Tala tillbaka, tala som ”other” i domstolsnarrativ om våldtäkt

Abstract

Like a prostitute, a married woman who charges her husband with rape has a special position in defending herself against doubts about coercion and at the same time vindicating her agency. This also applies to the woman who initially agrees with an unknown man to a sexual act which turns into a rape. This article investigates how women in such positions figure in historical and legal contexts, and how they have voiced/expressed themselves in courts in relation to dominant narratives about rape. Out of a larger sample of twentythree rape cases in Swedish courts, all attracting extensive media coverage, I have selected three cases for a detailed study. The examples are not representative, but they allow for in-depth discussions. The selected cases relate to the legislation that applied just before the 1998 Crime Committee and until the 2005 Act. The cases are from the late 1990s until 2007, a period of major societal changes that also affect perceptions of gender and violence. The study examines the presence in Swedish courts of two master narratives about sexual violence that, according to feminist research, dominate in the Western world, and how female plaintiffs respond to these verbally, by silence, and by bodily expression. The first, dominant since the 1980s, is “negate or blame”, that is, rape is understood to be either “just sex”, or the woman carries the blame. The second is “rape trauma”. The analysis relates to bell hook’s book Talking back. The perspective is widened with reference to Michael Bamberg, who argues that even though one always talks within dominant narratives, elements from these are picked up and an alternative speech is improvised. In different ways, women try to navigate against the dominant narratives of negate or blame and of trauma. They may not in full meet the criteria for talking back, but they are in different ways aware that their talk and performances are restrained, which is also a kind of resistance.