In recent years, members of legal, law enforcement, media and academic circles have portrayed rape as a special kind of crime distinct from other forms of violence. InFraming the Rape Victim,Carine ...M. Mardorossian argues that this differential treatment of rape has exacerbated the ghettoizing of sexual violence along gendered lines and has repeatedly led to women's being accused of triggering, if not causing, rape through immodest behavior, comportment, passivity, or weakness.Contesting the notion that rape is the result of deviant behaviors of victims or perpetrators, Mardorossian argues that rape saturates our culture and defines masculinity's relation to femininity, both of which are structural positions rather than biologically derived ones. Using diverse examples throughout, Mardorossian draws from Hollywood film and popular culture to contemporary women's fiction and hospitalized birth emphasizing that the position of dominant masculinity can be occupied by men, women, or institutions, while structural femininity is a position that may define and subordinate men, minorities, and other marginalized groups just as effectively as it does women. Highlighting the legacies of the politically correct debates of the 1990s and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the book illustrates how the framing of the term "victim" has played a fundamental role in constructing notions of agency that valorize autonomy and support exclusionary, especially masculine, models of American selfhood.The gendering of rape, including by well-meaning, sometimes feminist, voices that claim to have victims' best interests at heart, ultimately obscures its true role in our culture. Both a critical analysis and a call to action,Framing the Rape Victimshows that rape is not a special interest issue that pertains just to women but a pervasive one that affects our society as a whole.
Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape Mardorossian, Carine M.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
04/2002, Volume:
27, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Mardorossian draws conclusions about how the "crude exercise and connections of power" operate in relation to the dynamics of sexual violence and its processes of signification. While investigating ...academic treatments of rape, she singles out postmodern feminists because their appeals to the theorization of experience make their lack of engagement with rape all the more significant.
An analysis of Disgrace's representation of sexual violence exposes the inextricability of the social categories of gender, class, and race insofar as these identities are shown to accrue meaning in ...relation to one another rather than a posteriori. Specifically, the novel demonstrates that rape is not primarily a gendered crime that is then complicated by considerations of race or class, but a deeply discursive phenomenon whose material consequences are constituted by the profoundly racialized and class-based discourses that give it meaning. This paper shows how the discrepancy between the responses to the two rapes in the novel is only naturalized when insufficient attention is paid to the workings of narration, narrative, and racial politics. Coetzee's book exposes not just the contingency of justice but also the deeply racialized nature of this contingency, whether the response to rape occurs in black South Africa or in the white liberal context of the university.
Over the last few decades, Caribbean studies has been instrumental in reconfiguring the meanings of the national, geographical, sexual, and racial concepts through which postcolonial studies had ...traditionally defined difference. Here, Mardorossian investigates--via Edouard Glissant--the problematic of tracing the ecological ramifications of a creolized model for the Caribbean environment. She further examines the development of Glissant's environmental consciousness from his first novel La Lezarde in which landscape functioned fairly conventionally as an allegory for history to his much later work Une nouvelle region du monde in which the environment is no longer reduced to its metaphorical dimension. Among other things, Mardorossian discusses Glissant's "poetics of landscape" as an alternative creolized environmentalism that neither relativizes environmental destruction nor reproduces the pitfalls of deep ecological thought.
This article is a cultural analysis of how sexualized violence in the United States penal system is mediated by neo-conservative configurations of victimization that work to obscure gendered and ...racialized dimensions of violence against women in prison. I argue that the meanings of the term ‘victim’ over the last decade have undergone significant rhetorical and ideological developments that affect imprisoned women along gendered and racialized lines. Special attention will be given to the position of victim and victimhood in US culture following the terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. I argue that a renewed socio-cultural shift towards neo-conservatism initiated in the 1980s has retrenched the view that the US has been emasculated and its sovereignty rendered vulnerable to attack. In this discursive space, victimhood is no longer a political category aimed at the mobilization of policy and law reforms but rather provides the context through which sexual violence inside women’s prisons gets obfuscated despite national efforts to address the prevalence of (male) prisoner rape. I suggest that the rape of women in prison is eclipsed by an anti-feminist backlash.
An analysis ofDisgrace's representation of sexual violence exposes the inextricability of the social categories of gender, class, and race insofar as these identities are shown to accrue meaningin ...relation toone another rather than a posteriori. Specifically, the novel demonstrates that rape is not primarily a gendered crime that is then complicated by considerations of race or class, but a deeply discursive phenomenon whose material consequences are constituted by the profoundly racialized and class-based discourses that give it meaning. This paper shows how the discrepancy between the responses to the two rapes in the novel is only naturalized when insufficient attention is paid to the workings of narration, narrative, and racial politics. Coetzee's book exposes not just the contingency of justice but also the deeply racialized nature of this contingency, whether the response to rape occurs in black South Africa or in the white liberal context of the university.
Hospitals have adopted a rhetoric of family-centered maternity care, and one of the ways in which they show their commitment to it is through the integration of the husband-as-coach model of ...childbirth (the Bradley method) into delivery practices. I argue that this model's widespread popularity testifies less to the culture's endorsement of a woman-centered approach than to healthcare's appropriation of "natural" childbirth as a site for the production and reproduction of patriarchal and capitalist power.
Mardorossian responds to criticism of her article "Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape" by Janice Haaken and Beverly Allen. The original article was primarily conceived as a critique of the ...victim-blaming tendencies of academic feminism that duplicate and give credence to the popular writings of backlash writers.
