“Rape Is a Four-Letter Word“: Psychosis, Sexual Assault, and Abortion in the 2012 U.S. Election

Abstract

Republican candidates made headlines during the 2012 election season for their offensive statements regarding rape when defending a comprehensive ban on abortion. Using Lacan’s theory of psychosis, this article exposes unconscious rhetorical structures that may have contributed to the repetition of those gaffes even after the Republican Party advised all candidates to stop talking about rape. I argue that the repetition of controversial comments, during and after candidates’ attempts to retract their inaccurate statements, was the result of a foreclosure in the minds of some candidates. The discursive structure of their comments provides evidence that some candidates were unable to reconcile White patriarchal subjectivity with the inability to protect against rape.

Keywords:

• Rape
• abortion
• political rhetoric
• psychosis
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Catherine Palczewski, Kevin Johnson, Gina Giotta, John Kephart, Diana Bowen, Lauren Amaro, and her rhetoric students for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. She would also like to thank the reviewers for their generous feedback.

Notes

1 There is some dispute as to whether some individuals discussed in this article, such as Todd Akin, were members of the Tea Party. I use this term to clarify that the group represented here tended to be backed by the Tea Party and/or the most conservative wing (at the time) of the Republican Party.

2 Ernest Bormann’s work on group fantasizing has demonstrated how individuals unify around themes that resonate with their values. Political campaigns strategically refine these themes for deployment in the media (Bormann 399). Following Bormann’s logic, rejection of themes such as “legitimate rape” by the Republican Party should have prevented these themes from recurring in the campaign. However, Gunn has pointed to Bormann’s attachment to the self-conscious nature of rhetoric as the major flaw in the theory’s explanatory power. He argues that to avoid this “retreat into the humanistic imagination” critics should examine “fantasy and symbol [as] indirect signifiers of larger social structures, not individual motives” (Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy” 32).

3 I use the masculine pronoun here as a particular referent to the male experience of paternity, not as a universal pronoun.

4 While this analysis focuses on rape and pregnancy and is therefore necessarily focused on women victims, it is important to note that the legitimate rape myth also perpetuates assumptions that perpetrators are always men and victims are always women. This mistaken assumption persists even in prominent feminist scholarship on rape, despite the research indicating that roles are often reversed and that Black men “report higher rates of contact sexual violence” than men and women of multiple races (Curry 297–98).

5 In the 1970s and 1980s some articles suggested the trauma of rape could prevent pregnancy. However, contemporary research strongly refutes those studies (e.g., see Holmes et al.).

6 Laubenberg’s assumption concerning timing participates in another iteration of the legitimate rape myth: that in cases of “real rape” women report immediately and those who report later are lying. These comments appeared in Rivard’s statements as well as those made by Ron Paul, Trent Franks, and others, but there was not space to analyze them in detail here.