A Philosophical Investigation of Rape: The Making and Unmaking of Feminie Self

The author investigates the symbolic meaning of rape within the context of the globally dominant western symbolic order. Her central argument is that the act of rape takes place within a symbolic order that systematically and symbolically erases or problematizes women's sexual subjectivity, thereby simultaneously erasing and normalizing the damage of rape, which repeats the larger order's erasure of women's sexual subjectivity, an erasure that stems from the dichotomizing of female sexuality and female agency. This central claim is pursued through political, historical, sociosymbolic, and phenomenological-narrative approaches. Diagnostic chapters discuss how South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission replicated the symbolic order's dichotomizing of female sexuality and agency, the normalization of rape through the objectification of female sexuality and the turning of rape into a property crime, and an alternate feminist phenomenological perspective that demonstrates rape as an attack on the conditions for being a self and a subject in the world. She then turns to an exploration of the western symbolic order as constructed in Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Derrida, showing it as a "silencing of the maternal voice" and proposes an alternate symbolic logic that employs the figure of the goddess or the "feminine of the divine" in order to go beyond the monosexual logic of the western symbolic order. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Louise du Toit is senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg. She has published work in the fields of rape and sexual violence, legal philosophy, and ethnic identity.