ABSTRACT
By the impossibility of rape I mean that rape is fundamentally misconstrued in this version or understanding of it, to the extent that its true nature-the violent erasure of a woman victim’s sexual subjectivity-disappears from view, and rape properly understood is regarded as an impossibility. The ‘impossibility of rape’ is moreover a structural impossibility: rape understood as the violent erasure of women’s sexual subjectivity cannot happen because it cannot feature or appear as what it truly is, within a patriarchal symbolic order which denies and undermines women’s sexual subjectivity systematically. Rape, in particular the specifi c harm of rape, is thus a blind-spot of this system. The aim of this chapter is thus to look more closely at the systemic reasons for why rape cannot appear and its damages cannot be appreciated within the culturally dominant story about rape’s impossibility. My main claim in this regard is that rape’s systemic misconstruction should be understood against the background of a symbolic order which views women’s subjectivity as borderline, impossible or at least highly ambiguous and unstable. Because women’s subjectivity as such is under suspicion and repressed, and because women’s sexual difference from men is the rubric under which women’s subjectivity is so erased, there is a deep problem about allowing women to be the subjects of their own sexuality.
