Extra Credit: Prof. Linda Alcoff Talk

          Professor Linda Alcoff’s talk on the “Complicated Experience of Rape” analyzed how present-day reactions and interpretations of survivor speech create harmful and deeply nuanced  divisions between rape survivor’s experiences and the interpretations and articulations of these experiences by both the survivor and the respondent. Alcoff primarily focused on the experience of sexual violation as an intangible, yet meaningful event that transcends “fleeting perceptions and subjective sensations.” Alcoff uses this definition in order to further her main argument—because survivor speech is frequently discredited due to the loaded history that governs responses to sexual violations both in the past and present, it is critical to hear and trust survivors ‘experiences in whichever way they choose to articulate it.

Survivor speech is a critical element of resistance in that it allows the survivor to articulate their own perceptions of a particular event to the best of their ability. Alcoff argues that the discrediting of this speech is what contributes to many epistemic issues surrounding the general experience of sexual violation and rape. Though Alcoff acknowledges that the term “experience” is not favored by many philosophers, she notes that while rape survivors may not be able to fully verbalize their experience, it is still meaningful nonetheless. The discrediting of these experiences stems from women’s historically low epistemic status, which manifests itself as ideological socialization that abuse is deserved or imagined. After experiencing a sexual violation, a friend of Alcoff’s coined the term “grey-rape” on account of the disconnect between her experience and the available terms through which she could articulate her experience. “Grey-rape” reflects the problem caused by inadequate descriptions of events.  The perception that they “belie sophistication” is ultimately problematic and further extends the idea that rape survivors’s accounts of their experiences are neither respected nor relevant.

At this point in her speech, Alcoff began to introduce the issue of temporality in regards to survivor speech. Using Foucalt’s theories from the History of Sexuality, Alcoff argues that the manner in which we respond to events is produced in relation to history and time. The given power knowledge regime, or heteronomy, produces the meaning of certain experiences and in turn governs how individuals perceive events that happened to them. Alcoff argues that this idea is seen in “rape scripts,” which she vaguely defines as recognizable patterns of behavior that are in accordance with an individual’s identity. The argument that feminist accounts of rape work to create “rape scripts” is seen in the way rape is portrayed as a “fate worse than death.” This apocalyptic tone reinforces the idea that a woman’s virtue is more important than her life and further victimizes victims.

Alcoff argues that without this popular portrayal of rape in feminist circles, rape survivors are more likely to go “off script,” meaning that they debase themselves from the current power knowledge regime in order to create an account that more adequately describes their experience. The initiation of unwanted and intrusive touch by the other begins the process of first-person subjectivity, and in doing so, allows the victims to become the primary authorities in the process of meaning-making. Because rape survivors are marginalized from the position of “meaning-making,” this cannot truly occur in the current epistemic atmosphere.  Ultimately, Alcoff argues, the existing current language used to discuss rape and other sexual violations are not adequate and are under “long-overdue contestation.” The experiences of survivors are critical because they are not simply fleeting emotions, but rather they are “of and in the social world.”