Fear, feeling and embodiment

This week, in our readings and in my research for my paper, I have been thinking about the ways that our daily actions and embodied relationships with the world are impacted by gendered fears and and the ongoing threat of assault. Clearly these fears are largely due to the rape scripts that Marcus discussed in her article, which are completely entrenched in our understandings of ourselves and the world, but as Cahill illustrates, these kinds of fears can really affect our embodiments. It is interesting to think of prevention strategies, such as self-defense courses, as ways with which we can eliminate our fears, and therefore have positive affects on our subjectivities. I feel as though this is less about actually combating the physical act of rape, but rather, speaks to the power of altered embodiment as a whole. This seems to be not just about taking space in a way which renders one less seemingly vulnerable to potential perpetrators, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about enabling women to feel less vulnerable and more present in their own bodies. I think that the idea of shifting the scripted power imbalances between those who rape and those who are raped, is really meaningful. The potential of making women feel more in control through self defense, etc. seems more important to me than whether or not such strategies are very effective for protecting oneself in the moment of rape, because these embodied differences affect so many more aspects of our lives, before and after any the potential experience of assault.

These ideas also came to mind while I was at the follow-up meeting today. Sam from the Sexual Assault Centre talked to us about the importance of allowing ourselves to step back and feel when dealing with such heavy, theoretical concepts as we have been discussing in class, or when dealing with examples of rape culture in our own lives. I thought this notion of allowing oneself to engage in these kinds of topics on an emotional level, rather than one which is purely intellectual or rational was very relevant to the ideas about embodiment which I am trying to work out. Especially when these emotions are so wrapped up in the scripts which shape our understandings of rape, and are so pervasive in our culture, we sometimes need time to sift through these to take meaning from them. I think that there is a real power in learning to understand our emotional reactions in a way that doesn't necessarily comply with the scripts about rape, and that this difference in embodiment can change how we understand ourselves and the ways that we interact with our environments in really positive ways.