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.
I am also unsure how to define rape. I think approaching rape from an “all power as gendered” perspective is a good way to look at it, but I am curious as to how other intersections fit in this approach. Perhaps we look at sexual assault as a reinforcement of dangerous masculinities. I think if we first start to remove the conflation between sex and gender and move the conversation around just gender, we can account for more encompassing discourse around sexual assault. Of course, sexual assault is a gendered issue, but I think when defining sexual assault if we use the term “gendered” it creates a very binary connotation. As we’ve seen in the readings for this week, this connotation of “gendered” can initiate a sort of violence for those people who do not have experiences that share the common sexual assault narrative.
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