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What Is Rape? Hilkje Charlotte Hänel, Born in 1987, Holds a Phd in Philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin

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What Is Rape? Hilkje Charlotte Hänel, Born in 1987, Holds a Phd in Philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin Hilkje Charlotte Hänel What is Rape? Hilkje Charlotte Hänel, born in 1987, holds a PhD in philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is an executive board member of the Soci- ety for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) Germany and a founding member of the Network of Analytic Philosophy and Social Critique. Hilkje Hänel has held a fellowship at the Carl and Max Schneider Foundation and at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and works on questions of feminism and social justice. Hilkje Charlotte Hänel What is Rape? Social Theory and Conceptual Analysis Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Typeset by Francisco Bragança, Bielefeld Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4434-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4434-4 Contents Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction | 9 The Philosophical Debate | 16 Structure of the Book | 23 Chapter 1: Contested Rape | 25 1.1 Introduction | 25 1.2 Contestation and Conceptual Problems | 27 1.3 Essentially Contested Concepts | 54 Chapter 2: Rape as a Cluster Concept | 65 2.1 Introduction | 65 2.2 Cluster Theory | 66 2.3 Reconsidering Family Resemblances and Clusters | 74 2.4 Problems | 86 Chapter 3: Emancipatory Amelioration | 95 3.1 Introduction | 95 3.2 Conceptual Amelioration | 98 3.3 Developing Emancipatory Amelioration | 104 3.4 Possible Objections | 120 Chapter 4: Rape and Ideology | 129 4.1 Introduction | 129 4.2 Locating Rape | 130 4.3 Rape and Sexist Ideology | 143 4.4 The Injustice of Rape | 164 Chapter 5: Ameliorating the Concept of Rape | 173 5.1 Introduction | 173 5.2 Emancipatory Amelioration and Rape | 174 5.3 A Cluster Model of Rape | 179 Chapter 6: Accountability and Solidarity | 203 6.1 Introduction | 203 6.2 Hermeneutical Injustice | 206 6.3 Questions of Accountability | 218 6.4 Emancipatory Solidarity | 230 Final Remarks: What to Do? | 249 Bibliography | 255 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Carl and Max Schneider- Stiftung zur Förderung der Philosophie, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, and the Caroline von Humboldt-Programm in funding various stages of this project. The work presented in this book has benefitted enormously from the guidance and support that I received from Mari Mikkola and Sally Haslanger. I am profoundly grateful to each of them for the advice and encouragement they have so generously given me throughout this project. I am also indebted to Jenny Saul for the advice and guidance that paved the way for this project. Furthermore, I am grateful for the support that Gabriel Wollner and Rahel Jaeggi have offered. I would like to thank the following people for helpful comments and stimulating discussions of various ideas presented in this book: Ásta, Linda Alcoff, Emma Atherton, Nancy Bauer, Alisa Bierria, Melanie Brazzel, Anne Burkhardt, Robin Celikates, Matt Congdon, Alice Crary, Esa Díaz-León, Miranda Fricker, Ann Garry, André Grahle, Samia Hesni, Jules Holroyd, Chris Hookway, Daniel James, Abby Jaques, Katharine Jenkins, Maiya Jordan, Rosanna Keefe, Nora Kreft, Odin Kroeger, Resa-Philip Lunau, Deborah Mühlebach, Mirjam Müller, Daniel Muñoz, Ashley Pennington, Lea Prix, Eva von Redecker, Naomi Scheman, Isette Schuhmacher, Ginger Schultheis, Caleb Ward, Eva Weber- Guskar, Ella Whiteley, and many others from the Humboldt-community, the MIT-community, and the Sheffield-community. I benefitted very much from the feedback and discussion that took place at various conferences and workshops; I am grateful to all of the organizers and participants, especially to the participants of Mari’s and of Rahel’s colloquium. Essential assistance with preparing the final text was provided by Jacob Blumenfeld and Christine Bratu. Thank you for your tiredless effort of reading and helping this book to grow. I am grateful to all of my friends, family, and loved ones who have given me support and encouragement of various kinds during the time I was writing this book. Special thanks to Nuria Hoyer-Sepúlveda, Lea Prix, Johanna Müller, Isette Schuhmacher, Christine Bratu—this project would not have been enjoyable without you and I am beyond grateful that you have made my life so 8 What is Rape? much richer in every possible way. And, most importantly, thank you, Jacob Blumenfeld, your love and companionship sustain me always and you make me a better person and a better philosopher. Finally, as always, none of this would have been possible, if not for Ulrike Gerold and Wolfram Hänel. Thank you for truly everything. Introduction Rape is not a new phenomenon. In fact, it is probably as old as the first human beings who walked the earth. Neither is it a new topic to investigate. As long as humans have taken an interest in property, rape has been theorized. And, at least since the first women voiced resistance to being seen as property, the critique of rape was part of the feminist struggle. When the phenomenon of rape became an issue in the feminist struggle for equality and justice, it cast a divide between those who oppose the so-called ‘rape culture’ and those who think that rape culture is a figment of the imagination, an illusion made up by men-hating-feminists. But what is meant by rape culture? It is fraternity brothers chanting “Y is for your sister. O is for oh-so-tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass.” It is teaching girls not to be sexy instead of boys not to rape. It is supporting athletes and celebrities who are charged with rape. It is people who believe that women want to be raped. It is the media substituting the word ‘sex’ for ‘rape’. It is the ubiquity of street harassment. It is the belief that most women lie about being raped. It is rape jokes. It is the fact that committing rape and not serving even a day in prison is a real possibility. It is when women do not feel safe walking the streets alone at night. Or drinking with a friend. Or being at home with their husbands. The list could go on. While very few would actually defend rape, many would not think of this list as particularly problematic. And, while many believe they condone the crime of rape, what they in fact condone are specific forms of rape and not rape per se. What they condone is rape in the form of physically aggravated stranger rape. Not date rape, or marital rape, or drug facilitated acquaintance rape. But the athlete who tries to rape an unconscious girl behind a dumpster, is a very real phenomenon. Or his father who excuses the act as “twenty minutes of action”. Or the Facebook page run by a fraternity that contains pictures of nude and unconscious girls in sexually compromising positions. Or the Steubenville rape victim who was referred to as “dead girl” on social media. Or the girl on a beach in Panama City who was raped while being recorded by by-standers. Or the father who drugged a girl during orientation at Illinois State University so that his son could rape her. Or the girl at St. Paul boarding school who consents 10 What is Rape? while crying. All these are very real phenomenon. They are forms of rape that are far too often not acknowledged as forms of rape. However, the radical feminist stance of categorizing all acts of bad sexual encounters as rape ignores the complexity of rape and sexualized violence1. It ignores cases in which a “Jane Doe” got drunk during her college orientation and texted a friend that she was going to have sex tonight, but the next day felt that she did not want to have sex—in Kelly Oliver’s words, “at least her virgin sober self didn’t want to have sex.” (Oliver 2017) And it ignores the phenomenon that while victims feel violated and morally wronged, the perpetrators are “just having fun”. Rape is not a black-and-white issue and it is far more complex than both sides—those who fight rape culture in every instance and those who think it is an illusion— make it out to be. This book is an investigation into the phenomenon of rape and its conceptualization. It is an attempt to systematically map out and explicate the phenomenon of rape in the world. Part of this investigation shows how the dominant conceptualization of rape and the usage of the term are distorted by so-called rape myths. To counter this problematic conceptualization, the book develops a method that analyzes rape in the social world and proposes a conceptual amelioration of the concept of rape that tracks the phenomenon better. The book attempts to fill a striking gap in the literature on rape. Most of the literature focuses on the moral or legal questions that the phenomenon raises, e.g., what is morally wrong about rape, what is the best legal understanding for it, and so on. However, these are odd questions when the matter of the question—rape—is conceptually and theoretically underspecified. I contend that we have to know what rape is and how to conceptually understand it before we can focus our attention on the moral and legal issues. Furthermore, we have to understand how rape is embedded in the social world, to be able to adequately answer the moral and legal issues that surround it. My aim in this book is to give a rich theory of rape. I propose a method that can resolve conceptual difficulties and account for the ideological embeddedness of the phenomenon of rape.
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