Rape and Resistance by Linda Martín Alcoff

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rape and Resistance by Linda Martín Alcoff Ellie Anderson (bio) Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018; 269 pp. Concerns about sexual harms have burst into public view in recent years, culminating in the #MeToo movement. This movement is part of a resurgence of feminism that some are calling the fourth wave. Yet discourse about rape and other sexual violations within this movement has generally accepted existing theoretical frameworks inherited from liberalism, which emphasize verbal consent and individual freedom. In Rape and Resistance, Linda Martín Alcoff argues that it is high time to reconsider these frameworks. Being legalistic in nature, verbal consent fails to do justice to the complexity of sexual encounters and sexual violations. And, given that feminist theory has for decades taken issue with the abstract ideal of individual freedom, we also need to reframe talk of violation in a way that takes a bigger picture of the formation of our individual selves within our cultures and histories. In the face of these insufficient conceptual resources, we need nothing short of a new account of sexual normativity. Rape and Resistance is a must-read that cuts to the core of contemporary feminist theory and public discourse. Feminists and anti-feminists alike have worried in light of recent events that liberalism is not up to the task of accounting for the complexity of sexual encounters, yet it has not been clear what kinds of alternative norms might take the place of liberal ones. Part of the challenge is that feminist and queer theory have for decades deflected the very idea of norms, beginning with the sexual libertarianism theorized by Gayle Rubin in the wake of the sexual revolution. Rubin, inspired by [End Page 275] Foucault’s worries about the ways that sexual norms serve disciplinary functions to normalize “deviant” individuals, advocates a tolerant approach to sexual diversity (Rubin 1984). Alcoff argues that this approach, according to which all norms around sex and oppressive and should be removed, renders sexual accountability unintelligible: accountability is unthinkable outside of norms. An absence of norms makes it impossible to register sexual violation as a harm, since the notion of harm is normative. Alcoff compellingly argues in Rape and Resistance that the current dominant discourse around sexual violation is still libertarian in its logic. For Alcoff, in contrast, sex is a normative issue, and must be considered as such in order to do justice to survivors of sexual violation. While worries about the normalizing tendencies of sexual morality are well grounded given the violent history of excluding non-normative sexualities, Alcoff points out that normativity is different from normalization (77). The conflation of the two in much recent feminist and queer theory following Rubin has led to a wholesale rejection of norms that is performatively contradictory, given that suggesting that “norms are bad” is a normative statement. Alcoff reminds us that “In reality the practice of norming, theoretical and otherwise, is simply the ubiquitous and unavoidable practice of judging” (77). Following Foucault’s late work on self-making and normativity, Alcoff offers a thin ethical account centered on the notion of self-making in relation to others. She seeks to offer “guide-ropes but without scripts” (121). For her, agents are responsible for the development of their sexual selves, but responsibility is complex and intersubjective. Additionally, rather than being an issue of power rather than sex (paceSusan Brownmiller), sexual violation for Alcoff is about sex, and sex concerns our subjectivity and will (12). Alcoff combines feminist theory with Foucauldian, hermeneutic, and phenomenological frameworks in order to challenge additional assumptions at the heart of the zeitgeist. For one, she worries that the proliferation of survivor-discourse is a form of the “confessional” speech that Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality as serving to entrench power rather than resisting it. For another, she argues that feminist theory’s critiques of experience and first-person authority should not amount to wholesale rejections of these concepts, for this would render it impossible to take sexual violation as a violation. In this respect, Alcoff’s view picks up on the spirit of Ann J. Cahill’s 2001 book...