ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 is concerned with organizing the experiences of rape victims into a meaningful pattern of interconnected themes, and thus with an attempt to make sense of the ‘possibility of rape’. I use for this exercise the lived experiences and struggles for meaning of a number of victims who decided to record these in writing1. My phenomenological reading of these accounts shows rape victims to be above all faced with a severe challenge to their subjective identities or their being-in-the-world-with-others. To the extent that women’s subjective sexualities are in any case systemically repressed in western metaphysics, this core damage caused by rape remains unacknowledged. The logic of rape (which is paradoxically partly a destruction and partly a denial of women’s sexual subjectivity) fi ts fairly seamlessly into a western symbolic order which refl ects general scepticism regarding women’s sexual subjectivity. The account of rape offered here with its emphasis on the disintegration of victims’ subjectivity, therefore presents an alternative to dominant understandings of rape that tend to trivialise and privatise rape, as we have seen in Chapter 2. My interpretation of a handful of fi rst person rape stories is therefore also an attempt to start to forge an alternative vocabulary for the property model and the underlying constructions of feminine sexuality as passive, in thinking about the damage of rape.
