). In these cases, establishing consent did not help to redress the gender norms of heterosexual coercion or to discern either her sexual desire or her will.
As Carole Pateman and others have argued, consent is a concept imported from a liberal contract model of social relations with problematic baggage when applied to the issue of sex (Pateman 1980; Baker 1999; Cahill 2001). Contracts involve transactions or promises: for example, the promise to deliver a service or goods. Contracts also have a temporal dimension, ranging over a time frame beyond the actual moment of communication. To consent to sex can then be understood as a commitment to perform an act or deliver a good, in this case a service, either now or at some future point. However, in relation to sex, I can commit to perform, but I cannot commit to sustain a desire or a mood. Commitments cannot promise desire. Contractual approaches to sex can thus involve a consent to alienation, an alienation from one's body, feelings, and preferences. Furthermore, as Cahill (2001) points out, this can confer on the person who receives the consent the dangerous idea that they are “owed” sex, and that they have been wronged if it was not “delivered.” Such ideas have a long history, resonating with the sorts of transactional practices Balzac describes.
Former sex worker Rachel Moran (2013) also argues that consent ignores the constrained options within which choices are too often actually made. For Moran and many of the women she worked with over several years, the choice to do sex work was a forced choice between homelessness, being unable to support their children, perpetual familial or partner abuse, or “willingly” performing sex work. As Jeffrey Gauthier puts it, “when an oppressive system effectively defines the choice situation of the oppressed class,” rarely can our choices result in liberation (1999: 85). Women are generally analogous to workers under conditions of capitalism, Gauthier argues: that is, they are generally forced to bargain within unfavorable conditions.
Moran cites a study of prostitutes in Dublin in which
twenty-nine out of thirty prostituted women stated that they “would accept an alternative job with equal pay.” The authors of this study noted that the single interviewee who did not agree with that statement appeared to be under the influence of some substance at the time of the interview. That sounds about right to me, given everything I've seen in prostitution. The survival strategies of defiance and denial were most commonly practised by those who were so injured by prostitution as to have to block out their reality with alcohol and other mind-altering drugs, and I certainly remember my younger self among them. (Moran 2013: 175)
Whether or not all sex workers would prefer another form of employment, the relevant point here is that a focus on consent conceals what should be the real issue of concern.1 Whether consent occurs in the context of limited economic options or emotional pressure, it is separable from desire and can be manipulated under all too common conditions of constraint. By maintaining a singular focus on consent, we can actually make it more difficult to discern sexual violations.
As both Pateman and Cahill discuss, normative heterosexual sex even outside of explicit transactional relations assumes men ask and women answer, giving or withholding their consent. “[I]n the relationship between the sexes, it is always women who are held to consent to men. The ‘naturally’ superior, active, and sexually aggressive male makes an initiative, or offers a contract, to which a ‘naturally’ subordinate, passive woman ‘consents’ ” (Pateman 1980: 164; quoted in Cahill 2001: 174). If men are approvingly assumed to be the active parties, normative feminine comportment involves receptivity. Hence there continue to exist a litany of derogatory terms, and pathologizing theories, about women who resist or hold out or “tease,” and this itself can pressure women who want to be viewed as accommodating to the needs of others, that is, as caring (Gavey 2005). I often recount in my feminist philosophy classes an incident at a nightclub when I was out with a couple of girlfriends years ago. A man asked us, one by one, to dance, and we each politely declined, with a smile, explaining that we were there just to hang out with our friends. Hours later when we left we found the same guy in the parking lot, watching us and shouting at the top of his voice “BitchCuntDyke!,” as if this were one word. The intensity of the response took us quite by surprise; it seemed so totally inappropriate. Many of my female students have similar stories. A courteous decline is sometimes all that is necessary to lose one's status as a normative feminine subject.
In such contexts even an affirmative consent can become equivalent to the “oh, all right” response: a resignation motivated to avoid a hassle, unaccompanied by sexual desire or will. The concept of consent thus provides a low bar for sexual agency. For these sorts of reasons, Pateman holds that “An egalitarian sexual relationship cannot rest on this basis; it cannot be grounded in consent” (1980: 164). Cahill helpfully explains that this is “because consent is not itself ungendered” (2001: 175). Our ubiquitous reliance on women's consent as the dependable criterion of blameless sex is in fact a symptom of our problematic gender norms: the exclusive focus on whether the woman consented or not fails to challenge conventions in which males ask and females answer, and in this way helps to secure this scenario as normative.
I will argue in the next chapter that consent is also problematic because its contractual implications are phenomenologically unsuited to the domain of sexuality, for reasons I just gestured at above. As a contract or promise, consent ranges over a specified time frame, but a verbal consent cannot ensure that my state of arousal or desire will continue unabated over the contracted period. Sexual feelings are not subject to this degree of predictability, control, or constancy. This is why some colleges have followed what has come to be called the Antioch model, which has an ongoing affirmative (or stated) consent requirement for each micro-step of the encounter, a requirement readily lampooned by comedians (Culp-Ressler 2014).
The etymological origin of the word consent, however, means a “feeling with” or a “feeling together.” While asking repeatedly for consent in the midst of sex does suggest comedy, the requirement is attempting to ensure that the sex involves something like just this interactive, intersubjective engagement, in which each partner stays attuned to the emotional states and experiences of the other(s). In reality, this kind of intersubjective attunement is not that difficult to accomplish, especially in intimate encounters in which all five senses may be enlivened. Knowing something about the state of your partner does not actually necessitate verbal assurances, though perceptive attunement to others’ emotional condition needs to be learned, and there are typical gender-related gaps in who develops this skill. Any person's judgment of their partner's emotional state may well be fallible, however, and thus mistaken, in the absence of verbal communication. The idea that “consent” aims for a “feeling with” gives quite a different connotation than the association of consent with contracts, and brings it closer to the concept of “mutuality” that legal theorist Martha Chamallas (1988) argues would be a better approach to norming sex than contractual consent.
Lois Pineau argues that the Antioch model of affirmative consent has a legitimate but restricted utility, since its real intent, she suggests, is to regulate the real and sometimes non-ideal world of casual college sex in which partners do not know each other very well. Pineau suggests that lovers in more substantial relationships could be exempt from the step-by-step requirement. But she also develops a model of communicative sexual practice that would be “more ongoing, more tentative, more reversible than the one-shot affair [of consent] envisioned on the forceful-seduction model of sexuality” (Pineau 1996: 68).
Despite decades of such debates and explorations into the complexities and deficiencies of consent, it has remained the familiar, ready-to-hand implement in the arena of rape legislation and standard definitions. The question is why. One reason is because Western societies have limited conceptual repertoires in dealing with structural and group-related injustice, and hence usually emphasize only those harms that involve individual rights and contractual obligations between specifiable parties. It would seem that every political demand, whether for healthcare or a fair wage, has to be formulated in these sorts of terms – as a right, and as a right of individuals – rather than as a redress to structural injustice or the endangerment of communal values such as reciprocity and cooperation. The pragmatic advantage of making use of familiar conceptual approaches is clear, but we also need to reach beyond the present and consider how to make some conceptual progress in how we understand the workings of injustice and oppression.
Consent certainly has utility as a familiar conceptual tool for liberal Western societies, which some may take as overriding its phenomenological inadequacy. Yet it is important to acknowledge the ways in which consent can work against victims by placing the burden of proof in their court, so to speak, as well as implicitly reinforcing retrograde gender norms. Where, as we saw, seduction put the onus on men, consent has come to put the onus on women, who are usually the hermeneutically weaker party, subject to skepticism about their truthfulness, capacity for objectivity, and rationality. And consent can create the illusion of an obligation on the part of the one who gives it and an unbridled license on the part of the one who receives it.
Most importantly, the exclusive reliance on consent diverts our attention from the background structural conditions that may over-determine its appearance. So it is far from a panacea. Thinking beyond consent will require pushing back against the presumed hegemony of the legal domain to be the exclusive or privileged sphere of justice. The law in this domain, as it is currently constructed, operates to establish individual culpability; for this, consent is useful, but it puts serious limits on how we construe the ultimate nature of the problem or its solutions. We need to go beyond what currently configured courts may be able to work with, or prevailing discourses may be able to make plausible, in order to understand and remedy the epidemic of sexual violence in our societies.
Certainly, the story of our reliance on consent is more than a holdover of liberal ideology. There is a kernel of truth in the focus on consent, as Freedman's history recounts, by moving away from the question of transactions – in which fathers or families may be identified as the injured party – to the question of the victimized, which is in most cases a question about a particular woman. How was she disposed toward the encounter? Was there a willing, a turning toward, an intention?
The formal, contractual connotations of consent make it an odd choice as a central feature of intimate relationships involving physical needs and yearnings that at times can overtake us with surprise. Consent implies a rational volition, an agency, operating prior to and apart from the passions. Consent thus loads the deck to portray sex as transactional even when the lived experience of the act can feel more like a falling, a magnetic pull. One sometimes finds oneself in a sexual situation without planning or calculation. Rape and sex thus sometimes share a phenomenological feature: meta-level thoughts about “What is happening here?” seem to emerge in the midst, in the middle, some time after whatever it is is well under way.
I realize, fully, how dangerous it is to analogize wanted and unwanted sex. And yet this commonality is precisely why outsiders wonder about whether our claims of violation are true to the event, or whether the event was assigned a set of negative and accusatory words and terms only after the fact. Police, prosecutors, friends, assholes, ask: did you want it? Did you enjoy it? Or they may never voice these words but wonder all the same.
One of the most popular movies of the 1960s, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, had a memorable scene making clear why such questions are asked. This was one of a thousand similar scenes in the history of cinema in which a woman's vulnerability to a dangerous figure is played for sexual titillation. In the beginning of the scene, we see a pretty young schoolteacher walking through early nightfall to her small house, entering the door, relaxed in her familiar surroundings, preparing to change her clothes, when a man with a gun startles her. He directs her to keep going: that is, to keep removing her clothes. Slowly now she continues, with a guarded look, while the camera lingers over her body, until he approaches her and she embraces him with the words, “I thought you'd never get here.” This was merely, in today's parlance, a role play. Even if the scene had not been prepared by these players in advance, the woman goes along with it, for a while. The actions we observe are portrayed initially as a prelude to rape; we then find them to be a lover's game. But the acts themselves are identical. So the way in which we eventually decide how to understand the events we are watching hangs on the questions: what was her desire, meaning, her state of mind? Was this pleasurable for her?
On some theories of desire, what we want to know in assessing a given act can be discerned not by the actions themselves, but by the subjective experience of the actors.2 Even in a pre-arranged role play, a rape can occur. We need to know the participants’ state of mind, and in particular, in a scene like the one just described, the state of mind of the party who is being asked to perform or to follow direction, as victims generally are. The fact that one party is acting the aggressor, and the other the submissive, will not be sufficient to judge the nature of the event: we need to know the state of desire.
If we find that desire, or pleasure, is present in a situation where there is no stated consent, is this sufficient to establish a benign encounter? Surely not, since I can have desire, but for a million different reasons not want or intend to act on it by following through to sexual activity. Desire may well feel disconnected from my will or intention, conflicting with my more thoughtful self. One can find oneself attracted physiologically to schmucks, and most of us choose a form of sexual life, if we can, that involves greater discernment than a mere assessment of the internal desire thermometer.
If we agree, then, that desire is insufficient, might we still want to say that it is necessary? Here is another arena in which gender norms may enter into the analysis of sexual violation, since women's desire has so rarely been given either legitimacy or importance in Western, Christian traditions as well as some others. Women in heterosexual contexts are still too often expected to perform a service, to operate in an other-directed, caring mode. Requiring desire, then, acts as a kind of corrective to these specifically gendered conceptions of sexual relations.
However, some may want to affirm the motivation to have sex as a form of caring or loving. This is a well-established aspect of the repertoire of normal and oppressive female heterosexuality, as I mentioned earlier, but that alone does not provide a reason to cease and desist from the practice of sexual care work, or what Ann Ferguson (1989) calls “sex-affective labor.” We could mitigate the sexism by urging that the practice be extended to others. And it might well make sense to argue that women need not follow a “male model” of subject-centered (or selfish) sexual behavior. Yet I find myself, as a survivor, incapable of contemplating the sort of intentional sex without desire some might want to put in the benign category. This may be a feature of my own overly defensive sexual subjectivity, perhaps just a reactive response to gender oppression as much as to trauma, and not a generalizable consideration.
Relevant to this issue is some interesting recent research suggesting that women's sexual responsiveness often begins midstream, as it were. Women who do not manifest desire at the beginning of the activity will sometimes develop it along the way, and this marks a difference from the data on men (Basson 2000; Spurgas 2013, 2016). Although a man and woman may begin sexual activity with different levels of manifest desire or arousal, the research suggests that the woman's desire can emerge later. If we are concerned with desire, then, we also need to consider the question of when it needs to be present (at the beginning? at some point in the process?) and not only whether it is present. If these data are correct, it would seem that requiring manifest desire at the beginning of sexual activity may not be necessary. Yet, since desire may also not emerge after the activities have begun, this urges us to develop norms that allow cessation without criticizing or pathologizing or guilt-tripping the person who says, “This is not working for me tonight; I want to stop.”
These data may also pose dangers, of course, since they can support the old trope of a woman fighting to get free of a physical approach and then shortly thereafter swooning in the man's arms with desire. Such images continue to encourage physical coercion. I tend to think we should proceed cautiously even with recent sexology data produced with better methodologies, given the complex difficulties of this field and the relational nature of sexual feelings and responses (see especially Lloyd 2006). And we should obviously scale back what we claim from data gathered with one culturally select population, and avoid jumping to naturalistic, de-historicized claims. Yet I'd also support further investigation into and an open-ended approach to the possibilities of gender-related differences. Given how very recent is the attempt to weed sexism out of sexology, what looks to be good data today should simply be taken as a prompt for further thought and analysis. Even current work moves too often from data about existing differences to claims that posit innate unchangeable differences, since the research in this area continues to be distorted by a mess of androcentric and heterosexist framing assumptions (see Jordan-Young 2011). Yet findings about current differences for a specific cultural and/or gender group are not only usable for those trying to establish natural gender differences but are also helpful in establishing corrective norms of interactions that take into account the dangers of existing gendered conventions.
So far I have argued that desire represents something more in line with what we want to know about a sexual encounter, beyond whether or not there was consent. Desire implies something more than resignation, and it provides the means to interrogate role-playing actions. But I have also argued that desire is insufficient because it is not singularly determinative over our choice of action, or of our will. If we view sexual activity as a form of care work, we may hold that desire is neither sufficient nor necessary. This does not imply, of course, that desire is unimportant. If we are female and/or gay, having a positive, accommodating, and forgiving attitude toward our sexual desires has been a necessary staple of reform efforts, a measure of the political health of our sexual subjectivity.
Yet there is also the vexed question about the social and cultural construction of desire, especially under the bad conditions of most contemporary societies (see Bartky 1990; Cahill 2001; Kimmel 2007). As Sandra Lee Bartky says, “Sexual desire may seize and hold the mind with the force of an obsession, even while we remain ignorant of its origin and meaning” (1990: 60). Scripts and arousal patterns vary, in line with available narratives, images, and cultural influences, to produce what some theorists call our “sex-print.” The type of objects, including bodies and body parts, that we find desirable is affected by the arbitrariness of our geographical location. Sexual practices are just not purely natural: the internet is full of videos about the markedly different conventions around the world for kissing another human being. And today, of course, the inputs we receive are not simply the happenstance of our local environment and its ideologies but the calculated orchestrations of markets attempting to manipulate consumers by making use of the latest psychological research. Male and heterosexual dominance are not the only influences at work today in crafting commodifiable desire patterns.
The idea that the realm of desires and pleasures should be made individually autonomous is highly implausible, but even so, the heteronomous nature of culturally constructed desires is not the problem in and of itself. Rather, the problem concerns the manner in which this social and cultural construction occurs, such as, for example, where the intellectual and visual culture produces an ideational landscape replete with male dominance, racism, and heterosexism, and its ongoing current production is highly undemocratic (Oliver 2016). Under these conditions, the sexual imaginary may be formed without much, if any, agency on the part of marginalized groups. Object choice and the associations between social values and forms of sexual persona are over-determined by visual cultures created primarily out of market considerations. As Bartky argues, the result may be the fetishizing of object choices in ways that echo the current architecture of social domination: for example, the conflation of essential female desire with masochism or the eroticization of vulnerability.
These problems suggest a further set of questions: what can be claimed in regard to a manifest desire – or, for that matter, a pleasure? What do we learn, if anything, from the fact of their occurrence in a particular context? Given the stratified and oppressive social contexts in which both desires and pleasures may be formed, even if only in part, why would we imagine that championing them is all we need to know about rectifying injustice?
Helpfully, in this case, Foucault has admonished sexual libertarians with the warning that “we must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power” (1978: 157). His history of sexuality is more properly understood as a history of the construction of the category of sexuality, where sexuality is an object of scientific study that renders us all more vulnerable to colonization by power/knowledge regimes. The Victorian era ushered in a period of intense study and reportage on sexuality, and the impressive development of this obsession through the twentieth century created more opportunities for heteronomous influence from dubious sources cloaked by the aura of objectivity and expertise and also, more recently, sympathetic concern. In this sense, as Foucault explains, “We must not refer a history of sexuality to the agency of sex; but rather show how ‘sex’ is historically subordinate to sexuality” (1978: 157). In particular, the specter of normative sexuality has come to dominate sex, and even when we are imagining ourselves to be going against the current norms, these may still be governing the meaning we give to our actions as “transgressive.” If our sexual activity and, conceivably, its corresponding subjective experiences should be understood in relation to what Foucault calls the regime of sex-truth, we need a different account of liberation or progress than mere untrammeled expression or doing the opposite of existing norms.
Foucault's work is suggestive of just such a different approach, by offering a historical narrative about emergent European ideas and practices involving sex and the modern demand for bringing sex into discourse in order to make it an object of scientific study. In this way he helps to thwart our modern smugness, which so often spills over into cultural chauvinism about societies beyond the West. Foucault introduces historicism, contingency, and power into the formations of ideas about sex. He encourages skepticism toward the attempt to develop a theory of the real nature of human sexuality, not just because we lack sufficient evidence to date for such a project, but also because the project itself is ill conceived in its attempt to divest sex from the contingent and power-riddled historical plane.
Foucault held that the project to produce a science of sex manifests what he calls out in The Order of Things (1970) as a contradictory and ultimately incoherent approach to the study of “Man,” in which “Man” becomes an empirico-transcendental doublet, an impossible figure containing both transcendence and essential properties. “Man” emerges in the European Enlightenment as a substantive figure affecting the production of knowledge, and thus requiring its own study in order to secure the validity of knowledge claims. But “Man” is then formulated as both pure subject, capable of transcending the conditions in which knowing takes place, and measurable object (the known or knowable). This unstable hybrid produces the philosophical problematics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries concerning how we can be both free and affected by structural determinations. In reality, of course, these problematics are variations on a much older theme in Christian apologetics: the paradox of free will in a universe created at every temporal moment by God.
Yet Foucault's work on the history of sex manifests its own empirico-transcendental doublet, I'd suggest. His writings lend themselves to ideas about an almost infinite plasticity of sexual pleasures, and yet he also emphasizes the determinate and overbearing role of power/knowledges. On the one hand, sex is presented as “subordinate to sexuality,” as the passage above puts it, or in other words, as the mere effect of certain discursive regimes that construct our sexual selves. On the other hand, in later volumes, Foucault (1980, 1985, 1986) gives us a genealogy of varied moral problematizations regarding sexual practice and sexual desire, variations that he uses to embolden our imagination about alternative possibilities.
Thus Foucault suggests not only the determining power of discourses over our sexual lives but also the capacity to transcend current discursive regimes through reconfiguring and reimagining our sexual selves. The critical element here will be taking our imagination beyond resistance or a simple reversal of dominant scripts. Nor should we imagine a spontaneous free space of unfettered individuality. Foucault's alternative examples showcase alternative moral problematizations of sexual selfhood, not the de-sublimation of innate desire or attainment of a “liberated” sexuality. His analysis, I would suggest, contests the idea of scripts that set out a closed set of determinate possibilities; instead, he gives us the concept of discursive formations in which complex and contradictory scripts, such as Victorianism itself, yielded new pleasures and subtle forms of subversion. At bottom, the making relation we have to our sexual selves is productive of new sexual forms and not simply expressive of already existing desires.
In this vein, I want to follow Foucault's emphasis on the historical and political context within which sexual subjectivities operate, or the moral problematizations that have dominated our era. For example, many continue to take their sexual identities to be determined by the objects of their desire, producing a proliferation of finely tuned categories well beyond homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual to foot fetishists, anime lovers, or pederasts, and the plethora of dating sites allows one to choose partners by these and many more criteria. Some categories emphasize sexual roles – dominants or submissives, kinks, voyeurs, exhibitionists – rather than the preferred objects of desire, though these, too, are often presented as natural and stable tendencies. Foucault adapts Nietzsche's genealogical method to suggest that if we can tell truthful historical genealogies of our current ideas and identity formations, especially those that are presented as natural, we might render them as historically specific and thus subject to critique and creative replacement (i.e. transvaluation).
Foucault, like Deleuze, wishes to demystify desire and make it a surface phenomenon rather than a state that emanates from the deep structure of the unconscious, an innate human condition, or any sort of subterranean self. This is consonant with the idea that desires and pleasures are species of experience, and thus subject to the analysis I sketched in chapter 2, in which experiences arise at the nexus of domains of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of relation to one's self. To say that experience is historically constituted need not imply or entail that we can ignore the biological conditions and phenomenological reality of material embodiment, or come to claim that the manipulation of genitals can have the same significance as a shoulder rub, or that anal and vaginal penetration can be made to feel the same. Staving off a deep structure taken to be universal across human diversity and through all of human history does not require jumping to an improbable infinity of elasticity in human responsiveness or physical inventiveness.
So we need a model of causation that is plausibly holistic and multi-dimensional, incorporating material and social elements as well as the vagaries of individual interpretation, all in mediated relations with one another. Given such an approach, we can say that current configurations of desires and pleasures should not be taken as indicative of deep and unchanging facts about a static human nature. Desires may be experienced as found objects but they are constituted within certain complex conditions. Even if these conditions have some material parameters, I find that this idea gives me hope. It suggests that the desire to rape – the arousal patterns associated with varied forms of violation – may be specific rather than universal.
Certainly from a Foucauldian or psychoanalytic perspective (on this point in weird agreement), a particular manifestation of desire may be more heteronomous than autonomous, the manifestation neither of something innate nor of something we have had a hand in forming. This is just to say that how and what and how much we desire is subject to social conditions, which should motivate our interest in our sexual subjectivity. What have been the conditions in which our sexual subjectivity has, thus far, developed, and who has had a hand in shaping them? What we want to know is whether we can influence the processes by which arousal patterns are generated in us. Foucault's suggestion of an art of self-making incorporates the aspirations we have about the agency of our desires and the production of our pleasures.
It's chilling to find pedophiles discussing how they are providing a kind of service to their victims by showing them the possibilities of bodily experiences of pleasure. Teaching can be a fine thing to do, but coercive instruction in this domain of one's life teaches much more than the mechanics of bodily activity: it teaches submission and the disconnect of pleasure from subjective engagement with the emotional state of another. It also usually teaches children and young people that sexuality is something they can barter for necessities, whether material or otherwise. There are any number of better ways that young people might have to learn about their bodily capacities for pleasure.
Victims of sexual violations can sometimes be made to experience a kind of pleasure by the mechanics of their bodies. In memoir accounts this phenomenon is related as torturous, as if the body itself is capitulating with their victimizer. The presence of some sort of pleasure plays no role in justifying violations or mitigating their harms; in fact, pleasure can exacerbate harm in altering conditions of sexual response, inhibiting future sexual activity.
To summarize the analysis thus far, I've suggested that consent is particularly insufficient as a means to protect women’s freedom. An exclusive focus on consent concords with normative heterosexual non-reciprocity in the ability to pursue desires and pleasures. If all a perpetrator has to do is produce stated consent, this can actually make women more rather than less vulnerable to structural and contextual manipulations. Considering desires and pleasures, rather than merely consent, may thus provide a way to get at more of what we really want to know about a sexual encounter, especially concerning the subjective experience of the pursued party before and during the encounter, and in particular the aspects of their internal state that involve their sexual subjectivity and subjective experience in that moment. Yet desires and pleasures can themselves be manipulated, as many perpetrators well know. And, further, desires and pleasures may express an aspect of my subjectivity in any given moment but not the whole of it, and not be what I would choose, if I could, to act upon. The kernel of truth behind the turn to consent, and what motivated the move away from a focus on seduction in earlier periods of history, is the concern with what the person wants to do, with her will. We want to know what actions she would take if the structurally oppressive forms of coercion in her life (at that moment or in regard to that relationship) were weak or inoperable.
To see what is meant by will in this context, it is helpful to look at the debate over sexual harassment, and particularly over the requesting of sex under constrained circumstances. Classic among these types of cases are those in which a student, employee, or otherwise dependent person is presented with a choice that binds together a sexual activity with some other desirable good, such as a fellowship or preferred work schedule. If the desirable good is not an absolute necessity – not food or water or urgent medical care, for example – then it would seem that the person does have some range of free choice. In the literature these types of cases are referred to as “offers,” though this terminology, I'd suggest, stretches the bounds of what we generally think of as “offers” when they include an attempt to procure sexual services. But the question of how to assess these “offers” turns on the will, or, more accurately, free will, since what we want to know is whether, when a person chooses a benefit with strings attached, they are choosing it freely. Was it coercion, or simply an “offer”?
The debate among moral philosophers and legal theorists is precisely on this point of how to distinguish acceptable “offers” from unacceptable coercion (Bayles 1972; Tuana 1988; Superson 1993; Primoratz 1999). Could we understand a given offer as enhancing an individual's freedom, by making something available to her that would not otherwise be available, or should we understand the offer as coercing her into doing something she would rather not? In what is perhaps a sort of best case scenario, Michael Bayles puts forward a hypothetical wherein a “mediocre woman graduate student who would not [otherwise] receive an assistantship” is given the opportunity to obtain one if she has sex with her department's chair (1972: 142). So here a person is not being denied something that she would otherwise get, but being given an opportunity to obtain something she wants but at a certain price. This is precisely why such cases are described using the language of “offers” rather than the language of “threats,” since the situation of the receiver will not be worse off, so some argue, than it currently is if she refuses. Bayles holds that “the fact that a choice has an undesirable consequence does not make it against one's will. One may prefer to have clean teeth without having to brush them; nonetheless one is not acting against one's will when one brushes them” (1972: 149). The analogy is, of course, strained: brushing one's teeth is a natural way to clean them, and every time one brushes one's teeth they will be cleaner. Having sex with a power figure may be a normal way to gain necessary goods, but if so, this particular causal structure has been socially engineered, promulgated by certain ideologies, and legally protected. By contrast, the causal sources of clean teeth are not produced by systems of injustice.
Let us consider the case without the problematic analogy, though. The market logic at play here is that everything has a price. So if the woman wants the assistantship, she may be quite willing to pay the price. How, then, is this any more coercive than other market transactions? To answer this, philosophers have turned to the question of whether the offering party has had a hand in constructing the conditions of vulnerability of the party who receives the offer, or is taking advantage of unjust structural conditions that create coercive effects (MacKinnon 1987; Tuana 1988; Superson 1993; Primoratz 1999). Nancy Tuana argues that we cannot evaluate such offers of goods-with-a-price outside of their context, whether in regard to immediate circumstances or in more indirect and largely structural ways. The person making the offer may have had a hand in producing vulnerability, or be taking advantage of (and thus reinforcing) macro-social structures that create non-reciprocal and illegitimate conditions of empowerment. Further, a refusal of the offer may indeed carry a price similar to refusing a threat, even if no threat is stated. If we refuse to purchase a product that comes with a “free” gift, there are no likely repercussions from the salesclerk, but a power figure such as a department chairperson could smear our reputation or engage in some other sort of retribution by making use of their cultural capital in our discipline as well as their decision-making power over important aspects of our lives. Even in the example Bayles describes, where the student is portrayed as genuinely undeserving of the assistantship, her decision to reject the department chair's offer may possibly worsen her situation if the chair decides to enact retribution. Hence, as Anita Superson, Nancy Tuana, and Catharine MacKinnon concur, in sexist societies such “offers” may well be indistinguishable from threats.
In some scenarios, the subordinate party may accept an “offer” without being concerned about subsequent retribution. Yet I'd suggest we need to go beyond the surface situation of such scenarios to ask: what are the constraining contextual conditions that may engender a willful choice to trade sex for an assistantship or a job, in which one might be genuinely, on some level, happy to oblige? What would be the criteria by which we could call such a choice an instance of “free will”? Here again, as was the case with consent, desire, and pleasure, we find an inadequacy in the focus on will alone. A student may willfully take up the offer in order to secure the assistantship, but this might still involve an injustice if she lives in a society in which such offers are normalized. In such cases, if subsequent retribution does occur, she will have no effective redress.
The lesson here is that our concern should not be with the will in a narrow sense, as in a given momentary intention, but with will-formation in a larger sense. The formation of our will, no less than our “sex-prints,” needs a genealogical analysis in which we trace out the origins in systems of power and of power/knowledge. What we truly want to know in assessing sexual events is much more than what the immediate statements and acts, desires and pleasures, or even stated consent, can convey. A focus on will-formation may be crucial in understanding sexual violation. Whether I consented or not, whether I felt desire or experienced pleasure, I may yet feel traumatized by being led into a situation that felt compromising to my will. Many victims, of course, express shame and self-loathing and act in ways that damage their bodies and lives. All of this indicates a diminished self-regard, as if they have lost a sense of their will and their capacity for self-protection. The “offers” made under conditions of injustice may therefore have their most deleterious effect on our self-regard through compromising our will or re-forming it in ways that deteriorate our relations with our self.
If the ideal of absolute individual autonomy is beyond anyone's grasp, how might we think about a comparative evaluation of the conditions of heteronomy in which we are confined? Foucault suggests the following: “the important question here, it seems to me, is not whether a culture without restraints is possible or even desirable but whether the system of constraints in which a society functions leaves individuals the liberty to transform the system” (1989: 327). And not only individuals, I would add, but also groups and collectives.
In Foucault's rendering of the idea of technologies of the self, there is an emphasis on the open-ended but self-directed, mindful, and reflective practice pursued in relation to a moral problematic that can be variously defined, and his discussion of these variable problematics in the context of specific communities invokes the possibility of a collective fashioning of sexual subjectivity, with an eye toward overcoming or refashioning specific experiential responses such as shame, disgust, fear, or delight. In this last section, I want to turn once again to Foucault's late work as a way to invoke a technology of our sexual subjectivity.
As I've discussed in this chapter, the last decade of Foucault's life was spent researching what he came to think of as an aesthetic approach to self-formation. The aesthetic register was meant to signal an open-ended “making” and not necessarily a repudiation of moral concerns, since the projects he describes involve normative judgments of many sorts. In the traditions he studied, these judgments were often concerned with the development of virtuous selves, including sexual selves. Foucault was especially interested in the virtues that concerned matters such as excess and the lack of self-control, and he argued that these spanned pagan and theistic societies as well as hetero-patriarchal and non-hetero-patriarchal ones. What diverged concerned proscriptions or rules regarding the gender of the object of desire, but what was similar was the nature of the desiring practice. So by focusing on the way in which the ancients themselves formulated their moral problematics, rather than the way we today might formulate them, we can discern obscured unities as well as have a better understanding of the nature of the differences.
Foucault defined “problematization” as the contingent formulation of problems. These may be represented at times as a search for natural sexual dispositions or unchanging moral universals, but Foucault's claim is that our sexual problematizations have undergone radically fundamental shifts and are best understood as historical phenomena. The dictate to engage only in reproductive sex, for example, is not at all ubiquitous, nor is the disapproval of pleasure in general or female pleasure in particular, nor is the phobic attitude toward sex among those with similar genitals. Thus a long historical and cross-cultural view reveals variable modes of the arts of existence, enlivening our imaginations in ways that may help us change how we engage our sexual lives today.
In the cultures Foucault focused on, moral concerns focused more on the how than the what of sex (1986: 30). For example, akedah or askesis, often understood as a kind of self-sacrifice (related to how we understand asceticism today), was originally the word for a practice of heightened focus on the self oriented toward self-cultivation rather than self-denial. The “emphasis on sexual austerity in moral reflection takes the form, not of a tightening of the code that defined prohibited acts, but of an intensification of the relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as the subject of one's acts” (Foucault 1986: 41). For the Stoics, a good life was achieved not by obedience to duty or moral codes, but by practices intended to cultivate virtues understood as ways of living and ways of interacting with others.
Moreover, rather than the contemporary command to express one's self, which assumes there is already a self in existence that merely needs to be freed, for the Stoics the point is to make one's self. In his 1981–2 lectures, Foucault explored this idea, which he came to call “the hermeneutics of the self,” as the actual meaning of the misrepresented Socratic ideal, usually taken to be simply a command to “know thyself.” This implies that there is already a self in place, and it invites us, as modern European philosophers have assumed, to imagine simply “an intellectual attitude” or detached discernment (Foucault 2005: 31). In actuality, Foucault claims, the maxim incorporated both epistemic and practical activities (1980: 13; 2005: xx). The old maxim of epimeleia heautou, or care of the self, widespread in Lacedaemonian culture, “is what one could call an ascetic practice, taking asceticism in a very general sense, in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self, by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain a certain mode of being” (1989: 433).
Foucault himself, however, takes up the epistemic dimension of this maxim in his efforts to unearth the historical ontology of ourselves – or how we came to be as we are – so that we might come “to know how and to what extent it would be possible to think differently” (2005: xxviii). No doubt, he is here intending to redirect contemporary ethical fixations. In the midst of a libertarian inclined counter-cultural moment of the 1970s and 1980s that focused on expression, Foucault interjected ideas about the ways in which we might engage in self-making rather than simply liberating our natural dispositions. The idea of the care of the self involves a practical cultivation: a making, rather than a simple obeying or following or discovering. It is reflective but also exploratory, not simply in order to know the self that one currently is, but also to consider how this self was generated, and how it may be worked on, even possibly made anew, in terms we can undertake.
In this light, I want to make four claims. First, a central way to understand sexual violation is to consider its effects on our capacity to become effective agents involved in the making of our sexual selves. Effective agency requires a sphere for exploration and experimentation and the hermeneutical space to generate one's own interpretations of one's experiences and desires. Current practices of the self for vulnerable groups too often mainly involve exhortations to learn modes of self-defense, to exercise daily routines of caution, and to cultivate resilience in the face of traumatic experiences. This was true for women, I'd add, long before any feminist social revolution began. But the general orientation of this practice bespeaks a fatalism and diminution of exploration, as if self-regard can only be manifest, especially for women and girls, in forms of self-protection. What we need is rather an enlarged idea of one's relation to one's sexual self beyond the goal of protection and harm avoidance: such diminished agendas look plausible only in light of the epidemic of violation in contexts of social indifference.
Second, I want to argue that the movement of survivors and our allies to denaturalize abuse, assault, and rape, and to formulate new languages by which we describe and understand our experiences, is a reworking of moral problematizations concerning various kinds of norms that involve gender, moral relations, and sexuality. This is to say not that there is a uniform set of ideas and practices emerging from anti-rape movements, but that there is a concerted engagement with existing norms, problematics, and practices, such as the practice of remaining silent in the face of violation. In particular, what is occurring is an attempt to formulate moral problematizations that avoid self-blame on the part of victims, and instead place blame elsewhere (perhaps individual perpetrators but also institutional cultures and general social norms of sexual interaction).
Third, my contribution as a survivor to this reworking of language is to urge against taking the concept of consent as the sufficient, stand-alone criterion of violation. Some might argue that, given the sorts of problems with the concept I have discussed, we could expand it to something like “authentic consent.” In my view, building all we need into the concept of consent moves it too far afield of the everyday meaning of the term, for the concept of “authentic consent” would have to address more than whether a woman says yes, or declines to say no. I have argued that the better approach is to take the more expansive notion of sexual subjectivity and understand this as including consent as well as desire, pleasure, will, and, most importantly, one's concernful and agential self-making.
Fourth, I want to argue that we might take up this concept of sexual subjectivity in relation to an art of existence to ask, for both victims and others: what practices of the self might we imagine as helpful correctives in this moment? And what forms of self-cultivation are possible beyond self-protection? Posing this question helps to restore a fuller sense of agency in relation to our sexual lives. And I would suggest it will also help the larger publics to see that what is happening in youth cultures, college activism, and social resistance communities of all sorts is all part of the attempt not to police sexuality but to cultivate the conditions in which new forms can be invented.
This chapter has argued that the problem of sexual violation is its effect on the conditions in which we develop both a caring and a making relation to our sexual selves. Caring for one's sexual self is not to be confused with a tantric approach to sexual pleasure, nor should it be identified with the ars erotica Foucault presents as the contrast to the scientia sexualis of the modern period. There is no prescribed singular aim, either pleasure intensification or the diversification of experience. I am suggesting that we can conceptualize sexual subjectivity as non-teleological, without a specified end-point.
We can then pinpoint the harm of sexual violation as an inhibiting of the very possibility of sexual self-making. What is violated is not a substantive set of normative or normal desires, but the practical activity of caring for the self. Trauma atrophies possibilities.
This approach, then, will lead to a pluralism of moral problematics, but let me underscore the distinction between this and an unbounded, facile libertarianism based on consent, or the noxious idea that the expression of desire or the pursuit of pleasure is sufficient to justify my actions (see Seidman 1992). Care of the self is unavoidably involved in relations with others, as I've argued; even those who masturbate to images must consider the conditions of production of those images, the effects of their continued use on the well-being of the models, and the effect of their use on one's sexual self, one's relation to one's self, and one's relations with others. Still, although moral considerations cannot be set aside, we will no doubt continue to see plural formations of sexual self-making.
The goal of communities of resistance needs to go beyond the aim of survival to think about refashioning the capacity for an art of existence. The political interpretation and non-fatalistic approach to the epidemic of violations is critical for this to occur. For example, Nancy Whittier's account of the resistance movement against childhood sexual abuse emphasizes the way in which the effort to change how people understand these events in their lives changes how they feel about themselves. Shame is transformed to anger; fatalism and resignation can be replaced by empowerment and a sense of possibility; and self-blame is diminished as one cultivates self-directed compassion. These changes are accomplished not by behavioral modification, but by enhancing the self-directed process of survivors. In support groups as well as individual therapy, ideas about normative sex and culpability inevitably shift, altering the associated feelings people have about their lives. In my own experience, it was hearing about the lives of other victims that transformed my own relation to myself: in relation to their experiences I found a well of compassion and also rage that I had previously been unable to apply in my own case. Many survivors have reported similar transformations to me as a result of support groups.
Whittier uses the concept of “internalized oppression” to describe such shifts. Foucault would no doubt prefer a neutral concept such as alterations in the discursive construction of subjectivity. But we need something in between, given Foucault's own attentiveness to the role of power in relationship to received knowledge. In the shift from “shame” to “anger” there is a shift not merely in descriptive terms but also in relation to power.
The concept of sexual subjectivity is not by itself a guaranteed buttress against the formation of sexual violators. But by retaining an attentiveness to power, we can (and should) avoid the moral quietism of a neutral, non-judgmental approach to forms of sexual problematizations and sexual subjectivities. To eschew the claim of a singular norm is to say not that there are no legitimate ways to make moral judgments of the practices we engage in, but that there is no normative or ideal form of sexual life that applies to all human beings in all societies. Whether we emerge as sexual beings in New York or Cairo or Chiapas, our possibilities and problematics will in every case be conditioned by the rich context of cultures in which we live.
Still, to follow for a moment Foucault's exploration of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the idea to emphasize here is of a kind of practice, as in the practice of honing a skill or, better, a virtue, organized necessarily by some sort of aim, very much as in the way one might work on having a healthy or a strong body. Unlike these aims, however, in the matter of sex, our aims will necessarily involve intersubjective relations.
There is a wealth of personal experience written by survivors that suggests that rape gets in the way of being able to engage in open-ended reflective practices around one's sexuality, to put it mildly. It may cut off our activity, our desire, and our pleasure, cramp the will toward paranoia and safety concerns, cloud our minds with traumatic imagery rendering any other thoughts mute. No matter when it happens in one's life, one's sexual life is forever changed. But if it happens when we are young, or very young, the possibility of forming a participatory sexual subjectivity is seriously disabled. One is often in defense mode, caught in counter-moves to deflect violation or, conversely, to establish one's sexual freedom by successful risk-taking. The problem here is not correctly understood as heteronomy, or the fact that my relations with others have had transformative influence. Rather, the problem is a persistent pattern of relations with others that involves rape, sexual abuse, sexual coercion, structural manipulation, and violence.
By focusing on sexual subjectivity in societies riven by epidemics of sexual violation, we are led to new questions. How can we create the conditions where targeted groups, such as women, can make their sexual lives anew? In the remainder of this book, I will answer this question with two claims. First, we must address the question of voice, and all of the ways in which the voices of victims in particular are silenced, deflected, and dismissed. The point is for victims not simply to have the capacity to express our experiences and what we “are,” as if this is fixed, but also to have a hand in making what we are, what we wish to be, and for this we need a voice both individually and collectively. Second, we must acknowledge the ineliminable differences in the meanings of what we say, and the terms and concepts we use. Voice is always contextual, most meaningfully understood only in the fullness of a context that shares its implicit allusions as well as explicit references. Attempting to achieve a universal meta-language with fully articulated terms and definitions for making sense of sexual violations will shut down voices, or misconstrue their intended meanings, if they do not fit within the sanctioned concepts. Even the open-ended concepts such as I offer here – sexual violation, sexual subjectivity – will have limited range and are best taken as rough heuristics. In the following chapter, I will make this second argument. In further chapters, I will take up the question of speaking for myself.