Sexual Assault as Gendered and Genderless

(This post contains a mention of an article we aren't discussing until Friday's class. But I've already read it so I'm posting this now anyway. Just wanted to give a spoiler alert if you're reading this before Friday!)

Sexual assault can happen to anyone and be committed by anyone at any time, but there is a narrative that prevents us from seeing certain victims as victims and certain perpetrators as perpetrators when they fall outside of that narrative. The idea of the “ideal victim” was brought up in Benedet and Grant’s article on sexual assault and women with mental disabilities [sic]. The “ideal victim,” from what I understand, is a white, under-age girl whose assault cannot beyond a shadow of a doubt be questioned because for this victim, consent was not possible to give. Benedet and Grant assert that this “ideal victim of sexual assault is a fiction. No woman can meet this impossible standard, whose requirements seem only to increase in number” (152). Men can’t meet the standard at all (again, unless they are under-age, and even then it can be difficult) and neither can anyone else who falls anywhere between or outside the gender binary. This is what Jos Truit wrestles with in her article.

We’ve been talking for the past little while about whether or not it’s productive to imagine a discourse of rape that exists without gender in order to focus on its nature of violence. Ultimately we’ve all kind of come to the conclusion that we understand why we might feel compelled to do this, but that it leaves out a huge part of the crime in that it erases the indisputable fact that sexual assault is gendered.

Truit maintains that “we need to be able to hold an understanding of rape as a genderless act at the same time that we recognize it as embedded in a gendered culture of violence.” We need to do this in order not to leave any victims of sexual assault behind. But I guess I’m still left wondering how we actually are supposed to understand rape as gendered at the same time as we’re supposed to see it through a genderless lens.

Rape is a mechanism that doesn’t just work to control women. Further than that, it works to assert power and dominance over communities of people who deviate from the norm. Rape of lesbian women to try and “turn them straight,” rape of nonbinary and genderfluid people as a way to “un-queer” them, and so-on. Anyone who falls out of the gender binary and into the ocean of queer identities is a threat and I think this is where we can still hold on to the idea that rape is meant to control the categories of gender and appropriate corresponding sexualities.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I don’t really agree with Truit. I don’t think we need to understand rape as a genderless act to any capacity. It is possible, I think, to include every single sexual assault survivor even when we see rape as gendered.