After Steubenville: incapacitated bodies, rape, and a theory of sexual subjectivity beyond consent

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Steubenville Ohio rape case of 2012 involved the repeated sexual assault of an incapacitated 16-year-old girl by two high school football players, sparking a considerable amount of public and legal dialogue around issues of sexual consent. Two key components that enabled this incident of sexual violence—(1) silence construed as consent and (2) the misrecognition of incapacity—also served as underlying rhetorical arguments for the legitimation of affirmative sexual consent laws. Through close textual and visual analysis of the public discourse surrounding the Steubenville rape, I demonstrate that a legal emphasis on verbal enunciation does very little to overturn the dominant norms that structure the ways in which women’s incapacitated bodies are seen, encountered, and recognized. Quite the contrary, the rhetorical framing of incapacity in the case of Steubenville both undergirds and undermines our contemporary understanding of sex and consent—what I call the “Steubenville-effect”—that defines sex as something done to a feminine subject. While the case illuminated a feminist urgency to rethink the contours of sexual consent, it also exposes affirmative consent law as that which reproduces the very norms of intelligibility it sets out to redress, especially when it comes to the erotic potential of those living with disabilities.