Rape on the Contemporary Stage

© The Author(s) 2018

Lisa FitzpatrickRape on the Contemporary Stagehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70845-4_1

1. Introduction

Lisa Fitzpatrick¹ 

(1)

University of Ulster, Derry, UK

Keywords

Rape scriptFeminist theoryViolence in performanceRape in the early modern theatreRape and melodramaRape and film

The story of the Levite’s concubine¹ appears in the biblical Book of Judges. A woman and her husband are returning from her father’s house in Bethlehemjudah, and they stop on the way at the home of an old man in the city of Gibeah. After they have washed and eaten and drunk, some of the men of the city come to the house and demand that the Levite be given to them so that they may ‘know him’. The old man goes out to them, and begs them to leave the man alone. In his place, he offers his daughter and the Levite’s wife. But the men paid no attention to him, so

… the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go.

Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man’s house where her lord was, till it was light. (Judges 19:24–26)

In the apparently pragmatic sacrifice of the concubine, the householder’s offer of his own virgin daughter to protect a man who is a stranger to him, and the erasure of the women’s subjective experience, the absence of human value attached to the women is succinctly expressed. Yet this erasure, this absence of representation in the text, simultaneously offers a gap for the reader to imagine the woman’s terror at being forced out of the security of the house to the street and the gang of rapists, her desperation, and the physical violence that leaves her dead or dying. When she is released, she has nowhere to go but back to the man who gave her to her torturers. But of course the story is not about the concubine: her body is a message between men, a metaphorical site for a public or political struggle. The Levite brings her body home and cuts it into twelve pieces, sending one to each of the twelve tribes of Israel: as Mieke Bal notes, the body is thus literally transformed into a message (1991, 86). The expected reception of the text is clearly constructed within it: the householder offering his daughter; the brief description of the concubine’s death; the fact that she is never named and the earlier characterization of her having ‘played the whore’ (Judges 19:1), all encourage the reader to focus on the impersonal, political significance of the story in which all the valuable characters (the men and the virgin) are saved, and only the dishonoured woman is punished.

Although this story is separated from us in time and culture by more than two thousand years, it demonstrates common literary and dramatic representational strategies that use rape and sexual violence to communicate an idea or message that may have little to do with rape per se. These include the silencing of the victim’s voice, the erasure of her subjectivity, the use of her body as a site for the enactment of conflict between male protagonists, and the use of rape as a metaphor (for war , defeat, political oppression, colonization, and so on), that frequently displaces the ‘realness’ of rape as a lived, personal, embodied experience. These issues recur in the plays explored here. Sometimes, these works seek to reclaim or reinstate the victim’s subjectivity; sometimes they use rape as a metaphor, or for other dramaturgical purposes; sometimes they seek to challenge dominant cultural stereotypes to capture or interrogate the lived, bodily experience of the rape survivor.

This book examines the representation of sexual violence on the Western Anglophone stage over the past three decades, with the main focus on work performed in Britain and Ireland. The sheer numbers of plays that include rape scenes or narratives, even within a relatively narrow time-line and limited to the British and Irish stages, makes an exhaustive survey impossible; but here I draw upon examples by both male and female authors and directors, selecting work that has been widely produced and/or controversial or influential for scholarship and theatre practice. Working on the understanding that theatre is dialogic and that it speaks to its own social moment, that its process of reception and meaning-making is culturally and historically specific, and artistic choices made will tend to reflect or respond to tensions within a society, this study seeks to explore the following questions: How is rape to be understood in its relationship to the cultural representations of gender, sexuality, power and the body in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? How do theatrical and dramatic representations of sexual violence reflect the dominant metanarratives of our own cultural context, and how can they be remade to challenge those narratives? And how is sexual violence to be understood against a contemporary scholarly understanding of gender as performative and of the importance of performance in the materialization of the gendered body? Finally, how might any of these speculations and investigations meaningfully influence anti-rape activism?

Feminist Theories of Rape

Rape became an increasingly urgent subject of public debate during the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Feminists campaigned strongly on the issue of violence against women, particularly domestic abuse and rape, seeking changes in the law, increased support for women from social services, and changes in cultural attitudes and practices. Early examples of activism include the ‘Take Back the Night’ or ‘Reclaim the Night’ marches which began in the mid-1970s and which assert women’s right to occupy public space, including after dark; the foundation of the first women’s shelter by Erin Pizzey in England in 1971, and the opening of the first Rape Crisis Centre in England in 1973 and Ireland in 1979. Emerging from this backdrop, Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will was a ground-breaking study in the field and remains an important source of early second-wave anti-rape analysis. It makes the influential statement that rape is a form of systemic violence , ‘a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’, rather than an act of interpersonal violence as it had been understood (1975, 15) (italics in original). Her reading of rape, though now often critiqued, has fundamentally shaped feminist analysis and theory. By identifying rape as a systemic form of violence, Brownmiller shifts the focus from the credibility of the individual rape victim and the scrutiny of her behaviour to a structural examination of gendered power structures and relationships. Furthermore, by identifying the threat and perpetration of sexual violence as systemic, she points to the way it operates invisibly to limit women’s freedom , as is still reflected in advice given to women on how to avoid rape. By refusing a formulation whereby rape is a consequence of the actions of an individual (immoral) female or an atypical, brutal male and is instead part of the functioning of normative gender relations, Brownmiller opened new ground for feminist strategies to address shortcomings in legislation and to formulate methods to campaign against violence against women. Although she does not address male/male rape in her analysis, subsequent scholarship has argued that male/male rape operates to express and enforce power differentials between men, often by feminizing the victim (Projansky 2001; Coulthard 2010; Mardorossian 2014). In the light of Brownmiller’s argument, this is unsurprising: feminizing the victim becomes a way of identifying him as the cause of the violence , or at least as having provoked it through non-normative behaviour that undermines normative gender identities; and it reiterates the issues of structural power that underpin gender violence . In this study, two graphic depictions of male/male rape are discussed: Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain and Sarah Kane’s Blasted .

Brownmiller’s work was aligned with the feminist campaign against pornography, which produced the powerful slogan that ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’ (Morgan 1977/2014). Morgan writes, ‘So we can admit that pornography is sexist propaganda, no more and no less’, and she takes care to distinguish between pornography and ‘genuine erotic art’ (Kindle 3247–3249). The archives at the Women’s Library in London contain materials on the Campaign Against Pornography and the counter-campaigns against censorship as they unfolded.² What is perhaps most striking to a contemporary reader about the material from the 1970s and 1980s is the transformation wrought by digital technologies in terms of the ubiquity of porn, the ease of secret access to it, and the levels of violence depicted in it. In the 1970s, pornographic material was mostly in the form of still images in print magazines like Playboy or Penthouse, with some film that in the main would have been viewed in the public space of a cinema (though at-home video viewing first became available circa 1972 with the development of the VCR). An example of ‘massive exposure’ was 4 hours 48 minutes over a six-week period. The majority of the images were not violent (Baxter 1990, 37), though the archival material evidences growing anxiety about an increase in depictions of various kinds of fetish material including sado-masochism. As several commentators have pointed out, the situation changed during the 1980s and 1990s, with feminist opposition to censorship gaining momentum and a debate emerging between those who favoured censorship and those who argued that censorship rarely benefits women and minorities. This debate continues in the work of legal scholars like Clare McGlynn whose research has been very significant in the past decade for the regulation of violent pornography and revenge pornography in the United Kingdom, and in other ongoing legal debates about the status of sex workers and crimes of trafficking human beings within the sex trade.

While the Campaign Against Pornography was centrally concerned with the relationship between pornography and rape, a debate which remains unresolved, certain pornographic tropes are reflected in common myths about rape. These tropes may shape women’s—especially young women’s—understanding of their sexuality, a question that Anna Jordan explores in Freak (2014). But more troublingly, it may also influence popular understanding of female sexuality and sexual consent. Cultural beliefs about female masochism, the ‘sleeping beauty’ conception of female sexuality as passive, and the idea that female sexuality needs ‘awakening’ by force all shape commonly held attitudes to sexual violence. Bataille’s Eroticism includes extensive discussions of violence and a comparison of sexual intercourse to the sacrifice of the woman. Its emphasis on female physical vulnerability as erotic and its concomitant representation of female sexuality as helpless and masochistic is important in the reception of narratives of rape, and is a factor in the difficulty of signifying sexual violence on stage. These rape myths are reiterated in pornographic material online, in performance, and in pulp fiction. Despite the emphasis in many texts, critiques, studies and performances on empathetic engagement with the victim of sexual violence, rape remains a potentially erotic subject for representation. The exposure of the (usually female) body to the spectator’s gaze can, deliberately or otherwise, titillate, and imagery of endangered or violated women is frequently used in promotional material for film and television for this reason.

Although rape has a long history of representation in the high culture forms of visual art and theatre, the ubiquity of rape narratives in other forms of entertainment including television drama, film, video and online digital content, is important to note. Like theatre, mediatized performance represents fictional worlds in which sexual violence, or the threat of it, are common. The constancy of violence of all kinds is signified in the performances of gendered characters who threaten physical violence or who cower from it, employing everyday gestures that speak powerfully to gender roles and normative gender constructs. Simple visual sequences such as the camera following a woman down a dark alleyway indicate sexual danger while positioning the spectator in the perspective of the attacker. Actor Doon Mackichan has queried the ubiquity of rape and murder in British television drama, pointing to the graphic and often overtly titillating representation of violence against women (BBC 2015). She notes that it is now ‘de rigueur’ to start a drama series with the body of a raped and murdered woman, and that rape is increasingly incorporated into storylines in costume dramas and soap operas as well as crime dramas and thrillers. Her interviews with television critics note that the British and Irish consumer now has access to more, and more diverse, television than ever before through digital content providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime. She raises the concern that this kind of violence is becoming increasingly ‘normalized’, even as it is fetishized and eroticized for both male and female spectators. Although the rape and murder is often not explicitly depicted, but is signified by cut-away shots, fades, or straight cuts to indicate the passage of time, the body of the victim is often shown on screen, posed, naked, often for quite a long take.³ The feminist campaign against censorship clearly did not intend this outcome, but it is not the only example of women’s assertion of rights and freedoms being subverted within the marketplace, and by the persistence of social and cultural attitudes to gender and sexuality distorting or limiting progressive movements. Women’s sexual freedom is often similarly remade as the freedom to have sex (but not the freedom to abstain).

A considerable body of scholarship on rape addresses difficulties that women (and victims more generally) face in voicing their experiences, including historical-cultural reasons which attach shame to the victim rather than the aggressor, cultural beliefs about women’s credibility and sexuality, and contemporary social and cultural pressures on women to minimize sexual aggression against them. Liz Kelly and Jill Radford describe this as a social process whereby ‘women’s experiences of sexual violence are invalidated’ with resulting impacts on understanding experiences of male violence and related social policy (1996, 19). The authors identify the issue of female credibility relative to male credibility; the potential for women’s testimony to be rejected as ‘hysterical’ or for them to be accused of over-reacting, a conflict between female lived/bodily experience and the narratives available with which to express it, and the related question of the limits of representation. Their research gathers women’s experiences of verbal harassment in public spaces, unwanted touching and kerb-crawling amongst other intimidating behaviours, and they comment: ‘On one level all these women were clear that something had happened—they told their stories for that reason, including what the impacts of these encounters were. They were saying nothing happened because they know that their perceptions of something are unlikely to be validated’ (20).

Lisa Frohmann (1991) analyses two communities on the West Coast of America, to identify the bias inherent in selecting rape cases for trial. Frohmann notes that a ‘good witness’ is one whose appearance and demeanour will convince a jury. The victim’s testimony should be consistent, articulate and credible and the victim should strike prosecutors as ‘sincere’ and cooperative (213). She argues that the tendency is for prosecutors to look for holes or problems in the victim’s statements, rather than seeking reasons to believe the complainant (214). The prosecutors are trying to identify the cases with the best chance of conviction, and this relies heavily on the victim’s apparent good character. Returning to the public attitudes gathered in the UK surveys, the woman’s testimony is likely to be less consistent, and thus judged less credible, if her memory is impaired by the consumption of drugs or alcohol. The social class, level of education and race of both accuser and accused may also affect a jury’s perception of their relative credibility. This concept of the ‘good witness’ in a rape case is echoed by Susan Ehrlich (2001), as she examines the impact of stereotypical attitudes on the prosecution of rape through the US legal system. Nicola Gavey’s 2005 study Just Sex? identifies the set of (racist, sexist, class-inflected) beliefs underlying the concept of ‘real’ or credible rape accusations. Much of the emphasis in this body of work is on credibility: challenges to women’s credibility, difficulties for women in expressing their lived experiences, and limited opportunities for women’s experiences to be heard and validated.

Despite growing recognition and acceptance that rape is an act of violence, distrust of women’s speech, and particularly the belief that women lie about rape, is remarkably persistent. Surveys of social attitudes to rape repeatedly show high levels of victim blaming, and these attitudes are stable across age groups.⁴ The four most common reasons given in a survey by the UK Office of National Statistics for not reporting rape to the police were: embarrassment; did not want more humiliation; did not think that they could help; did not think that they would believe me (2015, www.​ons.​gov.​uk). These attitudes are explored in much of the literature on rape, especially cases where the assailant and the victim know each other. Joan McGregor (2005) notes that ‘in legal practice and in the minds of many in society … nonviolent non-consensual sex with someone you know … is not rape’ (1). In her examination of acquaintance rape to explore the legal determinants of rape, she details cases from the United States where the victim’s fearful compliance is interpreted as consent and the perpetrator is freed. In her conclusion she sets out proposals for criminal law reform. But central to McGregor’s argument is that ‘views about women feigning disinterest in sex and, consequently, needing to be forced into it, and about men’s inability to control their sexuality’ lead to the belief that ‘some force and overriding verbal protests [are] consistent with legitimate sex’ (220). She concludes that society and law must ‘stop treating women as if they don’t know what they want and are afraid to say it when they do’ (245). Kahn, Mathie and Torgler examine the impact of these attitudes on rape victims, finding that ‘nearly half of college-aged women who experience forced, non-consensual sexual intercourse, do not label their experience as rape’ because their ‘script’ for rape is stranger rape, and normally uses a greater level of violence than they have experienced (1994, 53). In 2003, Kahn et al. broadly replicated these findings, suggesting that little had changed. Peggy Sanday’s work on rape on campus similarly finds widespread indulgence of young men who commit rape—even gang rape—in circumstances where the victim was drunk, went voluntarily to a party or to a fraternity house, or had consensual sex with one young man before being raped by his friends. In Ireland, the 2009 study commissioned by the Rape Crisis Network identified the most common rape scenario as acquaintance rape characterized by low levels of additional violence, delayed reporting and very low levels of prosecution (Hanley et al. 2009, 360). As the researchers point out, this does not fit with the common perception of rape so the complaint is not judged to be credible.

Foucault’s writing on rape has been significant and highly provocative for feminist analyses, and is picked up again in Carine Mardorossian’s 2014 Framing the Rape Victim, though she refocuses some of the terms of his argument. In situating rape as a crime of violence rather than desire, Foucault is in sympathy with the dominant feminist analysis. However, his proposal that rape is similar to a punch in the face minimizes its impact upon the victims, and disregards the intimate exposure, the coerced physical intimacy, and the cultural consequences of shame, humiliation and ostracism often experienced by rape victims. It also disregards the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity, and the centrality of sexual orientation and experience to the formation of the subject. As Holly Henderson points out, his proposal disregards both the lived experience of rape victims and their subjective experience of ‘self-shattering’ violence , as well as the material context and conditions of gender identity in a patriarchal society (2007, 228). She argues, ‘feminist theorizing on rape … argued that rape was specifically not about sex in order to highlight the power relations and politics that are involved in rape … Thus while Foucault seeks to avoid the disciplinary effects of power, feminist theorizing attempts to bring to light the very differentials of power that structure rape’ (239). His argument has also been vigorously disputed by Monique Plaza (1981, 26), who argues that he ignores the materialization of sexual difference and the concomitant cultural meanings of rape. Similarly, Teresa de Lauretis critiques Foucault’s argument, writing that ‘to speak against sexual penalization and repression, in our society, is to uphold the sexual oppression of women, or, better, to uphold the practices and institutions that produce woman in terms of the sexual, and then oppression in terms of gender’ (1987, 37). Holly Henderson, however, criticizes this aspect of feminist rape scholarship arguing that ‘this relentless focus takes the very occurrence of rape for granted and offers limited possibility for intervention or prevention’ (2007, 228). She seeks strategies that can prevent or intervene early in the process, that work to eliminate rape rather than merely deal with the aftermath.

Germaine Greer, in her characteristically combative style, has argued that ‘It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men … The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity’ (2006, Independent on Sunday). While Greer is often provocative for the fun of starting an argument, anthropologist Christine Helliwell’s experience among the Dayak of Indonesian Borneo prompted her to reflect on Western attitudes to sexual violence. She was living in a Dayak community when a man attempted to have sex with or rape a young widow, entering her room in the middle of the night. Although the woman was angry, and afraid at the time, she responds to Helliwell’s questions with ‘Tin [Christine], it’s only a penis, she said. How can a penis hurt anyone?’ (2000, 790). Helliwell’s essay explores the Dayak conception of gender and contrasts it with the dichotomous Western model, to critique Western feminist arguments about the ‘universality’ of sexual violence and to argue that fundamentally different understandings of gender and sexuality shape very different conceptions of gender relations in different societies and cultures. Is it possible, therefore, that a missing aspect of this debate is a re-examination of the relationship between sexual integrity and physical or psychic integrity?

The bitter arguments within feminism about anti-rape activism and sexual freedom in the 1990s and early twenty-first century saw Camille Paglia arguing that feminist anti-rape activism was infantilizing young women, who needed to be vigilant, resilient and aware of the dangers of sexual freedom (1990, and subsequently). This argument was picked up by Katie Roiphe (1994), who argued that bad sexual experiences were being treated as rape by American universities in thrall to feminist politics. These studies were divisive, and characterized as being either dismissive of a real and urgent problem, or supportive of a conception of feminism that emphasized choice, with the choice represented as being between freedom and safety. More recently, Laura Kipnis (2017) addresses the range of on-campus actions developed over the decades since Roiphe’s book, including trigger warnings and prohibitions on personal staff–student relationships, which she argues unhealthily position all students as vulnerable, lacking agency , and incapable of dealing with life challenges; however, her study does not address acquaintance rape. Kristin Bumiller’s In an Abusive State (2008), explores neoliberal ideology, rape and gender politics to interrogate the relationship between feminist anti-rape activism and the neoliberal state. Bumiller argues that state intervention has profoundly limited the capacity for radical grassroots activism by women, and has in effect redefined women as victims to be protected and cared for by the (patriarchal) state. Bumiller’s work doesn’t dismiss or minimize the experiences of rape victims, but rather considers the ways in which the state has taken ownership of women’s radical action and in doing so, has reinscribed gender and racial stereotypes and limited women’s capacity for agency , both as individuals and as a class. Bumiller also explores those political discourses that universalize the issues of gender justice, critiquing approaches that see ‘the regulation of sexual violence … become integral to a wide range of forms of social control’ to the detriment of ‘personal autonomy and freedom’ (166).

In her identification of the tension within which the promise of ‘safety’ becomes the justification for ‘control’, Bumiller’s argument resonates with Elisabeth Grosz’s writing on the paradox of freedom . Grosz argues, with reference to Henri Bergson, that freedom has two potential expressions: freedom from certain kinds of oppression, and freedom to act. Bumiller’s study strongly suggests that neoliberalism promises women freedom from certain kinds of oppression but in doing so, renders them less able to act, and less confident in their ability to take action and to protect themselves. Grosz takes Bergson’s essay Time and Free Will and points to its concern with the questions of free will and determinism: ‘an ancient debate, still articulating itself with great insistence, ironically, even within contemporary feminism’ (2010, 142). She summaries the conventional conceptions of the subject, determinism and free will to point out that on both sides of this debate the subject is understood to be separate from his or her choices, presuming a subject who somehow remains essentially unchanged throughout. Bergson rejects this dichotomous approach to argue instead that the subject or being exists immersed in time, and that it is acts (rather than actors) who can be judged to be free or not. For an act to be free ‘the self alone will have been the author of it, and … it will express the whole of the self’ (Bergson, 165–166 qtd Grosz, 144). The same choice cannot be made twice because the time has changed, and the individual has changed—in part as a result of the earlier acts. Thus there is not a subject who chooses from a range of available options outside his or her self, but only the free or not acts of an individual in a material world whose actions are transformative. Those acts are only actualized in performance; they do not exist prior to that. Freedom can only characterize a process, it is not a property of an individual subject (Grosz, 151). Feminism, Grosz argues, is not about giving women more choices, but about ‘transforming the quality and activity of the subjects who choose and who make themselves through how and what they do. Freedom is not so much linked to choice … as it is to autonomy, and autonomy is linked to the ability to make (or refuse to make) activities … one’s own, that is, to integrate the activities one undertakes into one’s history, one’s becoming’ (151–152). This question of freedom remains relevant to two significant essays that address feminist responses to rape: Sharon Marcus’s 1992 essay ‘Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words’, and Carine Mardorossian’s 2002 essay ‘Towards a New Feminist Theory of Rape’, which responds to Marcus’s work. These essays address rape as a systemic form of violence and as an expression of gendered power relationships, but otherwise present different discursive positions on the operation of rape as an expression of structural power.

The ‘Rape Script’

Sharon Marcus argues that feminist discourse needs to find a language to talk about rape, and also an understanding of rape as a ‘language’. She proposes that rape can be understood in terms of a ‘script’. Using the word ‘script’ in a broad sense to encompass the range of discourses that the individual is exposed to and shaped by, Marcus argues that ‘rape as a linguistic fact asks how the violence of rape is enabled by narratives, complexes and institutions which derive their strength … from their power to structure our lives as imposing cultural scripts’ (1992, 388–389). She does not use the term ‘rape culture’,⁵ which has recently entered the everyday lexicon, but it evokes a similar sense of rape as ubiquitous in patriarchal culture, embedded in socializing myths as well as moral norms of gendered behaviour. Her argument particularly identifies discourses that demand submission and an eagerness to please on the part of women, which can impede attempts at self-defence. She argues that both victim and aggressor perform variants of traditional gender roles, which are socially scripted, and that these ‘scripts’ render up vignettes of male–female interactions and the power relationships that are often invisible beneath them. This is in opposition to Mary Hawkesworth’s argument for a feminist epistemology (1989), which critiques postmodern theory for its ‘over-insistence’ upon the subjective and situated nature of knowledge and experience to assert that ‘[r]ape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment … are not fictions or figurations that admit of the free play of signification … It would be premature to conclude from the incompleteness of the victim’s account that all other accounts … are equally valid’ (555). She continues, ‘Based on a consistent belief in and acceptance of fallibility as inescapable and consonant with life in a world of contingencies, feminists need not claim universal, ahistorical validity for their analyses’ (557).This, she argues, is the flaw in conventional epistemological analysis: that it privileges only the perspective of the male half of humanity.

Marcus rejects Hawkesworth’s reading of postmodern epistemology, arguing that ‘Feminist thinkers have asked: Whose words count in a rape and a rape trial? Whose no can never mean no? How do rape trials condone men’s misinterpretations of women’s words? How do rape trials consolidate men’s subjective accounts into objective norms of truth and deprive women’s subjective accounts of cognitive value?’ (1992, 387). In so arguing, she seeks to emphasize feminist commitment to the assertion that ‘rape is a question of language, interpretation, and subjectivity’ (387). Accusing Hawkesworth of seeing women as already raped and rapable, whose only outlet for justice is in seeking the punishment of the rapist, she states that she ‘will argue against the political efficacy of seeing rape as the fixed reality of women’s lives, against an identity politics which defines women by our violability, and for a shift of scene from rape and its aftermath to rape situations themselves and to rape prevention’ (387). It is not a matter of lived bodily experience; for the victim to speak and be understood it is necessary to transpose bodily experience into a coherent spoken testimony. Marcus sees in this the possibility to intervene prior to the rape, and to effect a politics of rape prevention that will empower women.

While Hawkesworth and Marcus occupy opposing positions on the opportunities that postmodernism offers to feminism , and particularly to anti-rape activism, there are significant overlaps in their end point. Both recognize the contingent nature of knowledge; both reject monologic conceptions of truth, and both are concerned with recognizing the material impact of gender discrimination and violence on women’s lived lives. Marcus’s concept of the ‘script’ is useful for this study because it makes explicit the range of cultural and social forces that underlie the crime of rape, including attitudes towards the other gender, assumptions about male and female sexuality, respect for women’s bodily autonomy on the part of both men and women, and so on. Yet Hawkesworth proposes something very similar when she writes that a feminist approach to epistemology can ‘preserve important insights of postmodernism and serve as a corrective to a variety of inadequate conceptions of the world’ by focusing on ‘claims about the known’ rather than ‘questions about knowers’. She continues, ‘By adopting a conception of cognition as a human practice, a critical feminist epistemology can identify, explain, and refute persistent androcentric bias within the dominant discourses without privileging a putative woman’s perspective and without appealing to problematic conceptions of the given’ (1989, 538).

Writing a decade later, Carine Mardorossian responds to Marcus’s essay. While rejecting positivist feminist politics, Mardorossian draws on the work of historian Joan Scott to problematize the notion of experience and to argue that experience must be contextualized within ‘the ideological systems and categories of its representation’ (745). She names Marcus, and Wendy Brown, as problematic theorists and in particular rejects Marcus’s concept of the ‘rape script’. Mardorossian sees this construct as a way to blame women for not effectively resisting the ‘script’, and as another process that places some or all of the blame for the rape onto the victim rather than the perpetrator, while reinforcing the political/social status of men and women: ‘A model like Marcus’s … downplays the materiality of gender and ignores that social inscriptions … do not simply evaporate because we are made aware of them’ (2002, 13). Mardorossian also reflects upon her own experience of working with rape victims, and on their very different and unpredictable responses to the experience of sexual violence . The turn to experience does not herald an uncomplicated epistemological reading but argues for a theorization of rape that problematizes, is self-reflexive, and ‘questions the terms through which reality is made intelligible’ (2002, 745). In relation to the concept of experience, Mardorossian argues that the same experience can be subjected to different explanations, and that victims’ accounts cannot easily be separated from ‘the signifying practices and discursive frameworks culture … has made available to them for making sense of their experience’ (in relation to blame, for example), while critiquing the ‘politically reactionary’ implications of academic treatment of victimization’ (2002, 747).

Marcus and Mardorossian write from opposite ends of the 1990s backlash against feminist and anti-rape activism (Camille Paglia 1990; Kotie Roiphe 1994) and Mardorossian acknowledges and responds to this. She identifies her aim in writing as to propose ‘an alternative theoretical model’ for understanding rape that ‘challenges the over-emphasis on subjectivity and interiority without falling back on the unproblematized category of experience’ (747). A recurring concern of all these theorists is the insistent identification of women as vulnerable to rape, and Mardorossian is particularly alert to this. While many of Mardorossian’s interventions into Marcus’s work are valuable, Marcus’s argument is more nuanced than Mardorossian allows. Far from offering a simplistic suggestion that women simply resist, she identifies rape as ‘one of the specific techniques which continually scripts these [gender] inequalities anew’ (1992, 391). Marcus notes that rape is not only scripted—‘it also scripts’ by acting to ‘feminize’ the woman and by imprinting upon her the ‘gender identity of feminine victim’ (1992, 391). In this, her proposal is close to Mardorossian’s argument that: ‘The feminist community needs to become more alert to the ways in which the source of women’s powerlessness is constantly located within victims themselves rather than in the institutional, physical and cultural practices that are deployed around them’ (2002, 772).

Although Hawkeworth, Marcus and Mardorossian all engage with and critique the theoretical paradigms underlying each other’s work, and although the philosophical differences in their arguments