ABSTRACT
According to this poststructuralist claim, rape is not an inevitable outcome of sexual difference. Rather it is made possible through what Sharon Marcus refers to as “the language of rape”2 or what I have described as the “cultural scaffolding of rape”3: the dominant discourses of sex and gender that position men as normatively and naturally both sexually driven and aggressive, and women as sexually passive and vulnerable.4 For Marcus, it is the “gendered grammar of violence”5-which not only constructs women as the objects of (men’s) violence, but also as the subjects of fear-that is of critical importance in sustaining rape. Any analysis of rape or strategy for preventing rape that accepts these gendered patterns as real (in an uncomplicated sense) and inevitable is therefore brought into question. This is because such analyses are trading in representations that can be seen as helping to constitute and reinforce the very dynamics of male power and female powerlessness that makes rape possible in the fi rst place.
