ABSTRACT
I argue in this chapter that the phenomenon of rape broadly understood (including the law against rape and professional responses to the rape victim) simultaneously assumes and undermines women’s sexual subjectivity or selfhood.1 More specifically: rape law provides a good example of how, within the late modern western symbolic, women are held accountable and responsible in ways that are irreconcilable with the extent to which their most basic (in the sense of fundamental, transcendental, or necessary) freedoms are undermined. The necessary conditions for women’s ‘consent’ to sexual intercourse as required by the application and interpretation of current rape law are not in place. Women’s sexual subjectivity is undermined and subverted in and by a rapeprone2 society, the event of rape itself and by the law against rape, to such an extent that women typically cannot function fully on the level of giving or withholding meaningful consent. The meaningful consent assumed as possible by rape law is associated with the traditional liberal notions of free will, contractualism, free negotiation, formal equality, assertiveness, competitiveness, and so on, and as such presupposes the freedoms of the subject. I argue here that we cannot take subjective freedoms for granted, and therefore need to consider more closely the level of becoming a subject, or the freedom to be a subject, when we confront the problems at the heart of current rape law.
