Gendering Power

This week’s readings made me question how rape and other sexual assaults should be defined. I used to think that rape was just about power, but then up until this point in our class we have talked about the dangers of eliminating gender and sex from the definition of rape. However, this week’s reading contents did make me think about the importance of power when defining these terms.

While reading Michael Munson’s blog post on sexual violence towards the Trans community, I was struck by how our construction of rape as a gendered crime “re-victimizes the millions of survivors who are not women, and those who have not been assaulted by men.” In Jos Truitt’s article she takes this notion a step further by claiming that rape is gendered but that “both the act and idea of rape are used to perpetuate a patriarchal gender hierarchy.” This plays into the idea of rape as a power dynamic, while still acknowledging the fact that it is often still entrenched in the gender. Furthermore, this definition does encapsulate a wider variety of experiences, since it allows the perpetrators and survivors of assault to be genderless. It implies instead that rape is a tool used to enforce patriarchal power, but this structure of patriarchy can take many forms. It does also still acknowledge that most perpetrators are cis-gendered men, which I think is important. I just think that we cannot separate the notions of power and control that are involved with sexual violence.

Jos Truitt also argues that “we don’t actually know how strong the gender disparity is largely because of how gendered our concept of rape is.” While I don’t think that we can separate gender completely from rape I do agree that our focus on gendering rape marginalizes a lot of survivors, and that that is dangerous. I don’t think that we can separate rape from gender when addressing violence against trans-people either, but I suppose this brings be back to how power is a gendered thing. That’s why I like the sentence in Truitt’s post about the enforcement of patriarchal hierarchy, because I think that power is inherently gendered, and that rape is inherently a sexual crime. I think that acknowledging that all power gendered may be a better way (for me at least) to try to understand how to define rape.