ABSTRACT
Many women have talked to author about experiences that they didn’t call rape, but which author find difficult to see as just sex. They include stories of situations in which a man applied pressure that fell short of actual or threatened physical force, but which the woman felt unable to resist, as well as encounters where a man was rough and brutish, and the woman described letting sex happen because she felt unable to stop it. Within a liberal model of subjectivity in which people are rational autonomous actors, it is difficult to appreciate why women faced with pressure to have unwanted sex wouldn’t just say no. Foucault noted that disciplinary power works not only by punishing behavior that steps outside of discursively prescribed norms, but also through rewarding acts that are esteemed within a particular discourse.
