“Killing Me From the Inside Out:” Heterosexual Rape as the Sexualized Trespass of the Embodied Self

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Embodied Trauma, Death, and Addiction

Abstract

Against a tradition of disembodied scholarship, this paper brings the body back into the study of sexual violence, attending to its corporeal, sensorial, and material dimensions. It does so by advancing a feminist phenomenological theory of heterosexual rape as a form of sexualized bodily trespass that inscribes an indelible mark on the violated body. It argues that by weaponizing sexed/gendered logics of purity and pollution, the forced intercorporeality of rape inflicts not only an assault on the physical body, but a symbolic desecration and existential annihilation of a woman’s embodied self. From a sample of 30 memoirs and 13 anthologies authored by diverse women raped by men, narrators capture how the cisheterosexual imaginary displaces the “contaminant” of rape from the penetrating to the penetrated body. Feeling raped to the core—all the way in—narrators describe futile attempts to restore their breached bodily boundaries and efface the stigma of rape through acts of ritual cleansing.

Author

• Gabrielle Sara LaFleur, Rutgers University