ABSTRACT

In Chapter One I develop the idea that law exercises authority through its ‘claim to truth’ and that it is possible to trace both a conflict and confluence of different mechanisms of power. I also raise the crucial issue of how law as a discourse disqualifies other, supposedly inferior, knowledges. In this chapter, I wish to pursue this issue of the power to disqualify other knowledges in relation to the subject of rape. I hope to reveal the mechanisms by which law consistently fails to ‘understand’ accounts of rape which do not fit with the narrowly constructed legal definition (or Truth) of rape. In this denial of women’s accounts law is not unique, but arguably it is a particularly important forum. This is because legal decisions affect many individual women, but the law also sets and resets the parameters within which rape is dealt with more generally in society. Law reflects cultural values about female sexuality, but I shall argue that it goes far beyond merely re-producing these norms. The legal form through which women’s accounts of rape are strained constitutes a very precise disqualification of women and women’s sexuality. This ‘precision’ is imparted by the legal method that is deployed during the rape trial. So, I shall argue that the rape trial distils all of the problems that feminists have identified in relation to law. Here we find the problem of legal method, the problems of the ‘maleness’ of law, the disqualification and disempowering of women, and the public celebration of all of these things.