“Excuse Me, But Are You Raping Me Now?” Discourse and Experience in (the Grey Areas of) Sexual Violence

Abstract

In feminist research on sexual violence and victimization, the relationship between discourse and experience has often been at the forefront of intense debates. Poststructuralist scholars have emphasized that the discourses used to name sexual violence may in fact perpetuate the very problem they set out to describe, by freezing women into powerless positions of rapability. Others have likened this sort of argument to anti-feminist trivialization of the pervasively gendered experiential reality to which such discourses refer, highlighting that women’s victimization is not a discursive problem. In this article, I seek to carve out a path that cuts through such polarization by exploring the multifaceted dialectical relationship between, on one hand, gendered discourses on sex and sexual violence and, on the other, people’s reported experiences of these phenomena and, in particular, of the “grey area” between sex and sexual violence. I do this by analysing autobiographical stories from the influential Swedish campaign #prataomdet (#talkaboutit), which emphasized the need for a new language that can do justice to people’s experiences of sexual violence and the grey area between sex and sexual violence.

Keywords:

• Continuum of sexual violence
• discourse
• experience
• grey area of sexual violence
• men’s unwanted sex
• #prataomdet
• rape script
• sexual violence
• #talkaboutit

Notes

1. All the quotes from #talkaboutit are translated from Swedish by me.

2. In October 2016 a consent-based law was proposed in an official report from the Swedish government and is presently circulating for consultation (Swedish Government’s Committee on Sexual Crime of 2014, 2016, p. 60). The report also proposed the elimination of “rape” as a legal term, precisely because its connotations are so far removed from its legal definition.

3. This focus on men is not intended to downplay the importance of studying men’s violence against women, which indeed remains an acute societal problem in a way that women’s assaults and men’s partaking in unwanted sex are not.

4. An intriguing question here is: does this mean the former act is less violent?