Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body puts theory to the test. In laying bare the complex relationship between body and mind, she reflects on what she describes as the unruliness of her body, provoking readers to reconsider what feeling weightless really means. The memoir is unapologetically challenging and invites readers to rethink the nature of fatness by vacillating between the desire to shrink and the desire to shield. To shelter herself from feelings of shame, fear, and pain that resulted from a violent experience with rape at the young age of twelve, Gay protected herself by gaining weight. Decades later, she writes,
It took me a long time, but I prefer “victim” to “survivor” now. I don't want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don't want to pretend I'm on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don't want to pretend that everything is okay. I'm living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred. (Reference GayGay 2017, 20–21)
Gay's ruminations on weight culminate when she asserts that “survivor” inadequately captures her life after rape. This contemporary impulse to label those who experience rape as “survivors” echoes what Robert McRuer has identified as “compulsory able‐bodiedness,” or the pressure placed upon disabled bodies to overcome disability and return to a normative bodily state (Reference McRuerMcRuer 2006). For Gay, identifying as “victim” disrupts this compulsion and mirrors her experience of being violently assaulted by a group of men and the feelings she lives with as a result.
As Gay's memoir makes clear, rape and its aftermath provoke a range of embodied consequences, often met with prescribed standards that dictate how one should heal. This essay interrogates the framework of compulsory survivorship in addition to a second framework often used to characterize those who experience sexual assault. Some may recall Sabrina Erdely's 2014 Rolling Stone article, “A Rape on Campus,” the widely criticized story of a young woman who allegedly fabricated an account of rape. Setting out to report on the harsh realities of campus sexual assault, Erdely followed the story of Jackie, who claimed to have been gang raped at a fraternity house at the University of Virginia, which resulted in what Jackie recounted as university mishandling of the event. The story was quickly retracted after drawing harsh retaliation from the fraternity, the university, and even the public, and Jackie's testimony was deemed what many refer to as a “rape‐hoax narrative”—a story of rape that a woman conjures up for fame or attention. Although Jackie was widely perceived as a “liar” in the unraveling of the story, she stood by her initial account in testimony she gave to CBS (Reference FrenchFrench 2016) and later attributed the gaps in her memory to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during an interview with the Associated Press (Reference RicherRicher 2016). Regardless of any attempts to defend Jackie's side of the story, both Erdely and Jackie were critiqued extensively and ultimately shamed for attempting to narrate her experience with rape.
These stories represent what have come to be two of the most popular labels applied to those who experience sexual assault: survivors and liars.Footnote 1 Feminist scholars have examined discourses of rape specifically through the lens of gender, analyzing how they often lead others to react to those who disclose rape with skepticism, doubt, and even distrust (Reference Alcoff and GrayAlcoff and Gray 1993; Reference SprySpry 1995; Reference Propen and SchusterPropen and Schuster 2017). Although these insights are important, I contend that they capture only part of the picture. Instead, this essay investigates how disability interacts with gender to manage disclosures of sexual violence within contemporary public discourse. Using tools of rhetorical analysis, I suggest that disparaging and ableist ideas about mental disabilities undergird the oppressive, sexist, and even empowering labels applied to sexual violence disclosures and mark those who experience sexual violence as unfit to speak about their own painful experiences with their bodies. Drawing on disability studies (DS) theory, I examine how discourses rooted in compulsory survivorship ask people who experience sexual violence to overcome disability and appear nondisabled, whereas discourses about liars seek to disable, framing women as mentally ill, mad, or irrational. Taken together, I argue, these frameworks form a discursive paradox for people who experience sexual assault and place them in a rhetorically impossible situation when they attempt to disclose the pain associated with sexual violation. This essay will demonstrate how using these frameworks for labeling experiences with sexual violence silences those who face sexual assault, keeps them from talking about a range of embodied experiences, and negates the realities of trauma that can occur after sexual assault.
When invoking a rhetorical lens in this analysis, I align myself with scholars who study the constitutive force of communication. Rhetorical studies’ notion of rhetoric sits in deep contrast to the popular usage of the term, which typically has a negative connotation. Popular discourse today uses “rhetoric” to critique empty, meaningless, or hopelessly “spun” words (for example, “that's just rhetoric”), but the meaning of rhetoric has deep roots. The history of distrust of rhetoric can be traced back to Plato's infamous distaste for the Sophists. Yet the stakes of this historically rooted distrust, as this essay will show, still play out today. Instead of viewing rhetoric in such ways, rhetorical theorists and critics approach the term as a means of illuminating the persuasive elements of communication (Reference BryantBryant 1973; Reference JohnsonJohnson 2009, 369). Working from a rhetorical perspective illustrates how language influences “the valuative mindsets that form the bases of others’ thoughts and actions” (Reference Gronbeck and TurnerGronbeck 1998, 50) and examines how meaning emerges from the “temporal, historical, and lived fluxes” of our social lives (Reference EdbauerEdbauer 2005, 9). In other words, those who use this perspective attend to issues of power, situation, and identity in communication, and ask questions such as: who is influencing whom and why? What appeals, visuals, tropes, descriptive or figurative language are used and to what effect? In this article, I use this mode of inquiry to understand how language is deployed to shape attitudes and actions surrounding sexual assault and the identities of those who disclose it. A rhetorical perspective is particularly useful in demonstrating the power of language in everyday life and enables us to understand what is at stake in identifying those who experience sexual violence, why those identifications are found persuasive, and what arguments, structures, or interests they serve.
Rape and sexual assault are painful experiences, both emotionally and physically. Examining how two labels shape the identities of those who have had these traumatic experiences reveals the limits of the frameworks presently available for explaining them. In addressing the difficulty of talking about trauma in public, this research responds to the recent call by feminist DS rhetorician Margaret Price, who argued in the pages of this journal that “DS needs to pay more attention to the place of pain in the world of disability” (Reference PricePrice 2015, 274). The frameworks explored here function as “rhetorical indicators” of current social and cultural attitudes about pain (Reference SiebersSiebers 2011, xi). In other words, interrogation of these terms exposes negative assumptions about pain that complicate discussions of it. Building on growing interest in the mind and mental disabilities (Reference NickiNicki 2001; Reference Lewiecki‐WilsonLewiecki-Wilson 2003; Reference MollowMollow 2006; Reference Donaldson and HallDonaldson 2011; Reference KaferKafer 2013; Reference PatsavasPatsavas 2014), I consider how discursive norms surrounding sexual violence are buttressed by unspoken assumptions about (and devaluation of) disabled minds that serve to deny people's accounts of pain. I add to this discussion by contextualizing disclosures of pain within the systems of power that prohibit talking seriously about the issue of pain. That is, I argue that when thinking about pain or mental disabilities theoretically, we should consider their rhetoricity—we should address how they wield influence in public life. Analyzing how contemporary public discourses manage expressions of pain by either denying disability (survivors) or labeling others as disabled (liars) demonstrates the rhetorical forces that condition gendered and debilitating norms surrounding mental illness. This essay expands the use of a rhetorical perspective for those working at the crossroads of gender and disability by illustrating how these norms circulate in wider public discourse.
I begin by situating this study at the intersection of feminist, disability, and rhetorical studies, focusing especially on approaches to pain and mental illness within these fields. Next, I analyze the differences within the two frameworks discursively applied to disclosures of sexual violence to explore how the mind is marked un/fit depending on which framework is applied. This analysis then enables me to examine how norms around pain management serve as markers of mental disability. I close with some implications this case study has for contemporary understandings of rape, as well as for future studies of the mind by feminist rhetorical and disability scholars.
Silencing, Mental Fitness, and the Bodymind in Pain
Feminist rhetoricians have long considered the silencing of nonmale voices in the public sphere (Reference CampbellCampbell 1989; Reference JarrattJarratt 1991; Reference GlennGlenn 1997). Although much of this work looks historically at the erasure of women's voices, this research revives this question based on our contemporary moment. To address how and why disclosures of pain expressed after rape are silenced, I build on disability scholars who have illustrated how bodies that fall outside of a normative biological construction are also silenced, “often viewed as deficiencies, perversions, or deformities, [that] can only have negative rhetorical value” (Reference Dolmage, Lewiecki‐Wilson, Schell and RawsonDolmage and Lewiecki‐Wilson 2010, 27). DS theories help show how certain bodies are marked as disabled and are silenced as a result of ableist norms imposed upon them. But the labels applied to those who experience sexual assault are layered with attitudes about mental disabilities that are not only stigmatized because of their link to ableism; they are also deeply conditioned by gendered archetypal depictions of women, including madness and hysteria. In other words, analyzing the rhetorical opportunities available to those who disclose sexual violence requires an approach informed by gender and disability studies, and this section outlines how scholars have attended to the mind and trauma in order to make a wider theoretical opening for those interested in interrogating pain.
Foundational approaches to DS find value in sociocultural models that unearth the structural implications of what constitutes the normative and, for the purposes of this research, aid in exposing the ableist assumptions present in discourse about sexual violence. In turning away from medical models that often assert difference as deficiency or abnormality, DS scholars have reclaimed corporeal difference as something to be celebrated, focusing their efforts on viewing disability through the lens of desire (Reference McRuer and WilkersonMcRuer and Wilkerson 2003). Doing so reframes disability not as a dismissal or unfortunate “truth of the system,” but instead as “a recognition that another world can exist in which an incredible variety of bodies and minds are valued” (Reference McRuer and WilkersonMcRuer and Wilkerson 2003, 14). Although reframing disability through the idea of desire productively disrupts the binary between disabled and nondisabled people, scholars have pointed out that this reframing poses a problem for studies of disability specifically interested in taking seriously the issue of pain. That is, though a focus on “desiring disability” troubles cultural stigmas that understand disability through the lens of pity and disgust, Alison Kafer and Margaret Price submit that being disabled isn't always desirable and can, in fact, sometimes be painful (Reference KaferKafer 2013; Reference PricePrice 2015). In particular, Price builds on materialist feminist DS scholars (Reference Crow and MorrisCrow 1996; Reference MollowMollow 2006; Reference ErvellesErvelles 2011; Reference PatsavasPatsavas 2014) to ask provocatively whether there is a place for “unbearable pain” in DS—“the sort of pain that impels one to self‐injure or to consider or attempt suicide” as a result of mental disability—an area of research that has only recently been given scholarly attention (Reference PricePrice 2015, 276; emphasis in original). This essay responds to Price's call by exploring what the consequences are for those who attempt to disclose their experiences with pain and the invocations of mental disability that result.
DS is not the only field to witness a dearth of attention to the mind. I argue that advances made in feminist rhetorical studies consequently led scholars to steer away from specifically investigating the mind. Turning back to some of the rhetorical tradition's earliest thinkers, feminist rhetoricians have analyzed how “woman” and “female embodiment” were figured as disabled forms of man, thus disqualifying women from the civic sphere and public debate (Reference GroszGrosz 1994; Reference LunsfordLunsford 1995; Reference GlennGlenn 1997; Reference Crowley, Selzer and CrowleyCrowley 1999; Reference Glenn and RatcliffeGlenn and Ratcliffe 2011). As a result, women had to deny perceptions of irrationality and emotion in order to carve out their agential place. Rejecting the charge that only men can be persuasive was thus accompanied by a ruthless defense of the mind that inadvertently created a lacuna of serious critical investigation into the mind. Put differently, repudiating the idea that women's minds are inherently unstable consequently foreclosed broader investigations into mental disability and gender.
The labels analyzed in this essay expose how this legacy of women as disabled lives on for those who describe their experiences with sexual assault, and I draw from scholars who locate the correlation between mental and rhetorical fitness to illuminate traces of this legacy (Reference Lewiecki‐WilsonDolmage and Lewiecki‐Wilson 2003; Reference Prendergast, Nystrand and DuffyPrendergast 2003; Reference JohnsonJohnson 2010). For speakers to be perceived as rhetorically fit, they must also appear rational, and impressions of disability can quickly cast such speakers as those who should be expelled from public discussion. As Catherine Prendergast makes clear, “That the mentally ill are treated as devoid of rhetoric would seem to me to be an obvious point: If people think you're crazy, they don't listen to you” (Reference Prendergast, Nystrand and DuffyPrendergast 2003, 203). Social attitudes surrounding people who are mentally ill—that they are dominated by irrationality and emotion and lack the cognitive capacity for reason—lead to doubts about their rhetorical capabilities. In other words, rhetorical fitness is ascribed to those who are simultaneously perceived as able‐minded and mentally fit, and expressing symptoms typically associated with trauma leads to a problem similar to that which Prendergast suggests: If people think you're traumatized, they don't trust what you say. Expressing the experience of trauma can lead audiences to perceive the speaker as one whose pain must be contained or controlled in order to rehabilitate rhetorical fitness.
This essay takes seriously the fact that trauma and pain are typical and even common consequences for those who have experienced sexual assault (Reference HermanHerman 1992; Reference Rothbaum, Foa, Riggs, Murdock and WalshRothbaum et al. 1992; Reference Resnick, Kilpatrick, Dansky, Saunders and BestResnick et al. 1993). According to feminist psychotherapist Judith Herman, not until studies of combat veterans in the 1970s and 80s “legitimated the concept of post‐traumatic stress disorder” did medical professionals realize that “the most common post‐traumatic disorders are those not of men in war but of women in civilian life” (Reference HermanHerman 1992, 32, 28). I draw on Cathy Caruth, who defines trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Reference CaruthCaruth 1996, 91). In addition to Caruth's definition, I also want to leave space for those dealing with trauma in ways that do not always require a trigger or response—an experience of trauma that those affected may not consciously encounter yet that they still carry with them bodily. For instance, psychotherapy researcher Bessel van der Kolk describes the experience of trauma as a feeling of “gnawing interior discomfort,” in which people who face traumatic symptoms may “chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies” (Reference van der Kolkvan der Kolk 2014, 97). Caruth and van der Kolk draw attention to what Price has termed the bodymind (Reference PricePrice 2011; Reference Price2015)—the intricate and inseparable linking between the body and mind—and expose how the effects of embodied violence most certainly can feel disabling. To be clear, this essay does not intend to suggest that those who have been assaulted always experience trauma nor to describe what an experience with trauma feels like after rape. Rather, I aim to illustrate how these experiences are viewed through ableist lenses that limit the available means for discussing pain or trauma afterwards. In other words, these two options—that trauma is disabling and that it is interpreted as disabling—are collapsed in public discourse, but always in ways that stigmatize and disable women and add to the marginalization of disabled people.
Documenting pain in public is a process that provokes judgment among audience members, and the effects of such judgments characterize and shape how the identities of those who experience sexual assault are perceived. DS has extended the insights of trauma researchers to understand how “living with trauma,” as Angela Carter argues, “means negotiating life in a world established by and for bodyminds that do not experience the affect of trauma” (Reference CarterCarter 2015). That is, trauma is positioned as an abnormal condition not experienced by bodies perceived through normative frameworks. This marginalization of trauma and its characterizations are rooted in what Tobin Siebers and Elaine Scarry have theorized as a fear of being in pain and a distrust of hearing about pain, respectively. That is, according to Siebers, those without pain don't want it and perceive the feeling of pain as the result of a deficient body (Reference SiebersSiebers 2011, 184). Such normative perceptions of pain's affect come into contact with what Scarry has described as language's incapacity for capturing what pain is. That is, Scarry argues that hearing about the pain of others serves as the primary origin of what it means to have doubt (Reference ScarryScarry 1985). One issue that emerges in the theories that both Siebers and Scarry lay out is that to understand the pain of another requires some sense of empathy. However, calling for empathy maintains a hierarchy between those with pain and those without it. Instead, we must move toward what Sara Ahmed describes as “a demand for collective politics” that recognizes the “impossibility of reconciliation” for some bodies in pain (Reference AhmedAhmed 2004, 39). Importantly, making space for the collective reality that Ahmed imagines requires a break in the values and assumptions undergirding how we talk about bodies in pain.
Through an intersectional approach, this essay investigates the ableist structures that deny trauma, mark mental fitness, and, in the process, silence those who disclose pain in contemporary US culture. As feminist DS scholar Andrea Nicki urges, it is important to contextualize these stigmatizing ideas of mental illness within their cultural context “since cultural and social factors contribute to the development and prevalence of much mental illness in members of disadvantaged groups” (Reference NickiNicki 2001, 82). In what follows, I analyze how relations of power impinge on the ability to disclose pain and sexual trauma in a culture where sexually violent conditions persist.
Marking Mental Fitness after Sexual Trauma
This section investigates how two popular frameworks applied to people who disclose experiences with sexual violence seek to manage the experience of rape and bypass accounts of pain caused by sexual trauma. In the first section, I examine the framework of compulsory survivorship, which, I suggest, places those who experience sexual trauma in a position of having to overcome trauma and reifies the idea that people need to be cured of their disability. In the second section, I explore how rape‐hoax narratives frame those who experience sexual trauma through the idea of madness, reconstructing hysteria within contemporary rape culture. Together, these frameworks complicate the rhetorical options available to those who experience sexual violence, co‐opt the realities of pain and trauma that emerge after experiencing sexual violence in ways that work against people's interests and goals, and bolster discriminatory ideas about mental illness.
Overcoming Rape: Compulsory Survivorship
Recharacterizing a person who has been raped or sexually assaulted from “victim” to “survivor” occurred in first‐person testimonies during the 1970s and 80s by women who experienced incest or child sexual abuse and wanted to shed negative notions of victimhood—a well‐intended move with productive motivations. Today, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) distinguishes these terms in the following way: victim refers to “someone who has recently been affected by sexual violence, when discussing a particular crime; or when referring to aspects of the criminal justice system,” whereas survivor refers to “someone who has gone through the recovery process, or when discussing the short‐ or long‐term effects of sexual violence” (RAINN). In other words, RAINN's designation aligns the term victim with legal and law enforcement contexts, whereas survivor assumes a healing process and draws attention to the seriousness of surviving a violent crime such as rape. Legislative efforts, such as the 2016 Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act, or governmental sponsored campaigns like “It's On Us,” have followed suit, making “survivor” the commonplace descriptor for those who experience rape or sexual assault. In this section, I theorize the idea of compulsory survivorship through a disability lens while analyzing key examples of the discourse to suggest that labeling those who experience rape and sexual assault as “survivors” marks those who experience trauma as abnormal and asks people to overcome their experiences with pain—both of which serve to eradicate mental illness from a normative social order.
Shifting the terminology to survivorship was prompted by a political need to bring a sense of agency to those who experienced sexual assault. With the word victim come social stigmas that often blame women for crimes committed against them, a problem for decades in how society discusses rape and sexual assault. Calling someone a victim risks framing that person through what communication scholar Caroline Picart identifies as a construction of gendered helplessness: “one who must be protected from ‘evil’ and predatorial [sic] forces because she is incapable of any acts of agency to defend herself” (Reference PicartPicart 2003, 97). These insights have been echoed by sociologist Jennifer Dunn, who suggests that victims “are presented as trapped,” whereas survivors “are shown as making choices” (Reference DunnDunn 2005, 2). Thus, advocacy efforts framed around survivors deliberately aim to redirect blame and responsibility away from the person harmed and grant that person agency to speak and be heard.
This shift in terminology, however, makes it difficult to acknowledge the painful consequences of sexual assault. Living in the aftermath of sexual assault can take a range of forms, and regardless of what they look and feel like, a DS lens helps unpack how these effects are perceived as personal defects that must be dealt with by the person. People may experience changes in their bodyminds, such as symptoms of dissociation or repeated memories of the assault, and others may establish different orientations to and relationships with their bodies after experiencing violation. They may develop attitudes of self‐blame, symptoms of PTSD or depression, and changes in sleep patterns or physical well‐being as a result of rape. Although these consequences have been well documented, theorizing sexual assault through a DS lens reveals that responsibility for dealing with these reactions is placed on the individual.Footnote 2 As Alyson Patsavas notes, “discourses of personal responsibility are consistently embedded in cultural narratives of pain,” and compulsory survivorship participates in this problem by narrowing in on individual healing and ignoring the conditions of the social environment that fostered sexually violent conditions in the first place (Reference PatsavasPatsavas 2014, 209). Within these social standards of normalcy, individuals are forced to take ownership of their experience and return to a normative ideal.
Turning away from victimhood emboldens a positionality previously exploited, but I suggest that the discourse of survivorship is laden with a rhetoric of overcoming. Disability scholars have illuminated how the idea of overcoming disability is rooted in a social quest for normalcy, which creates stigmas among certain bodies over others (Reference LintonLinton 1998; Reference Mitchell and SnyderMitchell and Snyder 2001; Reference KaferKafer 2013). In other words, “[a]n implication of these statements,” writes DS scholar Simi Linton, “is that the other members of the group from which the individual has supposedly moved beyond are not as brave, strong, or extraordinary as the person who has overcome that designation” (Reference LintonLinton 1998, 18). Such ideas of overcoming are akin to what Robert McRuer identifies as a compulsion to view able‐bodiedness as normal, leaving alternative ways of being in the world to be seen as unnatural or deficient (Reference McRuerMcRuer 2006). Following McRuer's idea of “compulsory able‐bodiedness,” compulsory survivorship, then, is to be free from mental disability—to force bodies into conforming to an invisible standard that mandates that some bodies be more mentally fit than others. Therefore, the survivor is seen as someone who can maintain normal mental functioning, whereas a victim—or anyone who acknowledges symptoms of trauma—is assumed to have abnormal mental functioning, and thus to be socially beneath their able‐bodied counterparts. Even worse, being affected by sexual violence is positioned as the problem, as opposed to the violence itself. The trauma of sexual violence inheres in a personal failing rather than in the crime.
Mainstream public conversations predominantly assume the discourse of compulsory survivorship, but some have begun examining the effects of its use. For instance, New York Times Magazine writer Parul Sehgal refers to the survivor's kind of “forced heroism” and describes the image of the survivor in the following way:
The survivor—or pop culture's fantasy of her—now cuts a distinctive silhouette: She's damaged, but never so much as to be a figure of pity or revulsion; her wound makes her interesting, even alluring. Where the victim was abject, a figure of shame and isolation, the survivor is lithe and frequently well armed. She is a little scary and a little sexy, and her rage feels divinely sanctioned. (Reference SehgalSehgal 2016)
In this image, the survivor—an inevitably female and cis woman—is empowered and strong. Although her “damage” is recognized, it is understood as evocative. This refiguring harkens to a DS emphasis on desire; however, these efforts to alter public opinion concerning victims result in neglecting to acknowledge the pain of sexual trauma. In glorifying the “wound” of assault within this archetypal image, feelings of pain caused by rape and sexual assault are minimized in the process of re‐empowering those who experience sexual violence. Here, she's a warrior, enraged and equipped to challenge those who pity her.
Although these depictions glorify the survivor, other feminist thinkers have gone further to analyze how survivor discourse specifically bypasses the healing process. For instance, Feministing blogger Dana Bolger argues that rape victims are understood within the public repertoire as “weak, disempowered, passive,” whereas survivors are “strong, (pro)active, healthy, and productive. To have progressed” (Reference BolgerBolger 2014). The title of Bolger's blog post, “Hurry up and Heal” aptly captures how narratives of overcoming overlook the range of ways in which sexual violence can affect someone, and Bolger suggests that this compulsion to survive “ignores the cyclic nature of healing”—the moments of interruption and disruption that are brought about by trauma (Reference BolgerBolger 2014). Though well‐intended, the framework of “survivor” encourages those who face sexual violence to “cure” their trauma, positioning it as something that needs to be quickly fixed. Bolger helps us to recognize that responsibility for healing is an expectation that individuals must meet; to be a survivor means to be out of pain and healed.
In addition to challenging these descriptions, some candidly and seriously reject the use of the term, pushing back on survivor discourse overall. For instance, an anonymous xoJane blogger writes: “I prefer the word ‘victim’ because it places the focus back where it belongs: on the fucking rapist who turned me into a victim by raping me. I had no choice in that, and I don't have much choice about how I respond to it either” (Anonymous 2016). Echoing Roxane Gay's preference for victim over survivor, this blogger reminds readers of the lack of choice inherent in sexual assault. By submitting, “I don't have much choice about how I respond to it [rape] either,” this writer draws attention to the lack of control she felt both during the experience of rape and in its aftermath. In rejecting the term survivor, this writer mimics the kind of emergence and reemergence of pain that can be caused by a sexually traumatic event. Using the term victim recognizes the pain of being violated—an agonizing and uncontrollable experience—as central to understanding the violence of sexual assault.
Society's adoption of the term survivor covers over deep consequences of trauma that can occur after rape and sexual assault. Compulsory survivorship asks people to adopt a public persona driven by a social need to overcome, to appear normal. In other words, those who face sexual violence can speak and be listened to only if they have disavowed the consequences of pain or sexual trauma. Examining the limits of this framework demonstrates how audiences deny a diversity of affective and sensory access in a way that is complicit with a goal of effacing those with mental illness. In order to speak of rape, the survivor script suggests, one must have already healed and resumed normalcy.
Lying Whores: Rape‐Hoax Narratives
The previous section explored how the discourse of compulsory survivorship asks those who have been raped or sexually assaulted to overcome trauma and appear nondisabled; this section examines how calling those who have been raped “liars” serves to mark them as more disabled and risks casting them as untrustworthy when speaking about experiences with their own bodies. Such characterizations participate in a larger landscape of “rape myths” that can be traced back to ancient ideas of woman as temptress, someone who is deceitful and who lies to cover up sexually promiscuous behavior (Reference Lonsway and FitzgeraldLonsway and Fitzgerald 1994). Such myths, according to Joanne Belknap, function to “blame victims, excuse rapists, and erroneously support [the view] that false rape claims are a common problem” (Reference BelknapBelknap 2010, 1335). In addition to these misogynist ideas about women, this section describes how rape‐hoax narratives serve to mark the mental fitness of those reporting assault and then examines how contemporary examples of these narratives invoke archaic and problematic ideas of hysteria and the archetypal madwoman. In doing so, I analyze how calling someone who discloses rape a liar suggests derogatory assumptions about mental illness that make it difficult to talk about trauma and mental disability.
Scholars such as Carole Pateman and Catharine MacKinnon have investigated common critiques of the positionality of a rape victim by investigating its link to sexuality (Reference MacKinnonMacKinnon 1987; Reference PatemanPateman 1991). They illustrate how adjudicatory processes shaped by rape laws call upon women to perform a certain type of identity when claiming to have been raped, which functions to assess the guilt of the perpetrator. Writes Pateman, “a woman is unlikely to convince either the public, the police, or a judge and jury that she did not consent to sexual intercourse unless she is badly physically injured or unless she can prove that she resisted” (Reference PatemanPateman 1991, 157). As Pateman suggests, for a woman to be believed, her experience must fit a narrow perception of what audiences broadly assume to be rape: one that portrays her as subject to violence during a sexual act that was entirely unwanted. Admitting sexual activity of any kind places her in a precarious position, and rhetorical scholars have illuminated how culturally ingrained attitudes surrounding sexuality subject her to standards that also condition how audiences perceive credibility: “From the past twenty‐five hundred years in a culture [that is imagined as white, Western, and coherent], the ideal woman has been disciplined by cultural codes that require a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement)” (Reference GlennGlenn 1997, 1). In other words, choosing to disclose an experience with rape or sexual assault admits to sexual behavior—an admission that often casts women as hypersexual and deviant. Thus, in revealing sexual behavior of any kind a woman risks deviating from standard notions of femininity in ways that can often foster the belief that she is an unreliable speaker.
Misogynist assumptions about womanhood shape norms around sexuality, and I argue that perceptions of women as liars are anchored by perennial beliefs that women's minds are inherently unstable and inferior to men's. Emotion and gender often go hand in hand, and, as a result, “mental illness has become the quintessential ‘female malady,’” writes Jenell Johnson (Reference JohnsonJohnson 2014, 50). Mental illness carries deeply gendered assumptions that consequently condition associations between feeble‐mindedness and femininity. Building on these feminized notions of the mind, in her landmark text Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler suggests that a diagnosis of mental illness has come to be seen as a “penalt[y] for being female” (Reference CheslerChesler 1972, 161; emphasis in original). The discourse of woman as liar operates under this assumption and harkens back to a cultural pattern that has presumed women to be hysterical by nature. Put differently, calling someone a liar invokes antiquated notions of mental illness that link an unfit mind to the mere nature of being a woman.
Stemming from the Greek word for uterus, hysteria denotes a kind of uncontrollable excess—a neurosis of the mind that manifests itself in symptoms of anxiety, irritability, insomnia, nervousness, and even increased sexual appetite—which affects how audiences perceive a speaker's rhetorical fitness. Understandings of hysteria have been inflected in different historical moments that have been preoccupied with various concerns such as menstruation, the “wandering” womb, and the female psyche. Scholarly analyses of hysteria are far too numerous to rehearse here, yet what remains constant is how the metaphor of madness functions within feminized understandings of hysteria. Feminist philosophers Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray have echoed this idea, showing its particular strength in the context of “survivor speech,” which they argue “is categorized within the mad, the untrue, or the incredible” (Reference Alcoff and GrayAlcoff and Gray 1993, 267). In other words, although the medical community no longer uses the term hysteria, labeling those who disclose rape and sexual assault as liars reveals a discursive legacy of madness still in use today. Calling a woman a liar alludes to the idea that she is not of sound mind, and positions mental illness as outside the boundaries of normative social and mental order.
Although the myth of raped women as liars has a long history, more contemporary conversations attest to its influence over how people talk about women who disclose sexual assault. For instance, during the 2017 rape trial involving businessman Mark Giannini, defense attorney Steve Farese commented, “People can be really good at lying. Women can be especially good at it, because they are the weaker sex” (Reference AliAli 2017). Farese's comments were directed at the jury, which ultimately found Giannini not guilty on three counts of rape. In addition to this invocation of women as being by nature weaker, former Congressman Todd Akin infamously classified certain cases of rape as “legitimate” when speaking on a St. Louis television station: “If it's legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down” (Reference AlterAlter 2014). Comments like these assume false biological ideas that further imagine women as responsible for sexual violence and, in the process, normalize sexually violent attitudes toward women. They function to devalue and ignore women's experiences with sexual violence and place them on constant defense when disclosing sexual trauma.
Recent well‐known, high‐profile men have taken on the terminology of women as liars when attempting to denounce accusations of sexual assault launched against them. During Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the New York Times published a story reporting two women who disclosed nonconsensual sexual advances made by Trump, after the 2005 footage from Access Hollywood was released in which Trump bragged about nonconsensual touching (Reference Twohey and BarbaroTwohey and Barbaro 2016). After the Times published the story, several other women came forth claiming similar sexual assaults, and during a campaign speech at Gettysburg, Trump denied the accusations saying, “The events never happened. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over” (Reference BiermanBierman 2016). A parallel to Trump, Harvey Weinstein, took a similar but slightly softer stance when he apologized to dozens of his accusers while also denying any allegations by maintaining that he “has a different recollection of the events” (Wang 2017). Tactics central to rape‐hoax narratives were also deployed during the 2017 Bill Cosby trial when Cosby's lawyers portrayed Andrea Constand and Beverly Johnson—two of nearly sixty women who accused Cosby of sexual assault—as greedy, fame‐hungry women, in order to claim that the sexual acts were consensual. When referring to Constand, defense attorney McMonagle said, “she's a liar” and during his closing remarks declared, “It's sickening what happened here” (Reference HeldmanHeldman 2017). Each of these examples normalizes hypersexualized, powerful male figures while concomitantly describing the women involved as being incapable of properly recalling what happened or, worse, as being “sick”—descriptions that mark them as disabled by appealing to those deep‐seated notions of women as hysterical. They subject women to impossible standards for disclosing their experiences with rape, by placing their mental capacity in question as soon as they describe sexual violence.
In addition to male speakers who perpetuate the use of rape‐hoax narratives, society also plays a role in circulating this label. Take, for example, Emma Sulkowicz: During her final year at Columbia University, Sulkowicz carried a dorm mattress with her across campus for her senior thesis project Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). The performance‐art piece was an attempt to seek redress from university officials for failing to punish Paul Nungesser for raping Sulkowicz in her dorm room in 2012. The piece culminated as she walked across the stage at her graduation with the iconic mattress, and within hours it met with much public backlash. Posters were hung around campus of Sulkowicz and her mattress with words like “pretty little liar” and the hashtags #rapehoax and #fakerape. In addition, a Twitter account @FakeRape was created to slander Sulkowicz and other perceived false‐rape accusers.Footnote 3 Unlike in the previous examples, the public played a critical role in circulating the idea that Sulkowicz conjured up a fake rape story. Because Sulkowicz admitted to a previous consensual sexual history with Nungesser, labeling her a liar is connected to a perception of woman as oversexualized temptress—someone who wanted it but then lied about her initial desire. In Sulkowicz's case, the metaphor of madness was leveraged against her to mark anything she described about her sexual experience as unreliable.
As forms of slut‐shaming, discursive uses of rape‐hoax narratives frame people who disclose sexual trauma through alternative and oppressive ideas of madness that project assumptions about irrationality and hysteria. Marking people as mentally disabled casts them as rhetorically disabled, troubling how they can testify to the actual experiences they may have. As a result, this framework mandates certain standards of mental fitness in which rhetorical fitness is “ascribed to just a narrow range of (white, male, able) bodies” Reference Dolmage, Lewiecki‐Wilson, Schell and Rawson(Dolmage and Lewiecki‐Wilson 2010, 27). Even worse, this metaphorical use of madness “diminishes the lived experience of many people who are disabled by mental illness… in ways that have ultimately harmful political effects” (Reference Donaldson and HallDonaldson 2011, 94). Employing these discursive tactics deflects serious attention from the realities of mental illness and trauma that might be present after a case of sexual assault.
Identifying Rape through Normative Standards in US Culture
In this essay, I have shown how two manifestations of disability are imbricated in contemporary discourses of sexual violence present in US culture today. I argue that the framework of compulsory survivorship and rape‐hoax narratives are layered not only with sexist and oppressive ideas of womanhood but also with stigmatizing ideas of disability that function rhetorically to silence accounts of pain and cover over the realities of trauma that can result from sexual violence. I suggest that these two frameworks place people who have faced sexual violence in an impossible rhetorical situation when attempting to disclose their assaults. That is, because these two labels make up the predominant ways to describe and discuss those who experience sexual violence, those attempting to disclose sexual assault are met with impossible standards for discussing what happened. Whether or not their disclosure deals with trauma or pain, the choice to disclose forces them either to deny disability, in the case of survivor discourse, or risk being labeled as more disabled, as demonstrated by rape‐hoax narratives. Neither framework allows for a broad discussion of pain, trauma, or mental disability, but instead casts mental disability as something to be shamed and resolved.
One could argue that the ability to lie suggests the ability to determine right from wrong, thus invoking a rational choice on behalf of the person who lies. In other words, lying could be perceived as a characteristic of a rational actor. However, calling a woman a liar (along with those who are feminized by discourses of rape) is never unequivocally grounded in the belief that she is a rational actor and of sound mind. As feminist rhetorician Jennifer Andrus has argued, critiques of women are rooted in “the presumption that women are not autonomous civic agents, they have flights of temper, and they talk too much” (Reference AndrusAndrus 2015, 22). Put differently, claiming that women are able effectively to deceive still relies on a patriarchal organizing of rationality (read: male) over irrationality (read: female)—one that carries serious material consequences. In this article, I have argued that analyzing this issue requires an approach informed by both disability and feminist studies. Unpacking how the discursive forces rooted in disclosure are accompanied by perennial social myths about women reveals the limitations placed upon those who disclose experiences with sexual assault and the material effects that result from calling women “crazy.” Little to no room is left for those seriously wanting to address their experiences with mental illness. This research illustrates how the physical reality of disability is deeply connected to how we talk about disability and the social myths that pervade dominant understandings of disabled and able‐bodied people.
Tanya Titchkosky cautions that the work of disability scholarship is not to order the use of certain terms over others but rather “to examine what our current articulations of disability are saying in the here and now” (Reference TitchkoskyTitchkosky 2001, 138). Although I take Titchkosky's point seriously, I'm compelled by the use of victim outlined by the discourse analyzed in this essay. Using the term victim reminds audiences of how people are made victims and victimized by rape and sexual assault and by those who violate them. The frameworks analyzed here reveal how a white, male, able‐bodied social hierarchy denies accounts of pain and subjects those who experience rape and sexual assault to ableist norms that limit their capacity to disclose sexual violence. Furthermore, this research sheds light on a public obsession over casting and labeling those who are subject to sexual violence while one identity remains unchallenged. That is, while public discourse spends much of its time deliberating the labels assigned to those who experience rape, one term remains overwhelmingly underinterrogated in US society: the rapist. At its best, this research encourages a rigorous examination of how society construes sexually violent behavior as normative in the very ways we choose to label certain bodies and minds over others.
Ideological and communicative factors surrounding issues of representation and identification remain at the core of debates about rape culture. This essay's investigation into rape culture has implications for DS because it reveals how disclosures of pain are rooted in ableist assumptions of mental illness that mark those who experience sexual violence as unfit to speak about their own experiences with their bodies. Productive and necessary interrogation of rape culture must begin with the intersectional dynamics of disability and gender at play in public discourse. This essay has argued that examining how public disclosures of pain are inflected by rhetorical conditions that make it difficult even to discuss sexual trauma is just one place to start.
