On the night of August 11, 2012, members of the Steubenville, Ohio high school football team transported an incapacitated sixteen‐year‐old girl to several end‐of‐summer parties, repeatedly and publicly violating her sexually and subjecting her to other degrading treatment along the way. Multiple postings to social media throughout the night, as well as a video recorded on a cell phone, express celebration in the face of the young woman's degradation. “They peed on her,” laughs the young man in the video, “That's how you know she's dead, because someone pissed on her … she is so raped right now” (Reference BakerBaker 2013).

In his analysis of the Steubenville case and two other gang rapes on the feminist blog, “Yes Means Yes,” Thomas MacAulay Millar describes gang rape as spectacular, “ritual degradation” (Reference MillarMillar 2013). Millar identifies three characteristics of such acts of sexual violence. First, gang rape is spectacular in the sense of both “spectator” and “spectacle”; it is performed in front of and to some extent for the benefit of onlookers and fellow participants. “They wanted to do it and celebrate it,” Millar asserts, “they wanted to put on a show … they raped her because there was an audience.” Second, gang rape is ritualistic insofar as it is collective, creating a bond among and between participants. The act of gang rape is “orchestrated by a guy who is really invested in making it happen, bringing the followers along with him down the road to depravity.” Third, gang rape degrades victims insofar as humiliation is its purpose, not a byproduct or side‐effect. “Humiliating her was the reason they raped her,” Millar writes with respect to the Steubenville case. “That was the exercise. Humiliating her was the point of the whole thing” (Reference MillarMillar 2013; original emphasis).

Michael Kimmel also acknowledges that gang rape humiliates, but he does not see humiliation as its objective. Rather, Kimmel identifies gang rape's defining characteristic as the bonding, to which Millar refers, that occurs among perpetrators. “Gang rape,” Kimmel writes, “cements the relations among men” (Reference KimmelKimmel 2008, 239). This bonding, he further argues, may be homosocial or homoerotic, with women functioning as a “vehicle” through which male intimacy generally and sexual intimacy more specifically is made possible. With respect to the former, most gang rapes at US colleges and universities are committed by “men who participate in intensive all‐male peer groups that foster rape‐supportive behaviors and attitudes” (that is, sports teams and fraternities) (237). Membership in all‐male groups, especially those that see themselves as (and are in turn generally considered by others to be) “elite,” heightens men's prestige; within this already exclusive context, gang rape participants further distinguish themselves and develop uniquely close‐knit relationships. Kimmel thus supports Millar's contention that gang rape “confers status for the men involved” (238). In terms of the latter, perpetrators of gang rape share an experience through their specifically sexual violation of the same woman. Kimmel notes, for example, the “pleasure” experienced by one gang rape participant upon “feeling the semen of his friends inside [a] woman as he raped her” (239).

Humiliation has generally been undertheorized within philosophy. Insofar as, in my view, shame and humiliation are related in important ways but are nonetheless distinct, this special issue provides an important space in which to discuss both, and to consider their points of intersection and departure. Moreover, in light of my argument that humiliation is a harm of sexual violence, making sense of its particularities is crucial to effectively countering such violence. The following essay proceeds by way of recasting the nature of and relationship among humiliation, publicity, and bonding among perpetrators of sexual violence that Millar and Kimmel describe.Footnote ¹ Fundamental to this recasting is my formulation of humiliation as a manifestation of the relationship one has to oneself. The first part of the essay begins with an overview of Michel Foucault's account of the relation of self to self and its significance, and draws upon the work of two philosophers, Avishai Margalit and Lisa Guenther, both of whom mark a distinction between humiliation and shame, in order to articulate the nature of humiliation specifically as a manifestation of the self‐relation. It then turns to feminist analyses of sexual violence and its effects in order to illustrate that humiliation is an effect not only of gang rape, but of sexual violence against women more generally.Footnote ² The second part of the essay illustrates that, given the nature and function of humiliation, neoliberal discourse generally and that of resilience more specifically reproduce the individuation and exclusion that characterize humiliation and are thus detrimental to feminist efforts toward countering sexual violence against women. I conclude by encouraging feminist anti‐sexual violence efforts that at least counter individuation and at best promote collective and inclusive solidarity.

In the lecture courses he delivered at the Collège de France between 1980 and 1984, Foucault analyzes the different modes of self‐relation that characterized ancient Greek, Hellenistic Greek and Roman, and early Christian contexts. As I explain in detail elsewhere, Foucault shows that in each of these contexts, self‐constitution, ‐relation, and ‐understanding is formed in and through relations of power defined in terms of access to truth (Reference Taylor, Falzon, O'Leary and SawickiTaylor 2013). In order to gain such access, individuals had to perform certain transformative practices, known as practices of conversion, upon themselves. They were guided through the process of self‐transformation by another person—specifically, an external authority figure possessing requisite expertise. Although the kinds of practices and the nature of the authority differed in ancient Greece and late Antiquity, the ultimate aim of the transformative process in these two contexts was the autonomy of the individual being guided through it. That is, the individual undergoing transformation subordinated himself to another, but only temporarily, and for the specific purpose of gaining access to the truth. Once the process was completed and access gained, the individual was self‐sufficient (Reference Foucault and GrosFoucault 2005).

The self‐transformation that occurs in early Christian conversion (metanoia) is distinctive in two important ways. First, it occurs by way of a break or “upheaval” within the self rather than a process (Reference Foucault and GrosFoucault 2005, 211). Second, in early Christian conversion the need for guidance is not merely temporary. This need, and therefore the subordination and accompanying obedience it necessitated, were formalized and rendered permanent by way of the practice of confession (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1980). Foucault shows that once thoughts rather than actions came to be understood as revealing the condition of the soul, and hence providing evidence of the self's break with its sinful past, verbalizing thoughts aloud to another person emerged as a necessity. Since thoughts are internal, the only way to ascertain their status (pure or impure) was to bring them out into the light: impure thoughts would resist such exposure. “Satan,” Foucault explains, “as a symbol of evil, is incompatible with the light and he resists the thoughts under which he hides until confession drives him from the dark caverns of the unconscious into the light of explicit discourse” (1980). Linking the state of the soul to the content of thoughts also established confession as a permanent practice. Since thoughts are dynamic, they must be continually (re)examined for signs of existing or encroaching impurity. The permanency of confession in turn solidifies an interconnection within the self between self‐renunciation and obedience. Salvation, construed in terms of access to (divine) truth, requires the renunciation of one's old, sinful self, and this renunciation can be ensured only through rendering oneself permanently obedient to the authority to whom one must regularly confess. “Verbalization,” Foucault contends, “is a way for … conversion, for the rupture of the self. It is a way for the conversion to develop itself and take effect. Since under the reign of Satan the human being was attached to himself, the verbalization as a movement towards God is a renunciation of Satan. It is for the same reason a renunciation of oneself” (1980).

Foucault argues that what emerges as the predominant mode of self‐relation in the modern West, subjectivity, is grounded in and therefore inherits and reproduces the interconnection of intelligibility, obedience, and self‐renunciation that characterizes the early Christian mode of self‐relation. Within a modern context, to be a subject is by definition to have access to the truth; no process of self‐transformation, and therefore no obedience to external authority, is required. What Foucault shows, however, is that authority and by extension obedience become internalized in the form of autonomy: modern subjects subordinate themselves and are in turn rendered obedient to their own rational capacities. Constituting, understanding, and relating to oneself as a rational agent in turn requires the continual renunciation of capacities deemed irrational or inconsistent with the dictates of reason (Reference Foucault and RabinowFoucault 1984, Reference Foucault and Lotringer2007a, Reference Foucault and Lotringer2007b).

Like modes of self‐relation that precede it historically, then, subjectivity is formed in and through relations of power—relations that Foucault construes specifically as normalizing. Normalization can be broadly understood as the simultaneity of enablement and constraint. Within the self‐relation of modern Western subjectivity, enablement in the form of new capacities such as prima facie access to the truth, reason, and autonomy but also and more fundamentally intelligibility itself simultaneously limits and thus constrains their expression. Insofar as the same norms through which one gains intelligibility as a subject in turn posit that intelligibility and the context from which it emerges as given and therefore fixed, potentially critical and creative capacities are merely channeled back into recreating the conditions for their possibility, and renouncing those that challenge them. Normalizing power relations, in other words, interconnect ever more tightly increased capacities with increasingly limited possibilities for their expression. Freedom for Foucault thus entails navigating power relations in ways that loosen or disrupt this interconnection; it consists of practices that refuse to uncritically accept what we are told we and the world must be; that critically analyze possibilities for becoming otherwise; and pursue those possibilities in multiple and as yet unimagined, multiple, and potentially conflicting ways (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1988, 1). Through honing and expanding critical and creative capacities, practices of freedom inhibit the coalescing of norms that can produce states of domination where conditions of existence are merely dictated and promote conditions within which alternative, potentially counter‐normalizing modes of thought and existence may be cultivated.

Given its function as a nodal point for both the proliferation and countering of normalizing power, for both reproducing ourselves and the world in their current iterations or becoming and promoting something otherwise—as a site of both domination and freedom, in other words—Foucault conceives of the relation of self to self as fundamentally ethical. Ethics for him is, however, interconnected with politics. Our self‐relation is shaped by the context in which it develops; in turn, it reverberates when we act in the world. Adept at obediently reproducing themselves in their current iterations, normalized subjects are equally well‐equipped to uncritically reproduce normalizing relations of power within society more broadly. Foucault was thus concerned that while constituting, understanding, and relating to ourselves differently is crucial for countering normalizing relations of power and promoting freedom, within a contemporary context self‐transformation might simply be impossible. “I think we may have to suspect,” he asserted in 1982, “that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself” (Reference Foucault and GrosFoucault 2005, 252).

Humiliation as I conceive of it reflects the interconnection of self‐ and other/world‐relations Foucault posits. Specifically, in my view humiliation is a particular operation of the self relative to itself that affects its relation to itself, others, and the world. I derive my conceptualization of humiliation from the work of Avishai Margalit in his book, The Decent Society (Reference MargalitMargalit 1998) and Lisa Guenther in her essay, “Resisting Agamben: The Biopolitics of Shame and Humiliation” (Reference GuentherGuenther 2011).

According to Margalit, “[t]here can be no humiliation without human beings to bring it about” (Reference MargalitMargalit 1998, 10).Footnote ³ He sees humiliation as either a direct effect of human behavior or the indirect effect of human‐created conditions of existence. Humiliating behaviors and conditions violate self‐respect, the basis of which for Margalit is freedom. Consistent with Foucault, Margalit defines freedom as the capacity to become in the future other than what one currently is. “All people,” he writes, “are capable of living dramatically differently from the way they have lived so far” (71). Humiliating behaviors and conditions deny this capacity to become otherwise specifically by treating humans as nonhuman—as not worthy of freedom—while seeing them as subhuman; by extension then, being humiliated is the experience of being treated and seen in these ways. This distinction between treating and seeing is important, because Margalit contends that humiliation requires recognition of the humanity of those it targets: “[t]he victim must be taken as someone with awareness, thus possessing implicit human worth, in order for an act of humiliation which denies his humanity to take place” (110; my emphasis). For Margalit, being seen as less than fully human and treated as if one is not human “constitutes rejection from the human commonwealth” (112).

The distinction between humiliation and shame, for Margalit, hinges on the “moral degradation” inherent in being seen as subhuman and treated as nonhuman (133). “Someone who is humiliated,” Margalit contends, “is also shamed, but not necessarily the other way around” (132). From his perspective, shame may be generated on the basis of “achievement traits”; that is, one may experience shame because of something one has done (or failed to do) (133). One is humiliated, however, solely on the basis of who one is—on the basis of “identity traits,” which Margalit refers to as “legitimate ‘belonging’ features of [one's] self‐definition” (that is, “being Irish, or Catholic”) (133). For example, referring to a writer as a “hack” is an insult that gains purchase by means of an achievement trait. Disparaging the writer's talents produces shame by “injuring” her or his “self‐esteem” (120). The insult does not, however, “provide a reason for feeling humiliated” (133). Because the writer's talents are not associated with an identity trait, her or his self‐respect and, therefore, her or his “sense of intrinsic value,” has not been injured (120).

In contrast to Margalit, for Guenther humiliation entails actually seeing another person (and thus for those who are humiliated being seen) as nonhuman. From her perspective, humiliation objectifies and thereby dehumanizes; the person who is targeted becomes “an object of scrutiny, scorn, and possible violence” (Reference GuentherGuenther 2011, 61; my emphasis). Like Margalit, Guenther sees this dehumanization “sever[ing] relations between one person or group and a larger community” (61). Such severing of relations takes the form of rejection (she uses the terminology of “exclusion”) that occurs by way of individuation, the specific nature of which, for Guenther, distinguishes humiliation from shame. Although shame also individuates, it does so “by intensifying the ambiguity of an indissoluble relation to others … what is unassumable in the feeling of shame is not an aspect of one's own being, but rather the relation to an other to whose gaze I am exposed, but whose view of myself I cannot control” (61). Rather than producing this “double relation to oneself and the Other,” humiliation involves a “double movement of subjectification and desubjectification” (61). Humiliation “singles a person out,” specifically through a process of negation. One is exposed or displayed before another or others, either “real or imagined,” one is forced to be visible, but to be so precisely “as no one or nothing” (61). The resulting radical singularity, the emphatic exclusion performed by humiliation, Guenther argues, simultaneously clarifies and strengthens the boundaries of and bonds within the community from which the humiliated individual has been expelled.

As described by Margalit and Guenther, humiliation appears to consist of conditions and behaviors that deny humanity and in doing so produce radical rejection/exclusion, as well as humiliated individuals’ experience of themselves as at least less than fully human and of being rejected/excluded from humanity on that basis. Put differently, persons may be subjected to humiliating conditions and behaviors, and those who are so subjected are not only seen but also see themselves as humiliated: they experience humiliation by internalizing dehumanizing external perspectives and treatment. Margalit describes this internalization specifically in terms of seeing oneself “through the eyes of another,” while still “respond[ing] from [one's] own point of view” (Reference MargalitMargalit 1998, 121). Guenther's language of exposure, display, and negation elucidates more precisely what this seeing and responding involves, and in doing so conveys the harm and even violence of humiliation. The question therefore emerges, and Margalit in fact raises it, as to why people would internalize and thereby adopt such a damaging conceptualization of themselves? Margalit's response reflects the Foucauldian perspective that selves are not merely self‐contained, that intelligibility is forged in and through broader (normalizing) relations of power. “The attitude of others,” Margalit writes, “is built into the very concept of the value of humans which the bearer of self‐respect is supposed to adopt with regard to herself” (125). Put differently, we constitute, understand, and relate to ourselves by means of norms and relationships that are not or are not solely of our own making and over which we have limited or in some cases no control. Because we are not distinct from them, we cannot help but internalize the perspectives and treatment of others.

Within the context of humiliation, this interconnection of self‐ and other/world‐relations means that one is exposed and displayed in a dehumanized, individuated, and radically negated state not only before others but also—and given Foucault's view of the pivotal role that the self‐relation plays vis à vis normalization perhaps most significantly—before oneself. When humiliation severs ties between the self and the community of human beings, it also, therefore, simultaneously forges a break in one's relationship to oneself. This break within the self is analogous to that which Foucault describes as grounding and in turn characterizing subjectivity as a mode of self‐relation: it posits a definitive aspect of the self that must be continually renounced. Humiliation thus compounds the self‐renunciation and obedience Foucault identifies within the normalizing relation of self to self that characterizes subjectivity. Whereas subjectivity inhibits and thus diminishes the critical and creative capacities that facilitate emancipatory self‐transformation by continually redirecting them back into its own reproduction, humiliation threatens to completely foreclose those capacities. It has the potential to fix the self in an abject relation in which it is displayed before itself merely as a negation, as not only unworthy but indeed incapable of freedom, for if one experiences oneself as unworthy of self‐transformation, why would one endeavor to transform oneself? Through diminishing our critical and creative capacities, the very resources upon which we need to draw in order to counter it by means of self‐transformation, the renunciation of self reflects and in turn promotes obedience. Given the interconnection of self‐ and other/world‐relations, a normalizing self‐relation simultaneously compromises the self's capacity to resist and counter normalizing power relations more broadly—such as the gendered power relations that condition sexual violence.

I agree with Margalit and Guenther that humiliation entails both external treatment and perspectives and their internalization. In light of the implications of internalization in proliferating and intensifying normalization, I derive from Margalit's and Guenther's work a formulation of humiliation in which internalization figures centrally. Humiliation as I conceive of it entails internalization, understood as exposure and display before oneself, of an externally generated perception of oneself as radically individuated: less than fully human and therefore unworthy of freedom and inclusion in the human community, where freedom is construed as the capacity to become other than what one currently is. In her book, Rethinking Rape, Ann Cahill illustrates how rape, as an act of sexual violence, individuates in a manner consistent with humiliation as I conceive of it. Like Foucault, Margalit, and Guenther, Cahill posits an interconnection of self‐ and other/world‐relations that she describes in terms of intersubjectivity (Reference CahillCahill 2001).Footnote ⁴ For Cahill, subjectivity is a “project” that is “undertaken … in the course of a variety of relationships … it is only in the context of others and a particular society that the self comes to be” (Reference CahillCahill 2001, 104). Cahill expands the point I made in the previous section that because we are not distinct from and, indeed, constitute, understand, and relate to ourselves in terms of external relationships, we are open to others and the world, and they are open to us: intersubjectivity, as she puts it, is characteristically reciprocal. In light of this interconnection and reciprocity, and given that our self‐relation (subjectivity for Cahill) functions as a mode of intelligibility, reciprocal intersubjectivity defines personhood.Footnote ⁵

Rape, Cahill argues, destroys the reciprocity that characterizes intersubjectivity by denying both women's capacities and their ability to exercise them.Footnote ⁶ “The actions of the rapist,” Cahill writes, “eclipse the victim's agency in a particularly sexual manner … [they render] impossible for that moment the victim's [intersubjectivity]” (132). Given that reciprocal intersubjectivity is a fundamental condition of intelligibility—of both one's self‐ and other/world‐relations—for Cahill rape constitutes an “assault on a woman's underlying conditions of being” (132). Such an assault views and treats victims as less than fully human. Rape not only denies but also, at least temporarily, negates their capacity to act at all, let alone exercise their capacity to become other than what they currently are; doing so, it inflicts serious and potentially lethal damage upon the latter. This denial, damage, and potentially permanent destruction severs the victim's other/world‐relations by destroying the reciprocity of intersubjectivity; as Cahill argues, the only active party in rape is the rapist. Given the interconnection of self‐ and other/world‐relations that intersubjective reciprocity implies, rape simultaneously severs the victim's relationship to herself (again, at least temporarily) by destroying her personhood and hence the grounds for her own intelligibility.Footnote ⁷

Internalization of this externally generated individuation is reflected in the guilt and self‐blame, or internalized victim‐blaming, that victims of sexual violence experience. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 36% of rapes, 34% of attempted rapes, and 26% of sexual assaults are reported (Reference RennisonRennison 2002). Common reasons victims cite for not reporting include fear of not being believed, fear of the perpetrator, lack of trust in the criminal justice system, guilt or self‐blame, and feelings of shame and embarrassment. All of these, in different ways and to varying degrees, reflect the external view of women as less than fully human for, presumably, one who sees oneself as fully human will see oneself as unambiguously injurable and deserving of justice. It is noteworthy that internalized victim‐blaming appears to be more acute in women who were impaired (that is, intoxicated) and, especially, incapacitated (that is, unconscious) when they were raped or assaulted—women, in other words, who are seen as having knowingly engaged in, as I discuss below, unfeminine behavior that put them at risk. In addition to engaging in the highest levels of self‐blame, incapacitated victims are particularly susceptible to feelings of stigmatization that are unrelated to the external blame they actually experience. In other words, consistent with humiliation, it is the “victim's own perception of her experience” that generates “self‐blame and … feelings of stigma” (Reference Grubb and TurnerGrubb and Turner 2012).

The clarification and augmentation of community boundaries and bonds that Guenther associates with the individuation of humiliation also occurs as an effect of sexual violence. Kimmel's work, as noted at the outset of this essay, illustrates this clarification and augmentation in cases of gang rape and, indeed, it was apparent in the Steubenville case. The victim was portrayed, both by friends who were with her on the night she was raped, and more generally, as sexually promiscuous and therefore a willing participant; following the verdict her safety and life were threatened (Reference OppelOppel 2013; Reference PoladianPoladian 2013). The town of Steubenville, by contrast, closed ranks around the perpetrators, Trent Mays and Mal'ik Richmond (Reference Macur and SchweberMacur and Schweber 2012). Responses within the national media also portrayed the two as sympathetic figures, young men whose lives had been ruined (Reference WempleWemple 2013).Footnote ⁸ Several recent cases of single‐perpetrator rape and sexual assault that have received wide media coverage also illustrate the radical individuation of victims and shoring up of communities that humiliation produces. To take one example, Erica Kinsman accused Jameis Winston of rape during her freshman year at Florida State University. Kinsman subsequently left FSU after her case against him became public and the harassment she was experiencing became intolerable (Reference BogdanichBogdanich 2014; Reference AxonAxon 2016). Winston remained at the university. He was permitted to continue playing football, awarded for his performance and heralded in the media as a star, and drafted into the National Football League before his senior year (Reference HaleHale 2013). Consistent with my account of humiliation, I see the external bonding among perpetrators in gang rapes that occurs through public exposure and display of the victim as secondary to and contingent upon the internal exposure and display of the victim to herself. The radical individuation of the victim, the severing of her relationship to critical and creative capacities that enable resistance, in essence shores up external relationships—primarily those of the perpetrators who bond through violating the victim, but also those of the communities who close ranks around them.

If, as I have argued, sexual violence generally and not merely gang rape humiliates, and if humiliation hinges on the radical individuation of victims of sexual violence, then effective feminist strategies for countering sexual violence must counter individuation. Prevailing neoliberal ways of framing sexual violence, however, exacerbate individuation. Lise Gotell argues that feminist accounts that frame sexual violence in terms of gendered power relations present it as a social problem that must be addressed through public policy. These feminist accounts have, however, been “replaced with de‐gendered and individual policy frameworks,” a shift that, according to Gotell, reflects neoliberal emphasis on “abstract risk and individuated … responsibility” (Reference Gotell and SheehyGotell 2011, 9).Footnote ⁹ She shows that the tension between the ostensibly gender‐neutral discourse of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the gendered nature of sexual violence, on the other, simultaneously and paradoxically masks the gendered nature of sexual violence while at the same time constructing women qua women as beings who are both sexually vulnerable and responsible for their own protection. Neoliberal risk management technologies that target individual women's behavior, rather than the gendered power relations that produce sexual violence, construct rape “as a personal problem that each woman herself must solve by limiting her own mobility” (15).

Similarly, Rachel Hall argues that the neoliberal substitution of risk for dangerousness “entails a move from intervention at the site of the rapist … to intervention at the site of women … as the potential victims of sexual assault” (Reference HallHall 2004, 3). At the same time that she acknowledges that feminine embodiment has long been characterized as vulnerable and therefore “at risk,” Hall points out that recent manifestations of this characterization are unique to neoliberalism: the emergence of date and acquaintance rape as distinctive and identifiable phenomena; the emergence of rape as a topic of public interest; the emergence of rape as a subject of study within the social sciences; the compiling of rape statistics by state as well as private entities; and the exploitation of women's fears surrounding sexual violence by private security firms as a “market” to be developed (3–5). Like Gotell, Hall concludes that “women are simultaneously assigned an a priori victim‐status and expected to avoid the inevitable all on their own” (6).

The neoliberal framing of sexual violence described by Gotell and Hall produces “bad victims” who do not adhere to prevailing norms of “sexual safekeeping,” and “good victims” who practice a kind of “fearful femininity” characterized by self‐regulation. Bad victims are duly and overtly “blamed for the violence they experience” (Reference Gotell and SheehyGotell 2011, 15). According to Amy Grubb and Emily Turner, studies have found that women who violate gender norms (who do not, in other words, appropriately self‐regulate) are in turn more likely to be blamed if they are sexually assaulted. They may be seen as receiving deserved punishment for their unfeminine behavior, and the actions of their attackers may be mitigated.Footnote ¹⁰ (That excessive consumption of alcohol is viewed as unfeminine behavior is noteworthy in light of my earlier observations about heightened humiliation in impaired and incapacitated victims.)

Victim blaming in the case of good victims is more subtle. It manifests primarily in the air of inevitability that surrounds sexual violence against women. Such an attitude is apparent, for example, in the fact that although specific acts of sexual violence may produce a level of public outrage (as was the case with both the Steubenville and Florida State rapes) they nonetheless fail to produce surprise. A sense of inevitability relative to some phenomenon (such as an event or the conditions of one's existence) tends to produce complacency or at least resignation in the face of it. Sexual violence against women is prevalent, yet the neoliberal emphasis on the need for women to monitor and restrict their behavior and actions in order to protect themselves leaves unanalyzed and therefore unchallenged the behavior and actions of perpetrators, as well as the conditions that give rise to those behaviors and actions (Reference RennisonRennison 2002).Footnote ¹¹ Framing sexual violence as (individual) women's problem thus reflects at best resignation to and at worst acceptance or even support of its inevitability.Footnote ¹² It is, in other words, to frame the prevalence of such violence as a normal or natural, albeit perhaps unfortunate, aspect of human existence or “human nature,” as opposed to an effect of human‐generated sociopolitical conditions. As Hall puts it, framing rape as an “impossible problem” effectively “deflects” the question of how to counter it back “onto individual women as vulnerable subjects” (Reference HallHall 2004, 6).

Given that the prevailing framework of neoliberalism holds all victims of sexual violence, whether bad or good, individually responsible for protecting themselves against risk and therefore for their own violation if they fail to do so, it should come as no surprise that the prevailing discourse concerning how to respond to risk within a neoliberal context is likewise individuating. According to Marc Neocleous, recent heightened appeals to resilience in the US are apparent within and to some extent an effect of concerns about state security resulting from the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Whenever one hears the call [for] security,” Neocleous writes, “one now also finds the demand of resilience,” where resilience is construed as “the capacity of a system to return to a previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or trauma” (Reference NeocleousNeocleous 2013, 3). Within the current neoliberal context, Neocleous argues, systemic resilience is interconnected with personal resilience. Faced with perpetual threat, risk, and instability, “[g]ood subjects” are nonetheless able to “survive and thrive,” to “overcome life's hurdles”: resilience is the “new technology of the self” (5). Robin James echoes Neocleous's argument that within a neoliberal context the aim is not to avoid but to manage risk. At the systemic level, she notes, “instead of expending resources to avoid damage, resilience discourse recycles damage into more resources” (Reference JamesJames 2015, 7). At the individual level, resilience discourse proceeds along the following lines: “damage is incited and made more manifest;” “damage is spectacularly overcome, and that overcoming is broadcast and/or shared;” and “the person who has overcome is rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense” precisely because individual resilience “boosts society's resilience” (7).

As Neocleous emphasizes, the capacity for “bouncing back” that resilience posits is inherent to the system or individual itself. Just as systems can become self‐sustaining, so can individuals, with proper training, learn how to effectively deploy their inner resources of resilience. In an article defending the concept, Maria Konnikova appeals to research that has been conducted into the nature of resilience. She describes how US developmental psychologist Norman Garmezy, credited with being the first clinician to analyze resilience, studied public school children ‘“who were adaptive and good citizens in the school, and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds”’ (Reference KonnikovaKonnikova 2016). A later longitudinal study by developmental psychologist Emmy Werner extended Garmezy's work. Through tracking 698 individuals from birth into their thirties, Werner identified as resilient those individuals who, beginning early in life, “tended to ‘meet the world on their own terms’;” were “autonomous and independent”; “sought out new experiences”; and had a ‘“positive social orientation”’ (Reference KonnikovaKonnikova 2016). Perhaps most important from Werner's perspective, these individuals possessed ‘“an internal locus of control”’: they believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements; they saw themselves as the “orchestrators of their own fates” (Reference KonnikovaKonnikova 2016). In the same vein, Konnikova notes, clinical psychologist George Bonanno, who has been studying resilience for twenty‐five years, posits that “[e]vents are not traumatic until we perceive them as traumatic” (Reference KonnikovaKonnikova 2016).

The explicit message of this work on resilience is that all persons possess the resources necessary for responding to and managing the omnipresent risk that ostensibly characterizes contemporary Western societies; Konnikova concludes her article by asserting that “resilience is … a set of skills that can be taught” (Reference KonnikovaKonnikova 2016). The more implicit message is that insofar as these resources are both inherent and individual, anyone who fails to acquire such skills and thus experiences “damage” and fails to bounce back, to overcome, and ultimately to thrive, is individually responsible for that failure. Such people have perhaps not undergone sufficient training, have not taken the time to develop their resiliency, or have elected to view damaging events in a merely negative light; alternatively, perhaps, they simply lack the internal ingenuity, strength, or willpower to effectively actualize their resiliency. As David Harper and Ewen Speed put it, “distress” is “link[ed] with internal deficits and recovery with internal strengths” (Reference Harper and SpeedHarper and Speed 2012, 14).

The neoliberal notion of resilience is normalizing as well as individuating. Exercising resilience may indeed facilitate the development of new resources or capacities needed to effectively manage risk but, as James points out, it simply “recycles” those capacities back into the existing system rather than channeling them in new directions (Reference JamesJames 2015). Consistent with neoliberal resilience discourse, damage or harm (and hence the conditions for their possibility) are secondary to and effectively masked by potential overcoming of that damage or harm. At the same time, since neoliberalism posits risk as both inevitable and perpetual, this emphasis on overcoming implicitly and continually reasserts, and in fact makes central, the damage or harm that necessitates the overcoming. The individuating and normalizing effects of resilience converge in the assertion of survivorship in the wake of a damaging or harmful event. Survivors are construed as individuals who have successfully changed their attitudes and behaviors; they have refused to perceive a traumatic event as merely traumatic. Manifesting the progression James describes as characterizing resilience—making damage and its overcoming manifest and rewarding that overcoming—these individuals enact a kind of “victim to survivor conversion.”Footnote ¹³ Yet, paradoxically, survivors implicitly identify themselves in terms of harm and therefore must perpetually overcome the harm they have experienced; the new capacities they acquire through that overcoming are simply recycled back into maintaining the harm and, although it is not recognized, the broader systemic social conditions that produced the harm in the first place.

Viewing survivorship in this way clearly poses problems in the case of women who have experienced sexual violence, insofar as asserting oneself as a survivor in the wake of such violence has historically been and indeed continues to be posited as well as experienced as empowering. In light of what I have presented here, it's my view that survivor identity may function as a first step that releases women from the externally generated, static self‐relation of dehumanization, abjection, and negation that the humiliation of sexual violence imposes. Yet if, as I have argued, freedom is characterized by the capacity to become other than what one currently is, critical engagement with rather than uncritical acceptance of that identity is crucial. As a manifestation of resilience, survivorship functions to extend and deepen the individuation imposed by humiliation; it effectively recycles and therefore reasserts the harm of sexual violence through valorizing the overcoming of that harm, and in doing so it encourages victims to understand and relate to themselves precisely in terms of what it is they are ostensibly resiliently overcoming. Survivorship is thus ultimately a normalizing mode of self‐relation: it keeps central to who victims are a vision of themselves as unworthy of freedom, of becoming anything other than the abject selves they currently are. It thus seriously compromises critical and creative capacities that facilitate not “overcoming” but actually becoming otherwise. As an interminable repetition of humiliation, resilient survivorship provides intelligibility at the expense of freedom, and is all the more insidious through masking its normalizing function.

Critiques of resilience can produce disillusionment and frustration in feminist readers. Resilience is an attractive idea, implying as it does that each of us possesses the necessary resources, if only we can effectively tap into them, for combating and overcoming challenges, disappointments, and loss. Given the myriad ways in which their capacities (embodied, intellectual, psychic) are devalued, inhibited, exploited, and appropriated in societies characterized by gendered power relations, such a notion of resilience may hold particular appeal for women. I have in many ways identified myself as a resilient individual who has overcome, for example, gender oppression and the institutional sexism of academia. In spite of obstacles, I have not left philosophy; I have stayed and have achieved some level of professional “success” (tenure‐track position, full professorship, decent record of publication). Seeing myself as resilient, as a “feminist philosopher survivor,” has felt empowering.

In the case of women who have experienced sexual violence, the narrative of resilience is likely to be even more compelling. As I have shown, the experience of humiliation cuts people off from themselves and others. It therefore greatly inhibits or even renders impossible the meaningful expression of one's experience, an experience that borders on the kind of singularity Hannah Arendt associates with concentration camp inmates who survived to be liberated: one finds oneself in the position of trying to convey by way of concepts that were developed within and therefore reflect one reality a different reality in which those concepts do not apply (Reference ArendtArendt 1973, 437–59). If, as Cahill argues, by producing a break in women's relationship to themselves, rape threatens the fundamental conditions of their existence, then victims of sexual violence find themselves in a position of trying to articulate that threat using concepts that assert a sense of stable and coherent subjectivity precisely in order to deny its possibility. It's no wonder, then, as Susan Brison points out, that people (including close friends and family members) often just “don't get it”—don't know what to say and are deeply uncomfortable—if women attempt to talk to them about being raped or sexually assaulted (Reference BrisonBrison 2002). Small wonder, also, that women who do so may find the experience deeply unsatisfying or even humiliating in its own right. To victims of sexual violence, the discourse of resilience holds out the possibility of being able to tap into one's own internal resources in order to “recover” without having to deal with other people. This attitude, while understandable, ultimately functions to exacerbate the individuation produced by humiliation and furthered by neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility and resilience.

Neocleous argues, “resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance … [it] demands that we use our actions to accommodate ourselves to capital and state, and the secure future of both, rather than to resist them” (Reference NeocleousNeocleous 2013, 7). Sexual violence humiliates, and humiliation individuates; it undermines the very relationships—those to oneself and others—through which emancipatory critical and creative capacities are generated and therefore exercised. Humiliation recycles the capacities of victims back into maintaining the social conditions for its possibility; it promotes acquiescence to those conditions by encouraging women to relate to themselves in ways that prohibit the meaningful recognition of the humiliation of rape and sexual assault: women constitute themselves in terms of a violation for which they are held responsible, expected to overcome, and blamed if they fail.

Within a neoliberal context where individuation, exclusion, humiliation, and normalization are tightly interconnected, Foucault's skepticism about possibilities for self‐ and therefore broader social transformation resonates. We do not yet, however, find ourselves in a situation of domination, which means that resistance by way of counter‐normalization is possible. Given what I have presented here concerning humiliation and sexual violence within a context of neoliberalism, practices and actions that oppose the logic of individuation possess counter‐normalizing potential. This is a logic that, as I have shown, characterizes and is in turn reproduced by neoliberalism itself, by the gendered power relations within a neoliberal context that underpin and reproduce conditions for the possibility of sexual violence, and by the humiliation victims of sexual violence experience. It is a logic that effectively reproduces itself, its own conditions of possibility, and its harmful effects by promoting individual resilience as remedy.

At the same time that his work illustrates its difficulty and complexity within a context of normalization, Foucault consistently emphasizes the importance of innovation: “[seeking] out in our reflection those things that have never been thought or imagined” (Reference FoucaultFoucault 1988). In my view, innovation entails critical and creative examination and mining of existing practices in order to identify their counter‐normalizing potential, as well as the creation of and experimentation with new practices. Feminist innovation aimed at countering individuation will focus on mining, creating, and experimenting with practices that oppose and therefore possess the potential to undermine the logic of individuation—in other words, collective, inclusive, public, and, in light of the nature of sexual violence as an embodied violation, corporeal practices.Footnote ¹⁴ Cultivating collectivity, inclusivity, publicity, and asserting corporeality in the face of humiliation resulting from sexual violence redirects and expands critical and creative capacities in new ways; doing so thereby opens onto potentially counter‐normalizing modes of constituting, understanding, and relating to ourselves, which in turn reverberate in our actions within a common, shared world. In short, what our present calls for, I believe, is feminist innovation specifically concerning solidarity. How might feminist solidarity be conceived in terms of critical transformation—transformation, that is, without predetermined outcomes or guarantees—at the level of the self‐relation as well as more broadly? How might, as Judith Butler puts it, “risk[ing] a new sense of being a subject” facilitate counter‐normalizing “social and political change?” (Reference AhmedAhmed 2016, 484). And (how) might this kind of feminist solidarity undermine barriers to victims expressing their experiences in ways that make sense for them, even at the risk of their not making sense to others, while at the same time encouraging those others to risk themselves through forging (inter)connections—and for both to keep trying in the face of inevitable challenges, shortcomings, and even failures?