“Everything inside me was silenced”: (Re)defining rape through visceral counterpublicity

ABSTRACT

This essay advances a theory of visceral counterpublicity through two case studies of recent high-profile rape crimes in the United States – the cases of Emily Doe and Emma Sulkowicz. Both cases garnered considerable public attention, yet neither perpetrator was convicted of rape. This essay analyzes how Doe and Sulkowicz performed public responses to these outcomes, using their bodies to argue what happened to them was indeed rape. These embodied forms constitute what I call visceral counterpublicity: modes of public engagement that (1) proceed when discursive frameworks understood through liberal subjectivity fall short; (2) expose the body's threatened boundaries to incite an affective response, or bodily intensity, in audiences; and (3) illuminate a subjugated position within the public sphere. Together, these cases call into question how mainstream publics define and discuss rape and suggest a potential shift in public opinion over rape to include visceral frameworks. This theory provides utility for rhetorical theorists and critics attempting to make sense of a range of embodied protests by drawing attention to how legal structures appear in and create larger public discourse about the body and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• embodied protest
• affect
• sexual violence
• the body

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mary Stuckey and the two anonymous readers for their generative feedback on this article. Christa Olson, Sara McKinnon, Jenell Johnson, Elisa Findlay, and Elisabeth Miller provided critical support as the essay developed.

Notes on contributor

Stephanie R. Larson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Composition and Rhetoric in the Department of English, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706, USA.

ORCID

Stephanie R. Larson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9379-5767

Notes

1 For the full statement, see Katie J. M. Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker,” BuzzFeed, June 3, 2016, Accessed April 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.ic5X39OgV#.rgr32oDQz.

2 While outcomes of both cases did not determine “rape,” the performances of Doe and Sulkowicz claim otherwise, which is why I distinguish their experiences as “rape.” In addition, I use the term “victims of rape” with caution and only for the sake of brevity, recognizing the political stakes at hand when we discursively label and construct those who have experienced rape with terms such as “victim” or “survivor.”

3 See, for example, Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Meet the College Women Who Are Starting a Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault,” New York Magazine, September 21, 2014. https://www.thecut.com/2014/09/emma-sulkowicz-campus-sexual-assault-activism.html; Roberta Smith, “In a Mattress, a Lever for Art and Political Protest,” The New York Times, September 21, 2014. https://nytimes.com/2014/09/22/arts/design/in-a-mattress-a-fulcrum-of-art-and-political-protest.html; Lindsey Bever, “‘You took away my worth’: A Sexual Assault Victim's Powerful Message to her Stanford Attacker,” The Washington Post, June 4, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/06/04/you-took-away-my-worth-a-rape-victim-delivers-powerful-message-to-a-former-stanford-swimmer/?utm_term=.b2839abe7bfb; Patricia Garcia, “Everyone Needs to Read the Stanford Rape Victim's Powerful Letter to Her Attacker,” Vogue Magazine, June 6, 2016. http://www.vogue.com/article/stanford-student-sexual-assault-victim-statement; Jasmine Aguilera, “House Members Unite to Read Stanford Rape Victim's Letter,” The New York Times, June 16, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/us/politics/congress-stanford-letter.html.

4 For the full project, see Emma Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, June 2015, Accessed April 2017. http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

5 Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is his Castle’: The Midcentury Fluoridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.

6 Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is his Castle,’” 2.

7 Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is his Castle,’” 3.

8 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

9 Because U.S. cultural and sexual norms feminize those who are penetrated by penises, the archetypal “victim” of rape is always female and those who experience rape are always feminized within legal codes.

10 “The Criminal Justice System: Statistics,” RAINN, Accessed July 19, 2017, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system.

11 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–42; Cindy L. Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere: A Feminist Critique,” Western Journal of Communication 60, no. 1 (1996): 21–39; Robert Asen, “Seeking the ‘Counter’ in Counterpublics,” Communication Theory 10, no. 4 (2000): 424–46; Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002); Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication as … Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 195–208.

12 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 128.

13 Sharon Marcus, “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 2002), 385–403; Rachel Hall, “‘It Can Happen to You’: Rape Prevention in the Age of Risk Management,” Hypatia 19, no. 3 (2004): 1–19; Nicole Khoury, “Enough Violence: The Importance of Local Action to Transnational Feminist Scholarship and Activism,” Peitho 18, no. 1 (2015): 113–39.

14 Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs 18, no. 2 (1993): 260–90; Tami Spry, “In the Absence of Word and Body: Hegemonic Implications of ‘Victim’ and ‘Survivor’ in Women's Narratives of Sexual Violence,” Women and Language 18, no. 2 (1995): 27–32; Wendy S. Hesford, “Reading Rape Stories: Material Rhetoric and the Trauma of Representation,” College English 62, no. 2 (1999): 192–221; Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart, “Rhetorically Reconfiguring Victimhood and Agency: The Violence Against Women Act's Civil Rights Clause,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6, no. 1 (2003): 97–126; Suzanne Marie Enck and Blake A. McDaniel, “Playing with Fire: Cycles of Domestic Violence in Eminem and Rihanna's ‘Love the Way You Lie,’” Communication, Culture & Critique 5, no. 4 (2012): 618–44; Amy D. Propen and Mary Lay Schuster, Rhetoric and Communication Perspectives on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault: Policy and Protocol through Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2017).

15 Picart, “Rhetorically Reconfiguring Victimhood and Agency,” 97.

16 Carrie Crenshaw, “The ‘Protection’ of ‘Woman’: A History of Legal Attitudes toward Women's Workplace Freedom,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 1 (1995): 63–82; Crenshaw, “The Normality of Man and Female Otherness: (Re)producing Patriarchal Lines of Argument in the Law and the News,” Argumentation and Advocacy 32, no. 4 (1996): 170–84; Katie L. Gibson, “Judicial Rhetoric and Women's ‘Place’: The United States Supreme Court's Darwinian Defense of Separate Spheres,” Western Journal of Communication 71, no. 2 (2007): 159–75; Angela G. Ray and Cindy Koenig Richards, “Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 375–402; A. Cheree Carlson, Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Mary Lay Schuster and Amy D. Propen, Victim Advocacy in the Courtroom: Persuasive Practices in Domestic Violence and Child Protection Cases (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2011).

17 Wendy S. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Rachel Riedner, “Lives of In-famous Women: Gender, Political Economy, Nation-State Power, and Persuasion in a Transnational Age,” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics 33, no. 3–4 (2013): 645–69; Wendy Wolters Hinshaw, “Regulating Girlhood: Protecting and Prosecuting Juvenile Violence,” JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics 33, no. 3–4 (2013): 487–506; Sara McKinnon, Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

18 See note 10.

19 Griffin, “The Essentialist Roots of the Public Sphere,” 33.

20 Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 123.

21 Daniel C. Brouwer, “ACT-ing UP in Congressional Hearings,” in Counterpublics and the State, eds. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 87–110; Gerard A. Hauser, “Prisoners of Conscience and the Counterpublic Sphere of Prison Writing: The Stones that Start the Avalanche,” in Counterpublics and the State, 35–58; Catherine Helen Palczewski, “Cyber-movements, New Social Movements, and Counterpublics,” in Counterpublics and the State, 161–86; Catherine Squires, “The Black Press and the State: Attracting Unwanted (?) Attention,” in Counterpublics and the State, 111–36; Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 4 (2003): 345–65; David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki, “The War on Terror through Arab-American Eyes: The Arab-American Press as a Rhetorical Counterpublic,” Rhetoric Review 28, no. 1 (2009): 47–65; Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 4 (2010): 611–51; Hoda Elsadda, “Arab Women Bloggers: The Emergence of Literary Counterpublics,” Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication 3, no. 3 (November 2010): 312–32; Karma R. Chávez, “Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building,” Communication Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2011): 1–18; Stine Eckert and Kalyani Chadha, “Muslim Bloggers in Germany: An Emerging Counterpublic,” Media, Culture & Society 35, no. 8 (2013): 926–42; Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics,” Journal of Communication 65, no. 6 (2015): 932–52.

22 Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,’” 357.

23 Craig R. Smith and Michael J. Hyde, “Rethinking ‘The Public’: The Role of Emotion in Being-With-Others,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77, no. 4 (1991): 446–66; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 3 (2001): 5–31; Dana L. Cloud, “Therapy, Silence, and War: Consolation and the End of Deliberation in the ‘Affected’ Public,” Poroi 2, no. 1 (2003): 125–42 doi.org/10.13008/2151-2957.1060; Jenny Rice, Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is his Castle.’”

24 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 49–84; Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004); Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

25 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 1–19.

26 Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

27 Cvetkovich, Depression, 2.

28 To approach this intricate relationship between the body and discourse, I borrow from Johnson and Debra Hawhee who prefer Ann Cvetkovich's term “feeling” found in Depression, 4.

29 Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is his Castle,’” 5.

30 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

31 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4.

32 See, for example, Michael E. Miller, “#RapeHoax Posters Plastered around Columbia University in Backlash against Alleged Rape Victim,” Washington Post, May 22, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/22/rapehoax-posters-plastered-around-columbia-university-in-backlash-against-alleged-rape-victim/?utm_term=.2490c1279463.

33 People of the State of California v. Brock Allen Turner, No. B1577162 (2015), http://documents.latimes.com/stanford-brock-turner/.

34 S.B. 5965, 114th Cong. (2015), https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2015/S5965.

35 For a broader discussion of affirmative consent laws, see Beatrice Diehl, “Affirmative Consent in Sexual Assault: Prosecutors’ Duty,” The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 28, no. 3 (2015): 503–20; Allison L. Marciniak, “The Case Against Affirmative Consent: Why the Well-Intentioned Legislation Dangerously Misses the Mark,” University of Pittsburgh Law Review 77, no. 1 (2015): 51–75; Chandler Delamater, “What ‘Yes Means Yes’ Means for New York Schools: The Positive Effects of New York's Efforts to Combat Campus Sexual Assault through Affirmative Consent,” Albany Law Review 79, no. 2 (2015–2016): 591–615; Michelle J. Anderson, “Campus Sexual Assault Adjudication and Resistance to Reform,” The Yale Law Journal 125, no. 7 (2016): 1940–2005; Wendy Adele Humphrey, “‘Let's Talk About Sex’: Legislating and Educating on the Affirmative Consent Standard,” University of San Francisco Law Review 50, no. 1 (2016): 35–74.

36 Marciniak, “The Case Against Affirmative Consent,” 61.

37 Carole Pateman, “Women and Consent,” Political Theory 8, no. 2 (1980): 149–68; Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

38 MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 180, 182.

39 Pateman, “Women and Consent,” 157.

40 Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Rape Redefined,” Harvard Law and Policy Review 10, no. 2 (2016): 439.

41 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

42 Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.’”

43 Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month,’” 347.

44 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

45 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

46 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

47 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

48 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

49 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

50 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

51 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

52 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

53 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

54 Baker, “Here Is The Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read to Her Attacker.”

55 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 425.

56 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics (Abbreviated Version),” 417.

57 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 45.

58 Butler, Precarious Life, 20.

59 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 27, emphasis in original.

60 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

61 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

62 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

63 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/, emphasis in original.

64 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

65 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

66 Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, http://www.cecinestpasunviol.com/.

67 Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, 2–3.

68 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 196.

69 Butler, Precarious Life, 29.