The subject of rape: Feminist discourses on rape and violability in contemporary France

Abstract

Rape is a tricky issue for feminists, not least because it poses the problem of how to protect women as violable embodied subjects without assuming a mind/body separation that goes against the contemporary conceptualisation of the embodied subject. This article explores this tension in feminist discourses in France in the 1970s and uses Luce Irigaray’s radical reconsideration of the embodied subject as intrinsically violable and relational in Democracy Begins Between Two to explore alternative models of rape and violability in twenty-first-century France. Analysis of recent rape testimonies, including but not exclusively those recounting the highly mediatised phenomenon of the tournantes, challenges prevailing feminist conceptions of rape ‘victims’ and of an autonomous violable subject. This article mobilises the image of the scar as configured in the rape testimonies in order to rethink (feminist) responses to rape more productively and more openly through acknowledgement of (bodily) violability as the site of potential dialogue and resistance.