It Can Happen to You: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management

RACHEL HALL

This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape preventions habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a womans best line of defense. I suggest changes that must be made in the anti-rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the paternalistic myth of womens vulnerability donned the neoliberal cloak of risk management. It was a move befitting the new rationality of government emerging in the United States and other postindustrial nations at the time. The new space of risk, as Robert Castel calls it, describes the takeover of the risk management mindset in social administration (Castel 1991, 281).1 Governmental solutions imagined from within the new space of risk work neither through repression nor through welfare interventionism. Rather, they shift the appropriate site for social intervention from dangerousness to risk (1991, 282). As a result, responsibility for a wide range of social, health, and environmental problems gets personalized. The method of risk assessment can be and has been applied to almost every aspect of modern life, from drug use to unwanted pregnancy, from violent crime to child maladies preventable with vaccination, and from car accidents to chemical spills. Translated into the language of risk, these wide-ranging problems become like so many accidents that the individual should try to avoid. Castels analysis of the new space of risk is useful for understanding rape prevention in the wake of the feminist antirape movement. He describes a
Hypatia vol. 19, no. 3 (Summer 2004) by Rachel Hall

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rationality of government that belongs to the larger project of neoliberalism (shrinking government in terms of social services while expanding its law and order functions) against which feminist activists in the movement must struggle. Once the notion of risk becomes autonomous from that of danger, it is possible to dissociate the practice of caring from the administration of care. In Castels words: A risk does not arise from the presence of particular precise danger embodied in a concrete individual or group. It is the effect of a combination of abstract factors which render more or less probable the occurrence of undesirable modes of behavior (1991, 287). As a result, care for a dangerous person or the individual in danger becomes preventative education for populations thought to be at risk. The new space of risk implies a new mode of surveillance that Castel names systematic pre-detection (1991, 288). It does not require the mutual presence (or even the illusion of mutual presence) of watcher and watched that was a requisite of the classic disciplinary and therapeutic techniques. In the new space of risk, Castel argues, surveillance can be practiced without contact: To intervene no longer means . . . taking as ones target an individual in order to correct, punish or care for him or her (1991, 288). Instead, one attempts to anticipate and then prevent an undesirable event such as rape. Prevention in the new space of risk plays into the realignment of agency in the postmodern era. Castel argues that the new preventive policies of the 1980s and 1990s primarily address not a subject, but factors, statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements. They deconstruct the concrete subject of intervention, and reconstruct a combination of factors liable to produce risk (1991, 288). Within this schema, a womans body, or more precisely, her sexual anatomy, becomes one risk factor among others. She is addressed by prevention discourses not exactly as less than a subject; rather, it is that her subjectivity momentarily collapses into her sexual anatomy. In other words, rape prevention, as a practice of risk assessment, encourages the metonymic treatment of women as rape space. Risk assessment works by objectivizing, absolutely, any type of difference amongst members of the population in its quest to file and profile them (Castel 1991, 295).2 Public campaigns for rape prevention actually reinforce essentialist treatments of difference. Consequently, instrumentalist approaches to rape find a new stronghold in the governmental strategy of prevention. The treatment of womens bodies as threatening because reducible to their (vulnerable) sexual anatomy revives treatments of womens sex as property that must be protected because it is capable of being trespassed upon. Sharon Marcus has criticized the use of property metaphors that construct womens sexuality as inner space and rape as both invasion of that space and theft of sexuality-as-space (1992, 399). Following from her work, J. K. Gibson-Graham claims woman is necessarily rape space in the phallocentric discourse of gender (1996, 79). Gibson-Graham

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goes on to suggest that popular understandings of rape depict women as inert spaces waiting to be invaded/taken/formed (1996, 76). Through this combination of new and old ways of imagining female sexuality, a woman becomes reducible to her sex as violable space. According to Castel, The modern ideologies of prevention are overarched by a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control over the accidental, understood as the irruption of the unpredictable. His description of this dream is particularly apt for womens safety: a vast hygienist utopia that plays alternately on fear and security (1991, 289). For women living in the age of rape prevention, it is almost as if the goal is to become physically impenetrable; it is as if what is objectionable about being a woman is her multiplication of spaces to be invaded: quite literally, she has too many orifices. Castels analysis of the new space of risk helps us to understand many aspects of rape prevention since the 1980s; but the practice of reasoning in terms of risk is not new in this case. In rape discourse, the shift from dangerousness to risk entails a move from intervention at the site of the rapist or sex offender to intervention at the site of women and children as the potential victims of sexual assault. If the rapist is the embodiment of dangerousness, then his potential victims are the embodiments of risk. This does not represent a recent development in our thinking about rape. On the contrary, rape has long been imagined in terms of womens bodies understood as risky spaces. In Western cultures, the threat of male bodies or dangerous men has always been secondary to a fascination with the risk and vulnerability embodied by women. Rather than understanding the embodiment of risk as a radically new development of the 1980s, we might approach it instead as a revised version of older understandings about the role of fear in womens lives. The familiar threat of rape long used to terrorize women, curtail their movements, and discipline their habits and behaviors becomes high tech in the 1980s. It enters into the information age, if you will. Prevention, writes Castel, in effect promotes suspicion to the dignified rank of a calculus of probabilities (1991, 288). If a marked shift occurs in the socialization of women in the 1980s and 1990s, it is that rape is rendered virtual by prevention discourse. While rape in these discourses is not exactly the always-already inevitable, it becomes something perhaps just as pernicious (Marcus 1992). Under the influence of the new space of risk, prevention discourses render rape virtual in womens lives such that no social experience seems to escape the ever-present possibility of rape.3 While its true that rape has long been treated as a defining limit of womens experience, rapes status as a virtual threat in womens lives was energized in the 1980s and 1990s by several developments: rapes increased presence in public discourse, the naming of date and acquaintance rape, rapes entrance into the ranks of hard facts (that is social phenomenon supported by statistics), and its new credibility as a phenomenon worthy of study by social scientists.4

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What is more, private security firms began to capitalize on womens fears in an unprecedented fashion. In response to mainstream acknowledgment of rapes prevalence in our culture, some organizations seized the opportunity to profit from womens fears by commodifying safety in the form of gadgets, alarms, and workshops that socialize women to be ever more fearful.5 There is another limit to the usefulness of Castels analysis for feminists working in the antirape movement. Although Castel roots the new space of risk in the sociological imagination of the nineteenth century and in the eugenics policies of the early twentieth century, his analysis does not help us to explain how rape prevention treats (or ignores) differences among women today. While rape prevention essentializes sexual difference, it fails to account for significant racial and economic differences among women. Rape prevention discourses ignore the fact that all women are not, statistically speaking, equally at risk.6 By silently ignoring race and class differences among women, prevention discourses reinvest white and middle-class women with a sense of preciosity, while ignoring the particular concerns of working-class women (for example, the fact that women who work the third shift do not have the option of staying in at night, as rape prevention policies suggest they do). At the same time, rape prevention reifies race and class-based myths about rape. Any trend in social policy toward objectivizing differences amongst women operates in tension with a long history of rape mythology in the United States that is rigidly codified in terms of race and class. The metonymic treatment of some womens bodies as rape space builds on an American tradition in which the politics of race and sexual violation are inextricably linked. Historically, the treatment of white, middle-class women as uniquely vulnerable has worked in tandem with two other fictions: the myth of the black male rapist and the stereotype of the sexually voracious black female. Articulated by Ida B. Wells (1892) in her powerful writings against lynching in the late nineteenth century, the myth of the black rapist is rooted in Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction Southern cultures (Campbell 1989, 385419). Whites terrorized black communities by falsely accusing black men of raping white women and then publicly lynching them. The cry of rape, which pleaded the necessity of revenge for assaulted white womanhood, writes Hazel Carby, attempted to place black males beyond the pale of human sympathy (1985, 269). According to Wells, black men were most often lynched not because they had actually raped a white woman but because, as men, they posed political and economic threats to white supremacy, particularly in the wake of black male suffrage (Campbell, 1989, 401402). White men used their ownership of the body of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the black male (Carby 1985, 270).7 Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall concurs that lynching served primarily to dramatize hierarchies among men, but it was carried out in the name of protecting white womanhood

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(1983, 332). As forbidden fruit, white women were repeatedly positioned as objects and never as agents of their sexuality (Hall 1983, 334). Concurrently, Hall argues, the fear and fascination of female sexuality was projected onto black women; the passionless lady arose in symbiosis with the primitively sexual slave (1983, 333). According to the Victorian cult of true womanhood, white women were chaste and sexually frigid, whereas black women were said to be sexually voracious and animalistic. This complementary ideological couplet kept both white and black women in check to white men. White womens freedoms were curtailed and the systematic rape of black women by white men was implicitly condoned (Marcus 1992, 338).8 In the United States, then, the rape script has always also been a fantasy about race and property relations. The articulated myths of the black man as rapist, the vulnerable white woman as victim, and the black woman as sexually inviolable continue to exert their influence today. This is particularly true in discursive situations where their legacy goes unacknowledged. To ignore the symbolic power of race in the rape script is to nourish present-day stereotypes by allowing them to remain part of the implicitthe fantasy material animated around what we explicitly say when we discuss rape and its prevention. The Lessons of Womens Safety Prevention discourses have been extremely successful in capturing the American imagination because they play on our popular faith in information (that is, information will save you). If it doesnt, if there is an accident, if the system breaks down, then information collapses and we are back on the ground with material violence, illness, and other tragedies. Up to that point, its all information; afterward, youre a lost cause. A veritable chasm exists between the two stages. We do not know how to connect them and so we continue to be caught in a mode of perpetual preparation. For the individual woman, this means a plethora of mixed messages. Prevention rhetoric addresses her as a conglomeration of risk factors, most notably, the risk of having/being rape space. At the same time, womens safety education programs hail her, as a modern subject, to the position of feminine vulnerability. I call this form of rape pedagogy womens safety; it supplies the information about sexual violence necessary to support rape prevention in its current form. According to Cindy Pattons analysis of the Safe-Sex campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of national pedagogy suggests that powerknowledge is not statically held in a state comprised of both brute and sublime apparatuses, but it is a procedure for bringing bodies into positions of duty and obligation that are constitutive of identity (1996, 9).9 In the case of womens safety, womens bodies are brought into a position of vulnerability that becomes constitutive of their identity as women; however, not all women are hailed to

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the position of sexual vulnerability with equal insistence. A womans social positioning shapes both her experience of rape and her treatment as a proper or improper victim. The quintessentially vulnerable woman at the heart of the conservative dream of womens safety, as well as older paternalistic models of protectionism, is specifically white and middle class. Those women who are successfully brought into a position of vulnerability become the appropriate subjects of fear, obligated to limit their mobility and social relations. Womens safety pedagogy produces popular notions of female agency in which women are simultaneously assigned an a priori victim-status and expected to avoid the inevitable all on their own. The resulting paradox is that agency is possible for women only through avoidance.10 While some publications have finally begun to admit that rape is out of the victims control, they continue to encourage women to develop strategies to reduce their chances of being raped. Often the probability of rape is invoked in such a way that the woman addressed is treated as guilty of flirting with the accident. Consider the following advertisement for a sexual assault prevention workshop held at a community college in the Southeast and conducted by a male crime prevention officer working for the city police (Edwards 1997): A woman is raped every five minutes in this country. Three out of four American women will be violently, physically, or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. These statistics speak to the need for women to learn how to lead safer and more secure lives. This informative and participatory workshop will discuss sexual issues as well as include tips on how to be safer at home, in your car, and in public. This workshop is designed for women. This is not a self-defense class. The subject position offered to women by womens safety pedagogy is that of the tough target. A (re)action hero, she is stealthy and quick with an expert awareness of her own vulnerabilities. To be a tough target, a woman need not be tough, just hard to catch. She must make herself un-easy through strict adherence to an elaborate regime of avoidance behaviors informed by statistics, probability, and fear. A disclaimer hovers below the surface of this subjectposition: Only you can save yourself. Rape, when articulated as an impossible problem, erases the question of how we might stop it. Or, rather, that question gets deflected back onto individual women as vulnerable subjects. Informational pamphlets and Public Service Announcements atomize women by encouraging each listener or reader to feel isolated and rather helpless in her fear, as well as personally threatened by the dangers being suggested. Womens safety pedagogy addresses the social body of women as a series of individual bodies responsible for protecting their own stuff. In this way, current prevention techniques privatize the womans body in order to refuse

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the responsibility for safeguarding her freedom to live, move, and socialize unharmed.11 Sexual violence statistics play a central role in womens safety pedagogy, even though what they communicate remains up for debate. Simply put, it is difficult to gauge whats happening with sexual violence in our culture by looking at rape statistics. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, serious violent crime levels have declined since 1993; however, a new survey, jointly commissioned by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute of Justice, found one in seven women is raped, lending support to claims that rape is holding steady or perhaps growing more frequent while other violent crimes decline.12 Feminists have long discussed the particular difficulty of tabulating rape statistics; namely, the fact that rape is the most underreported crime. Experts argue that the percentage of total rapes that are reported is anywhere from 16 to 37 percent.13 In addition to this, rape statistics do not factor in the influence of national and local economic trends on violent crime. Numbers may also be skewed by varying definitions of what constitutes rape and by unreliable reporting practices of police under pressure to boost a communitys image (Friedlin 2002). Considering all of the potential problems with quantitative measures of sexual violence, the compulsive citation and recitation of rape statistics in the name of womens safety ought to be challenged.14 The spectacular display of sexual violence statistics does not merely communicate the reality of rape in numbers, but performatively compounds it. Adopting a presentational style akin to the tough-love public service announcements of the 1980s, the texts of womens safety seem intent upon frightening women into facing the harsh reality of sexual violence for their own good. This mode of addresscontrary to its avowed intentnot only holds women accountable for the crimes committed against them but also positions them as waiting to be victimized. Even in those cases where womens groups recite statistics, the threat of future rapes is often folded into offers of help. Take for instance, this advertisement, sponsored by the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, appearing in the May 1997 issue of Emerge magazine: Every Two Minutes, Another Woman is Raped. Or sexually abused. Or sexually assaulted. In fact, 354,670 women a year are victims of these violent crimes. If you, or someone you know, is a victim, call RAINNthe Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network hotline. Its free. Its confidential. Its waiting to help. Given the above presentation of the facts of sexual violence, women are encouraged to fear for their own bodies and to imagine rape as a relentless force

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that merely shifts its location from one womans body to anothers. Each woman is afraid of becoming the next body in line. Current norms for the presentation of sexual violence statistics empty individual rape cases of their specificity, erase the particular stories of the women who have been raped, assimilate them to numbers accumulated, and employ them as generic models with which to threaten other women into practicing healthy caution.15 Public information and statistics on sexual violence like this are dizzying, overwhelming in fact, because they propagandize rape as pure effects. This, in turn, masks the particular contexts of certain rapesactual rapists and their very specific motivations. Instead, rape is positioned as a prediscursive flow of violence that precedes not only the victims of rape but the rapists themselves. Rape seems, therefore, not only omnipotent but also inevitable. And, so, we begin with the end. We address the problem through the bodies of women, always already victims, instead of addressing potential victimizers. As a result, each fact about sexual violence we hear is located at the site of the womanas-victims body after rape; this is true even when we speak of the prevention of future rapes. As we circle around her wounded body to discuss violence against women, she becomes the highly visible, prototypical victim and the rapist fades into thin air. In the mid-1990s, the American Medical Association referred to rape as a social virus, calling it the silent-violent epidemic: Rape is the fastest growing crime in the U.S.16 Here, rape is positioned syntactically as the self-perpetuating subject of its own acts. The utter absence of the rapist and his actions from the AMAs discussion of rape (in the form of a medical report, no less) makes rape seem like something a woman might catch if she is not careful. The language is reminiscent of outdated euphemisms for pregnancy insofar as it renders rape mysterious, emptying rape of action and agents so that it becomes purely phenomenal. Due to the fact that medical interventions take place after rape, the AMA portrays women and their bodies as the locus of trouble. Older, premodern understandings of rape and the victim also cling to medical discourse about sexual violence.17 The multiplicity of actual women who have been violated becomes proof of their primordial difference from men. It is as if the abstract figure of woman-victim holds within her feminine body the totality of all rapes committed against all women, the way that the general holds within it all possible instances of the specific and the set contains a particular number. As a result, the real body of a woman who has been sexually assaulted becomes, in retrospect, the first and most essential layer of the truth of her suffering (the body of all women), over which the actual experience of the rape and its representations are written. Womens safety pedagogy is perhaps most insidious when it borrows from womens culture a feminine address historically deployed in popular texts such as the womans film, soap operas, or womens magazines. Feminine modes of

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address offer women the fantasy of a woman-identified story world in which to imagine themselves. While these texts often feature male characters and heterosexual romance, men are introduced and allowed to move within a discursive space that remains decidedly feminine. Roland Barthes (1972) has described the womens magazine, Elle, as a gynoecium: a term that refers to the female reproductive organs of a flower; it comes from the Latin, gynaeceum, meaning womens apartments (American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition, s.v. gynoecium). Such is the world of Elle, writes Barthes, women there are always a homogeneous species, an established body jealous of its privileges, still more enamoured of the burdens that go with them. Man is never inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful; but man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist (1972, 51). Womens safety pedagogy addresses women with the following message: Remember, ladies, while the world is open to you as never before, your presence in public and semi-public spaces is a luxury. Barthess description of Elle captures the conservatism and heterosexism implicit in womens safety discourse: Man is everywhere and no where like the sky, the horizon, an authority which at once determines and limits a condition (1972, 51). Consider, for example, the popular no means no poster campaign that saturated college campuses in the 1990s. While I am deeply sympathetic with the project of teaching women that it is okay for them to say no to sex, and to expect their no to be honored, I believe that the no means no campaign is misdirected. Through its insistence on securing the meaning of no and its desire to guarantee the effects of no in the world, this slogan paradoxically highlights the limits of the power of no as a speech act. In other words, while the slogan explicitly communicates that no means no, its reason for being is the periodic performative failures and the inability of no to guarantee its own success. Ultimately the no means no campaign reassigns women to a reactionary position within the field of sexual relations generally, and within the rape script specifically. Not unlike the discursive space of womens magazines, this slogan locates womens bodies and their power to refuse sex within the all-female space of womens safety where everything exists because of him, because of the rapist. Vulnerable Subjects It is my contention in this essay that we must stop privileging the experience of rape over and against the experience of fear. When rape and womens fears are set against one another, it becomes next to impossible for us to recognize the importance of both at once. Rape demarcates its own discursive reality by seeming larger than life and therefore beyond representation. In this way, rape is rendered both the worst imaginable, and to a certain extent, unimaginable.

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Rape refuses constructivism; it is too physical, too violent, too real to be made or made up. It is beyond usa detestable practice that we accept by abjection to the extent that, in defending rape against appropriation by abstraction, we position it outside language where it becomes untouchable, repulsive, yet absolute. By the same token, we expel womens fears from the really real. Fear is marked out from the physicality and materiality of rape and thought to be less legitimate because we imagine that it exists only in womens heads. We think of fear as psychological and place it on one side of the Cartesian splitthe side regarded less tangible and therefore less real. When we imagine fear as merely psychological or imaginary, we deny the extent to which womens fears are embodied and social experiences. We also mask the actual historical processes by which women become marked as vulnerableprocesses that normalize womens fears. Hence our current intervention policy (fear and avoidance) is exempt from critique, not only because it is our only option, but also because it seems entirely appropriate. Within the universe of rape management, performances of diligent fearfulness grant some women access to good citizenship and all the rewards (psychic and social) that ensue. Its just common sense, we are told: Dont go out at night. The only problem is that this common sense is shot through with racist and classist ideologies and informed by the particular complex of paranoia and guilt born of private ownership and access to wealth in a culture that claims equal access for all, while building the wealth of a few on the exploitation of many others. Such tensions become even more acute in times such as the 1980s and today, which are characterized by the consistent redistribution of wealth upwards. Rape prevention must begin to deal openly with the relationship between economic strife and acts of rage against women. National campaigns must be accompanied by careful analyses of local circumstances. The rape script gives rise to endless reproductions of the dramatic struggle between a rapist and his victim. In its most universal and aesthetic treatments, rape is portrayed as the tragic and timeless violent dance between the sexes. Since the 1970s, the antirape movement has attempted to shift public perceptions about rape from the register of tragedy to an understanding of how utterly ordinary it is. Of course this lesson has its own drama. But the energy of that drama is misused if it sweeps us back into older sexist and paternalistic modes for dealing with rape. Our goal now should be to de-dramatize rape discourse, even as we are disturbed, and rightly so, by how ordinary rape is in our culture. To admit that rape is ordinary in the United States is depressing, and to be fair, evokes its own emotional and cognitive responses. Still, the depressing and disappointing ordinariness of rape need not support a public imaginary wherein rapes commonness is used to encourage women to live in fear of its virtual possibility. Admitting rapes ordinariness, we must hold ourselves back

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from the dramatic pull of treatments of rape as virtual and women as virtually vulnerable. Fear is appropriate and even helpful in particular situations, but it need not be perpetual or vigilant. Encouraging young women to fear rape as a form of good citizenship is not and never was, as I understand it, the goal of the antirape movement (see Berlant 1997). I want to suggest that it is possible to admit rapes ordinariness and for women to exercise a modicum of self-protection in their everyday lives without ceding rape and masculinist violence more broadly the power it currently holds in the public imaginary. Dispelling the myth of fear as responsible citizenship will also require identifying and challenging the ways in which dramatic and fearful discourses about rape reinstall race- and class-based discrimination.18 Rape Prevention Otherwise By way of conclusion, I want to offer three ways in which feminists might make rape prevention reinforce a womans right to freedom from fear and abuse, rather than teach her to fear assault. The first is to shift the site of social interventions against rape from women to men. Women are not the appropriate targets for governmental interventions against rape, as Carol Bohmer and Andrea Parrot (1993) convincingly argue. Addressing rape pedagogy to women does not stop rape; it creates a culture of fear in which women are encouraged to resign themselves to the inevitability of sexual violence. Happily, some men have joined the antirape movement. Mens groups organized to fight sexual violence are springing up on college campuses around the country.19 And in the last few years, several volumes about sexual violence have been published that are written by and for men (see Schact and Ewing 1998; May, Strikwesden, and Hopkins 1996; Buchwald, Fletcher and Roth 1993; Porter 1992; Kimmel and Mosmiller 1992; Kimmel and Messner 1989; Kimmel 1987; and Beneke 1982). Thanks to the cooperation of these men, and the continued work of women struggling to shift the address of rape prevention discourse from women to men, the central slogan of the 1990s antirape campaign, Better safe than sorry, now shares space in public consciousness with a very different message: Only men can stop rape. We should be attentive to the potential drawbacks of this approach. Organizing along gender lines should not be achieved at the loss of a nuanced understanding of how race and class play into particular scenes of sexual violence. The problem with national education campaigns is that they tend to make and then disseminate generalizable knowledge and information. As such, they risk becoming rigid, and therefore, unable to deal with the particular. Those working in rape education must know the national statistics but also be versed in the racial, economic, and gender politics of their local communities.

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Despite recent efforts to shift the target of intervention from women to men, mainstream America continues to assume that rape prevention is the responsibility of individual women. As I have tried to show here, this resistance to change is not merely due to the recalcitrance of particular forms of sexism in our culture. Antirape policies are not simply a matter of battling ideologies about how to deal with the problem of sexual violence. Rape prevention and womens safety are programs born out of a particular historical era in the art of government. As such, they reflect the broad administrative trends and techniques of the times. In order to challenge the rationality of rape prevention in the new space of risk, we have to reopen the question of what social intervention should be and do. Instead of ceding the power to define intervention to administrators caught up in the culture of risk management, feminists might practice publicly perverting and mocking that language in a manner that highlights how nonsensical it is to socialize women to stop rape. Second, we have to let go of the abstract figure of woman as victim. We cannot continue to let the imaginary figure of woman as victim bear the brunt of representing the problem of sexual violence to the American public. Her power to move us to pity and anger not only fuels public awareness of sexual assault; it gives that awareness its form. Never mind that woman-as-victim is an abstraction. Her emptiness renders her more appropriate for the task at hand: we fill her up with cultural ideals of feminine suffering, so that she comes to embody suffering as female. Woman as victim is: a fantasy, a nightmare, a cultural transfer point, a container to be filled, a signifier beneath which chains of complementary and contradictory signifieds endlessly slip. The prototypical woman-victim is hard to get rid of because she signifies in several ways at once, thereby pleasing everyone. For feminists, she symbolizes the necessity and moral bedrock of the womens movement. She signifies an entire history of injustices committed by men against women. She portrays feminine suffering as that which endures, thereby motivating us to continue our struggle. She makes us believe that the movement for womens equality is meaningful. Unfortunately, she sometimes also revives the old cultural feminist belief that women are morally superior to men. For conservatives, she functions to sanction the authority of law, the necessity of order and protection, the mythical moral clarity of an absolute distinction between good and bad men. She justifies endless interventions into womens lives, habits, routines and rightsall in the name of protecting them: Trust me, honey, its for your own good. She makes men feel needed, necessary, and important. She justifies heterosexual family and marriage, not to mention racial segregation. She makes overprotective fathers seem cute and affectionate as they limit their daughters freedom. She reinforces a belief in the natural goodness and moral purity of suffering to which Christians and Jews alike subscribe. As long as we continue to be enamored with an image of woman as victim, at the expense of acknowledging the specifics of actual rapes, we risk reproducing

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racist stereotypes of perpetrators and victims in the public imagination. In the American imaginary, the figure of woman as victim also reflects her inverse or negative image: the rapist as monster. Within a historically racist culture such as our own, the ideal figures of victim and rapist are often racially coded. Women of color have repeatedly made the point that not all women are considered equally violable. The potential woman-victim addressed by womens safety pedagogy is most often white and middle class. Inversely, the negative ideal of the rapist is most often played by a stereotypical man of color. Rape prevention continues this tradition by encouraging (white) women to be suspicious of mens appearances even as it admits that appearances sometimes lie. It is this paradoxical relationship between seeing and knowing that lends rape prevention its racist edge, rekindling older fears of men of color as suspicious persons harboring dubious intent.20 At its worst, rape prevention leads to the everyday mistreatment of men of color as menacing, intimidating, threatening, and scary (see Williams 1995 and Staples 1994). It should also be said that resistance to momentarily and strategically giving up the figure of woman as victim is caught up in feminists theoretical commitment to securing the division between rape as a material reality, on the one hand, and as a discursive reality on the other. Sexual violence, even as I place it in quotes, stubbornly refuses denaturalization because the apparent obviousness of sexual violence and the female bodies upon which it is committed are both reinforced in turn by modernitys engendering of material reality as feminine. To be real is to be marked: woman, victim, (m)other. This is one legacy of modernity that feminists have learned to subvert and celebrate; hence, our unwillingness to give it up. We must stop allowing the spectacle of womens suffering to eclipse the cultural factors at work that make rape thinkable and doable by some men. If we are to struggle against rape as a product of gender socialization more effectively, we have to acknowledge how much sense rape makes in a (hetero)sexist culture such as our own. In light of this, I suggest that some feminists working in the antirape movement momentarily and strategically focus our speech about sexual violence on rape as a cultural practice in which some men repeatedly engage. I also suggest that we intervene into speech situations where the figure of woman-as-victim is hailed through discursive abstraction, taken out of context or treated in an overly sentimental fashion. Through these practices, we may begin to shift the discursive terrain of rape prevention and womens safety pedagogy, thereby opening new possibilities for critical and practical interventions against rape. Third and most difficult, we should challenge a public mode of representation in which the performative recurrence of horror secures a sense of rapes naturalness. Here I refer to: spectacular presentations of sexual violence statistics; apocalyptic narratives of rape as a fate worse than death; and the fatalistic belief that violence inheres in sexual difference. While I wholeheartedly support the

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need for women to tell their stories and for people to learn how to listen and react to rape, I want to contest the dichotomy between victimization and agency that sensationalistic accounts of rape reinstall (Brison 2002, 12, 35). The sentimental treatment of the rape victim belongs to a particular narrative of rape as a fate worse than death. If, as Michel Foucault has argued, sex offers a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species, then we can see how rape slides into and beyond death in our discourse about it (Foucault 1978, 146). In this narrative economy, rape becomes a particularly awful crime in direct proportion to the sacralization of womens sex as precious and innocent (read: without agency). According to Pamela Haag, this economy requires an increasingly hyperbolic victimization (Haag 1996, 60). To the degree that the victim is made special by tragedy, she is at the same time distanced from other, everyday women who have and have not been victimized themselves. Likewise, the figure of the rapist is rendered more monstrous, thereby creating absolute distance between him and the everyday man, between rape and other misogynist and heterosexist practices. The performance of horror at sexual assault is most costly when it naturalizes rape, causing us to forget what we have learned from feminists; namely, that sexual violence is a cultural effect of gender relations under compulsory heterosexuality. To illustrate how this works in practice, consider the recent trend in daytime talk shows such as The Maury Povitch Show and Montel Williams, which repeatedly stage the horror of gender violence as inevitable and lamentable. In these shows, the male hosts performance of horror, shock, and empathy at the victims story eclipses the relationship between sexism and sexual violence in womens lives. The hosts exceptionalism as a sensitive listener is predicated upon the assumption that men are naturally unsympathetic, even violent, bastards. Naturalizing male violence in this manner supports the mistaken assumption that men are incapable of curbing violence and abuse. While such shows often devote an entire program to one womans story, the serial effect of repeated stories of suffering creates a wash of horror. Watching these programs, a woman is likely to feel gratitude at the hosts exceptional sensitivity and to conclude that because men are bastards, women naturally suffer the consequences. Much to feminists disappointment, the strategy of appealing to the horror of rape through representations of female suffering has not stopped men from raping women. Instead, it has naturalized the violent practices of men and the suffering of women. As Renee Heberle has noted, one of the unfortunate effects of naming sexual violence is that our incessant reiteration of its reality makes masculine violence seem omnipotent (Heberle 1996; see also Feldman 1993). Heberle acknowledges that naming, as a political strategy, issues from a past in which the truth of womens claims has been consistently denied; however, she believes that this history has led us to assume, wrongly, that the experience of womens suffering is or will be transparent to representation and social under-

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standing, and that there are only gains to be had in the articulation of that experience (1996, 67). Heberle wonders whether continued insistence upon the reality or truth of womens pain as a political strategy to authorize further action may contribute to sustaining the reality of masculinist powerrather than doing what is intuitively and understandably expected, that is, making men stop raping and beating women (1996, 68). I would argue that it is not naming, per se, that is the problem; rather, it is the affective charge that naming takes on in public representations of sexual violence that is currently causing us trouble. The performative recurrence of horror in public representations of sexual violence naturalizes rape in a manner that denies mens ability to stop raping women. If we want to challenge this effect, we should practice narrative resistance to apocalyptic portrayals of rape as a fate worse than death. We should refuse to let the horror of rape give sexual violence passage into the realm of the extradiscursive. We should challenge the notion that the (imaginary) figure of the rapist is the natural boundary that determines where women can go and what they can do. In sum, feminists working in the anti-rape movement should focus our energies on three fronts: shifting the site of social interventions against rape from women to men; letting go of the abstract figure of woman as victim; and challenging a public mode of representation in which the performative recurrence of horror secures a sense of rapes naturalness. Through careful and strategic performances of the facts of sexual violence in our activism and our everyday encounters, feminists have the power to challenge a rationality of rape prevention that continues to serve male dominance and to insist instead that rape prevention uphold a womans right to feel at home in the world and to live free from sexual abuse.

Notes
Thanks to Lawrence Grossberg, Dustin Ells Howes, D. Soyini Madison, Meeghan Morris, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, and Della Pollock for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1. Michel Foucault (1991) defines rationality of government as ways of thinking about the practice of government, including what that practice consists in and how it should be carried on. The rationality of government answers the following questions: who can govern; what is governing; and what or who is governed? In order to satisfy the rationality of government, governing practices must be thinkable and practicable both to those who practice them and to those on whom they are practiced (Gordon 1991, 3). 2. In the late 1980s, social scientists adopted the language of risk and used it to describe their statistical findings about sexual assault (Pirog-Good and Stets 1989). One researcher constructed an interactive model meant to explain how multiple factors

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(such as motivation, lack of inhibition and opportunity) interact to produce sexual aggression (Malamuth 1989, 220). This article also features an interesting attempt to diagram risk (1989, 223). 3. It is out of this atmosphere of prevention as total awareness that the womens movement responds with activist events like the 24 Hour Rape-Free Zone: a utopic refusal of rapes virtual possibility, which is no less dependent on the dream of total surveillance than prevention discourses. To its credit, the event challenges current prevention discourses insofar as it dares to spread the responsibility for keeping the zone rape-free across the social body. 4. With recent developments in DNA testing, rape and murder are becoming more scientific. Dangerous and risky bodies are breaking down into smaller traces of code. The proposed DNA database, argued for in the name of convicting more rapists, reinforces the cultural belief that acts of violence are moments of truth, which may and often do escape the actual participants in the rape and/or murder scene and must later be decoded and understood by police, doctors, and scientists. Women stand to make gains in the courts at the overall cost of losing purchase on their understandings and stories of/for specific rape events. 5. It is likely that private sector activities such as these also influenced governmental and police approaches to sexual violence. The lines between public and private are often blurred when it comes to safety ventures. It is not uncommon for womens safety workshops to be run by former or current cops who wish to earn a little extra money on the side. There is often a borrowing of materials and mutual citation across public police forces and private securities organizations. 6. The National Crime Victimization Survey found that during the period 1993 1998, black persons were violently victimized at rates significantly greater than those of whites (http://www.la.utexas.edu/research/crime_criminaljustice_research/ncvs.html). In her book, Nothing Bad Happens to Good Girls (1997), Esther Madriz expands our understanding of the differential treatment, in safety discourse, of white women and women of color beyond black and white. 7. Paternalistic protectionism takes on a global dimension when, in the guise of caring about international womens civil rights, the Bush administration uses nonWestern womens victimization as a rationale for U.S. imperialism. I am thinking specifically of how the rights of Afghani and Iraqi women were invoked in order to justify bombing both countries in the wake of September 11. 8. The Department of Justice reports that today, 8090 percent of violent crimes against women are committed by someone of the same racial background as the victim (http://www.rapetraumaservices.org/rape-sexual-assault.html). 9. Following Patton (1996), I understand womens safety as a particular example of what Michel Foucault (1991) calls governmentalities, or various modes of relating bodies, space and their administration (Patton 1996, 9). 10. The idea of rape prevention as the art of avoiding rape was present in feminist discourse from the beginning of the 1970s. However, when feminists talked about womens safety and rape prevention in the 1970s they most often did so within a larger critique of patriarchy. In other words, avoidance as a strategy unto itself was not acceptable. This would have meant a return to older, patriarchal ways of imagining womens

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safety. In the 1970s womens safety teamed avoidance strategies with self-defense and assertiveness training designed to teach women how to expand the range of practices and behaviors acceptable for their gender. Often these strategies were articulated as ways to help women challenge sex-role stereotypes. In the most recent literature published on rape prevention, many feminists are embracing this combined approach anew (McCaughey 1997; Bohmer and Parrot 1993). 11. Castel observes that risk assessment guides and assigns individuals without having to assume their custody (1991, 295). 12. In addition to the new survey by the CDCP, rape statistics come from two primary sources: The National Crime and Victimization Survey, ongoing since 1972, interviews about 80,000 persons ages 12 and older in 43,000 households twice each year about their victimization from crime; and the Uniform Crime Reports collects information on crimes and arrests reported by law enforcement authorities and the FBI. 13. I came up with this range after seeing how wildly the numbers fluctuate from one Web site to the next. 14. The FBI continues to use its outdated definition of forcible rape as the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly against her will. The Womens Law Project of Philadelphia has called for the FBI to revise its definition of rape. So has the Stop Prisoner Rape organization. 15. There are striking parallels between rape prevention and HIV prevention discourses. For instance, Lauren Berlant makes the powerful argument that since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, we have come to imagine sexuality in the shadow of deaths to be avoided (1997, 16). I argue that womens safety imagines mobility, for women, as constrained by a labyrinth of rapes to be avoided. 16. This excerpt was taken from the American Medical Associations web pages (http://www.ama-assn.org/public/releases/assault/guide.htm). 17. For a thoughtful discussion of domestic violence as at once premodern and modern, requiring analytic tools appropriate to this layering of historical periods, see Andrea Westlund (1999). 18. This goal has become increasingly difficult to achieve in the national climate created by the War on Terrorism. The United States government has become obsessed with safety and security in a manner that compromises all Americans civil liberties, but particularly those of nonwhites who look Arabic. In this way the uncontrollable threat of terror gets turned back on U.S. citizens, not unlike the way womens safety turns the threat of rape back on women. The current climate also feeds a dangerously generic anti-Arab sentiment within and beyond the United States. 19. The following campus mens groups have organized to fight sexual violence against women (the list is by no means exhaustive): Tulane Men Against Rape (TMAR), Duke Universitys Men Acting for Change (MAC); North Carolina State Universitys Rape Education and Active Leadership (REAL-Men); University of Rochesters Men Against Sexual Assault (MASA); University of Texas-Austins Men Against Sexual Assault; and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hills N C Fellas/White Ribbon Campaign. 20. At a university in the Southeast, I have witnessed the persistence of xenophobia in local womens safety campaigns mounted by the university in response to two separate

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incidents spanning the latter half of the 1990s. Both times, the university mounted poster campaigns organized around a computer-generated police sketch of the assailant. Simultaneously, the college paper ran stories about the attacks and zealously listed tips for women to follow in order to prevent themselves from being assaulted. In both cases, the wanted posters, made to help campus and local police arrest the alleged attacker, featured computer-generated images not of individual men but of a generic type: Black and Latino, respectively. The faces looked like composites that had been generated by entering a series of discrete data into a computer: medium black skin, almond shaped eyes, high cheek bones, slight jaw-line and close-shaved head, or light brown skin, wide-set eyes, broad forehead, heavy jaw-line and curly black hair. Practicing a form of neo-physiognomy, these campaigns momentarily rendered the sexuality of all local men of color suspect by association.

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