“How Can a Woman Who Has Been Raped Be Believed?”: Andrea Dworkin, Sexual Violence and the Ethics of Belief

In June 2000, Andrea Dworkin, an American feminist activist and author, published an account of being raped in a Paris hotel room a year earlier. The story was met with widespread disbelief, including from feminist readers. This article explores the reasons for this disbelief, asking how and why narratives of rape are granted – or denied – truth status by their readers. The article argues for understanding the conferral of belief as a narrative transaction involving the actions of both narrator and reader. It posits that Dworkin was widely seen as an unreliable narrator but argues that for ideologically charged narratives such as rape narratives judgements of reliability and belief inevitably draw upon the normative standpoint of the reader. I suggest that there are opposing criteria for establishing the truth of rape narratives; a ‘factual’ or legal model, which sees rape narratives as requiring scrutiny, and an ‘experiential’ model, located within certain strands of feminist politics, which emphasises the ethical importance of believing women’s narratives. The article finishes with a consideration of the place of belief within an ethics of reading and reception of rape narratives

Theoretical Stories

A review of Clare Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Duke 2011) and Janet Halley & Andrew Parker (eds.) After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011)

Kerry Carrington, 'Feminism and Global Justice'

Review of Kerry Carrington, Feminism and Global Justice, Routledge: New York, 2014, 204 pp. (including index): 978-0415711128, $47.95 (pbk)

“How Can a Woman Who Has Been Raped Be Be-lieved?”: Andrea Dworkin, Sexual Violence and the Ethics of Belief

In June 2000, Andrea Dworkin, an American feminist activist and author, pub-lished an account of being raped in a Paris hotel room a year earlier. The story was met with widespread disbelief, including from feminist readers. This article explores the reasons for this disbelief, asking how and why narratives of rape are granted – or denied – truth status by their readers. The article argues for understanding the conferral of belief as a narrative transaction involving the actions of both narrator and reader. It posits that Dworkin was widely seen as an unreliable narrator but argues that for ideologically charged narratives such as rape narratives judgements of reliability and belief inevitably draw upon the normative standpoint of the reader. I suggest that there are opposing criteria for establishing the truth of rape narratives; a ‘factual’ or legal model, which sees rape narratives as requiring scrutiny, and an ‘experiential’ model, located within certain strands of feminist politics, which emphasises the ethical importance of believing women’s narratives. The article finishes with a consideration of the place of belief within an ethics of reading and reception of rape narratives

Speaking out, and beginning to be heard: Feminism, survivor narratives and representations of rape in the 1980s

This article challenges common conceptions of the 1980s as simply a period of ‘backlash’ for feminism. Instead it argues that remediatory cultural activism by feminists shifted discussion and understandings of rape in this decade in complex and contradictory ways. While more space was given to feminist and survivor voices, survivors continued to be denied cultural authority. In addition, a lack of intersectional awareness allowed feminist understandings of rape to be incorporated within criminal justice discourses. The article illustrates these arguments through a 1990 media event, the publication by the Des Moines Register (Iowa) of a five-day series based on the experiences of a local rape survivor, Nancy Ziegenmeyer. The series was made possible through cultural antecedents, such as actor Kelly McGillis’ public disclosure of her own rape as part of the publicity for the avowedly feminist rape film, The Accused, and academic and Democratic political figure Susan Estrich’s writing about her own rape prior to becoming the manager of Michael Dukakis’ failed 1988 election bid. Consideration of three media events help to outline the complex cultural legacy left by feminist media activism around sexual violence in this decade

Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture

This symposium invites colleagues working across the spectrum of the arts, humanities and social sciences to critically examine the emergence of what, with Katherine Angel (2021), we might call “consent culture.” In recent years discourses on consent have exploded, with medicine, bioethics, and to a lesser extent law, being the greatest contributors to academic research. In contrast, cultural discourses focus squarely on sex and technology. For media discourses, consent is that by which people must orient themselves towards sex—especially, to how sex is implicated in and in turn implicates us in power/knowledge, orienting sex to power—as well as to one another. Whereas concerns about new media technologies often emphasise the more sinister, surveillant and extractive powers of governments and corporations. That is: where sex and technology are concerned, consent operates as a space of enunciation for the ethical dilemmas of living with/in power. The new social location of consent is forcefully realised where sex and technology interact, evident everywhere from the UK’s new Online Harms Bill to the controversies of Only Fans. Such debates, predominantly moral and legislative, are barely distinguishable from feminist cultural discourses that increasingly frame sexual ethics as matters of consent. Consent culture presumes a feminist vernacular; consent is presumed to be good for women. Yet these new aesthetics of consent, that attune our senses to the politics and intricacies of (non)sexual encounter, are reworking longstanding debates and discourses on power, agency and violence, with far reaching implications. This symposium seeks to foster new and emerging scholarship that treats consent as a site of complexity requiring urgent critical attention from multidisciplinary theoretical and practitioner perspectives. Rather than specify a universal or legally obliging definition, the symposium observes transformations to the articulations of consent—to what cultures of consent are doing at this cultural conjuncture. https://contestingconsent.wordpress.com/call-for-papers

‘Somewhere. Some time. Somehow. Something has to change’: Prima Facie and the cruel optimism of feminist legal advocacy

In her play Prima Facie, playwright and lawyer Suzie Miller uses theatre to critique legal responses to sexual violence. This article thus offers an analysis of the play as both feminist theatre and feminist advocacy. We examine the rhetorical and performative strategies it deploys, arguing that they are effective because they mobilise long-standing feminist tropes which use a representative figure of the traumatised victim and the repetition of statistics to position the audience as potential victims of violence. Such strategies, however, fail to account for the complexity of sexual violence, intersectional understandings of it, or its relationship to other structural forms of harm that flow from turning to the state, as articulated by Black feminist scholars. These limitations also function in the play’s loop between an indictment of law’s failings and recuperating the law as a privileged site for responding to sexual violence. We read this tension as exemplifying the play’s enactment of a cruelly optimistic relationship to law, which is, we argue, a recurring feature in feminist cultural advocacy around sexual violence. However, we also suggest that reading the play through the words of its protagonist can open up visions of justice beyond what Carol Smart has described as the ‘siren call of law’

Bombing Gaza isn't fighting sexual violence

As the human catastrophe in Gaza deepens, Israel and its allies are mobilizing evidence of sexual violence committed by members of Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups on October 7 to justify continued military action. When the Security Council failed to pass a resolution demanding a ceasefire on December 8, Israel government spokesperson Eylon Levy tweeted: “Thank you to the United States of America for vetoing a UN Security Council resolution designed to keep Hamas’ rapist regime in power.” In the wake of its case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide Levy accused South Africa of complicity with a “rapist regime.

Sexual deviance in prison: Queering identity and intimacy in prison research

Recent years have seen increased attention in both research and policy towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) prisoners as a group with distinct needs. This has been driven by wider political recognition of LGBT rights and research suggesting that LGBT prisoners are particularly ‘vulnerable’ to bullying and abuse within prison settings. Much of this research, and the policy solutions associated with it, we argue, ignores or side-steps queer perspectives, relying instead on liberal conceptions of identity, vulnerability and, ultimately, assimilation. Just as contemporary campaigns around marriage rights see LGBT communities and individuals as fundamentally the same as the majority, rather than posing a challenge to the heteronormativity of marriage as an institution, much contemporary research and policy on LGBT prisoners sees this group as marked only by potential discrimination. We argue here instead that experiences of LGBT prisoners can be read ‘queerly’ so as to potentially challenge the rigid gender and heteronormative foundations that underlie systems of incarceration. We draw on a small-scale empirical research project around the experience of LGBT prisoners to revisit contemporary paradoxes of prisons and sexuality and to problematise understandings of identity, intimacy and deviance in the prison context