Margaret Miller_Week One: Putting Sedgwick and Warner in conversation with Steubenville and Stanford rape cases

I thought I would use my blog post as a moment to put Sedgwick’s piece on paranoid reading and Michael Warner’s piece on uncritical reading in conversation with a conference paper I am giving in October. I’m presenting on a panel about the visibility of sexual violence in the media. I am currently revising my introduction for this paper because its main focus has always been the 2013 Steubenville case and I want to be able to allude to the Stanford case from earlier this year. The Stanford case is the only mainstream media moment in which a survivor actually gives her own public narrative, and thus, a reading that falls outside the usual way we have all come to “read” (no matter how many times we acknowledge and understand that these cases are never the faults of the survivors) rape narratives. Part of my realization that I needed to come back to a literary, close-reading type lens in this piece was discussing my partner’s work on Pamela: or, a Virtue Rewarded, an 18^th century novel (hence the title of my piece—“Girl, you’re the only exception; or, The Social Narrative of a Symbolically Dead Object.” Pamela is consistently read as a tease and as totally desiring much of the sexually transgressive violence that she comes to endure as if there could be no alternative narrative.

Similarly, much of the Steubenville case evidence and social media responses blame the survivor, citing her as a “sloppy” drunk party girl, suggesting that her rape was her fault and thus not a crime. I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of bare life, both to contest his dismissal of sexual violence and gendered violence as real or legitimate violence, but also as a means to ask this crucial question: how must a woman be “seen” in order to be sexually violated and not have that act viewed as a crime. I argue that her body is read as a symbolically “dead” object and as such, unable to be raped; her consent no longer seen as a right and her assault no longer viewed as a crime.

With all of this in mind, I want to consider certain aspects of Sedgwick’s argument in the context of this notion that no matter which angle the media, law, and social media users come at rape narratives, we get the same result or same singular vision, because it is a narrative based on exposing the truth. What drew me to Sedgwick’s argument was the very use of the word “exposure” because it has gendered connotations of violation—to uncover and put on display. From the very outset then, it seems highly problematic that the law and the media use a lens of violation to penetrate and solve the Stanford rape case. From the survivor’s letter to her rapist, here is a list of the questions she was asked in court: 

How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day? Well what did you have for dinner?...Did you drink with dinner? No, not even water?...Did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal?...Are you serious with your boyfriend? Are you sexually active with him? When did you start dating? Would you ever cheat? Do you have a history of cheating? What do you mean when you said you wanted to reward him? Do you remember what time you woke up? (buzzfeed.com)

             Clearly, the court is trying to expose something—pointed questions are being asked. Yet, instead of thinking about the narrative the court is trying to establish—whether or not the survivor consented or was conscious enough to consent—I want to re-contextualize this piece of evidence outside of that framework. At this point, I’m thinking of Michael Warner’s “Uncritical Reading” where he suggests Mary Rowlandson’s reading style is deemed “uncritical” because it does not consider the totality of all of the parts, but only selected pieces. The above questions for the survivor seem to imply a sense of wholeness and totality, or a desire for such because they cover the entire day in which the assault took place, moving from “What did you eat that day” to “Do you remember what time you woke up [the next day].” The court seems to forget that the total narrative of a sexual assault would presumably also necessitate the exposure of the perpetrator.

The court’s questions fall into a framework with an already pre-scripted “truth” based solely on the survivor. In this dominant narrative, there is only one way to establish consent and it has nothing to do with “what actually happened that night.” What is the right answer to the question, “would you ever cheat?” for when a woman is attempting to establish whether or not she consented? If she says, no, she is upholding the very same oppressive, moral, heteropatriarchal values we’ve come to expect of “virtuous” Pamela. If she says, yes, then she definitely could not have been assaulted. Preservation of oppressive values and mores requires a certain type of visibility. Sedgwick argues “to make something visible as a problem” it must feel as though it were “a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction” (139). The legal framework for determining whether a sexual assault occurred or not, problematically, comes to depend on defining whether or not a woman consented through a faulty “good” girl/ “bad” girl—yes or no—binary.

However, there is a way that the Stanford survivor’s letter (very similar to Pamela’s continued writing) comes to challenge this implicit narrative. By only including the questions in her letter, and not her answers, her narrative maintains that a sexual assault has occurred and gives no “reason,” explanation or means of tying together the implicit, dominant narrative. Instead of exposing the monopolistic “truth,” she exposes the inexplicable gap in the narrative. In doing so, the legal, media, and social gaze is displaced and must look elsewhere—to the rapist—for the explanation, truth, or knowledge. In this way then, rather than eliminating the paranoid reading—the victim actually expands the totality of what such a reading includes, positioning the burden of proof and responsibility onto the rapist, in this case, Brock Turner.