The Spectacle of Child-Rape Exceptionalism

The approach of child-rape-victim exceptionality rests on refusing to think through some admittedly challenging issues; but this refusal resurrects a set of false values in its attempt to isolate the issue of sexual violence in disaggregated spheres. First, infants and children who are raped are seen as having been violated, whereas the sexual assault without penetration of children should be seen as equally pernicious in its own way. This leads us to one dubious outcome of constructing rape as “more extreme” than other forms of sexual assault: the physical evidence of penetration enables voyeurism in a distinctive way, in that it offers an ongoing or remaining sign of the act on the body of the victim. Further, an associated implication of child-rape exceptionalism is that adult women are somehow more able to prevent themselves from being raped than children in all cases, a preconception that is often false, based as it is on the notion that women are always more able to escape men’s aggression than are children. This assumes personal physical strength of the victim to be not only a relevant issue, but the determining factor in sexual assault. Further, the notion that the harm done to an infant or child is somehow “worse” than that done to an adult woman risks normalizing the rape of woman as somehow more acceptable than the rape of children, and implies that adult recovery from rape is less traumatic. Clinically, as the South African experience demonstrates, the harms cannot and should not be ranked in terms of harm: their outcomes are both harmful, but very different.

For example, an infant on a colostomy bag caused by the rupture of their genitalia and digestive tracts through rape has a physical harm that is enormous; yet such infants can recover social interaction and faith in community far more readily than children attacked as they head toward puberty and upward.8 Further, infants, children, adolescents, and women require radically different forms of therapy after assault, as those working with children in communities of high prevalence of sexual assault have pointed out. For example, children often need and wish to talk about the experience with community members, whereas their parents and other elders, in an attempt both to contain stigma and protect the children from stigmatization, often attempt to censor this much-needed discussion. Children can show extraordinary resilience here: while their elders attempt, albeit for good reasons to do with prevention of stigmatization of the child and family, to prevent childhood sexual abuse from entering the speakable, quotidian, discourse of the community, children both want and need to take a different tack, especially when the aggressor has in the past threatened the child with violence if they speak of the sexual aggression. Once the threat of retaliation is removed, the speaking child can do much to heal both self and community. I should emphasize, here, however, that I am not underwriting “the speaking cure” as a panacea for all trauma victim-survivors. I am suggesting that we take a lesson from child-rape-survivor resilience in the model of speaking sexual assault back into the fabric of quotidian life, rather than spectacularizing it through censorship and rendering what I call its effluent quality secret. The idea is not to “traumatize” a public, but to make childhood sexual assault speakable for the benefit of the community, including the child survivor.

Reading Gender-Based Violence as an Environment

I am not suggesting that the kind of out-of-the-box reading I propose here is an easy switch in gears. For those of us who have worked in the applied contexts of massive and enduring trauma, the attractions of reading trauma as a series of singular, catastrophic events are multiple. I speak here from decades of experience of working with victim-survivors of state-sponsored torture in the aftermath of South Africa’s transition to democracy, and with victim-survivors of gender-based coercion and abuse in South Africa during the height of the HIV pandemic, of which the area of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in which I worked was an epicenter. The experience of the HIV context was instructive. There was 33 percent prevalence, according to prenatal testing statistics, at the time. Working alongside the medical professionals, traditional healers, spiritual groups of various sorts, and welfare systems, both government-funded and NGO, we learned that HIV positivity was not an event, but an environment. People were dying more quickly than their families could afford to bury them properly, the hospital morgues and incinerators were overwhelmed, and surgery took place in a context of double-gloving and repeated postexposure prophylaxis that left visiting surgeons from the northern hemisphere feeling scared, underskilled, and clumsy. No one ever died of AIDS, as the stigma was so great that officials producing death certificates would kindly choose (or be bribed into) writing “TB” as the cause of death; and in any event, one doesn’t die of AIDS, but of opportunistic infections.

HIV and fear of AIDS were the fabric in which we lived and worked within a quotidian set of challenges that refused to frame themselves nicely around the genres of individual diagnoses, discrete tragedies, and personal fear. Rather, the experience was of communal exhaustion, communal fear, unspoken but perennial stigma, wild swings between despair as to the usefulness of our work and absolute belief in its essential contribution, and unholy delight in dark humor that formed an element of communal resilience. This is certainly not to claim that individuals were not isolated by virtue of positive HIV diagnosis, or that communal experience trumps despair, or humor triumphs over HIV. Not at all. It is merely to say that HIV was an environment in which events happened; it was not a discrete event in and of itself. And this is still the case today, although the environment has been changed by the introduction of maternal-child prophylaxis, more broadly available HAART treatment, and a change (although not an eradication) in the profiles of stigma in rural communities.

One night, on field research, I had a deep and heated argument with two of my colleagues, one a Canadian South Africanist of decades’ standing with a partner but no children, the other a South African–born Zulu mother of three children. I myself have a partner, but no children. I was making an argument I later put into print, about the fact that I believed the rape of a woman versus an infant is neither better nor worse morally, just different in its clinical outcomes and victim-survivor service needs. We were struggling with the fact that South Africa, a country with one of the highest sexual violence statistics in the world, was expressing horror and disgust at the “events” that came to light in 2002–2003 of multiple infant rapes, usually of infants neglected momentarily or for stretches of time by mothers and grandmothers who were themselves impoverished, lacking social supports, and sometimes substance abusers. The rapists were most frequently gangs of deeply marginalized (homeless, unemployed, substance-abusing) men and boys.

My sense of offense at this response of horror and shock to the “event” of infant rape had to do with the fact that the infant rapes could be considered exceptional only if one were to ignore the prolonged and sustained history of violence against women in South Africa. Indeed, the infant rapes are part of a continuum of violence that is intergenerational and has deep roots in the entanglements of colonial, neocolonial, and postcolonial racist and sexist violence, including the particular forms of familial breakdown coerced into being by the racist forms of industrialization under the European colonial governments and the apartheid regime, not to mention the systems of slavery and indentured labor that undergirded that development.

My Canadian-born South African colleague steadfastly maintained that infant rape would always in some sense be “worse” than the rape of adult women, whereas my South African–born colleague-mother referred to her own motherhood and then stated that “you’re right, Rose; but we can’t go there with you yet in our minds. It’s too hard to bear.” This argument was vehement and fueled by the stresses of working in an environment structured by both endemic HIV and gender-based violence and coercion, just as much as racism. I see both my colleagues’ responses as attempts, in a sense, to prevent the spread of gender-based trauma out of what is perceived to be the exceptional horror of infant rape and into the broader spectrum of gender-based violence, including sexual assault of females and males, children and adults. This response may also reflect an investment in framing our research subject (GBV) more in terms of a series of “events” rather than a structural challenge, in order for us to make GBV prevention and the provision of services for its treatment “manageable” in order for us to employ a bubble-type strategy of containment.

Indeed, this notion of illness as event rather than environment more broadly construed is a limitation public health itself is confronting, as fifth-wave public health theory attests. Fifth-wave public-health theory, discussed in further detail in the following chapter, argues that the major challenges for public health in contemporary times are themselves symptoms of modern ways of life, and as such, are compound challenges that do not offer the cause-and-effect simplicity of, say, John Snow removing the handle of a water pump to curtail the outbreak of cholera in 1854 Soho in London. We did come to conceptualize the project’s understanding of GBV as a continuum, in which, for example, the societal acceptability of verbal abuse, which is often regarded as less offensive and therefore more acceptable than physical abuse, cannot be separated from “events” of physical GBV, including but not limited to rape, as the physical cannot be extracted from the context constituted by the systemic oppression of infants, girls, women, boys, and men perceived for whatever reason to be challenging masculinist, heterosexist authority.

Being in one of the first teams in rural KZN to work on gender-based violence in HIV settings, with that conjunction as a driving factor of the research, made me realize how valuable this experience of HIV as environment, not event, was. In 2003, when we began the GBV work in earnest, the largest concern was an event-based understanding of the rape of women and children as the traumatic event. This was supported by the series of child- and infant-rape scandals that were hitting the newspapers in South Africa at the time, as well as the heritage of the tendency of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to view a girl or woman’s rape as the “foundational trauma” of her testimony. As with HIV, GBV is similarly not simply a series of events, but an environment in which we work. Female victim-survivors understand this in their rejection of the formation of rape as the foundational trauma of womanhood, indicating their essential vulnerability and gendered identity. This attitude meant that men whose torture had taken the form of object and other kinds of rape who testified at the TRC never bore witness to being rape victim-survivors: they would say they were tortured, but not raped, further consolidating the erroneous notion that a woman’s inherent physiology makes her a potential or actual rape victim but men cannot be raped, an obviously false aspect of a disturbing heteronormative configuration of rape. The man cannot be raped, because then he becomes feminized.

Subsequent work on the TRC—that of Fiona Ross, Antjie Krog, and my own among others—has since registered and objected to the expectation of how women were to talk about their sexual assault (Krog 1998; Ross 2002; Jolly 2010). These expectations involved requiring a woman to speak of her sexual assault as if it were a nonsystemically generated event, but rather “personal,” and as if there were no life after rape for the woman and as if rape is still currently (at the time of testimony) the woman’s greatest challenge (as opposed to the crises of food security for her children or education for them). Feminist critiques of these expectations have since gone some way to dislodge the assumption of “the rape” as the foundational trauma of the lives of girls and women who suffer a series of traumatic events in their lives, and who did/do not always see their rape (or rapes) as emblematic in the way in which the deeply gendered views of the TRC trained that community to hear as foundational traumatic events in testimony.

Such is the power generated by the generic expectations of readers and listeners: that it can willfully reshape testimony within the testifier’s repeated, explicit, and accessible protestations to the contrary. The momentum to override victim-survivors’ self-expressed needs is symptomatic of paternalistic approaches that assume victim-survivors, whether adult or child, lose their brains along with their entire sense of self at the moment of victimization. Further, the dependence on how those other than the victim-survivors construe the traumatic “event” also plays into hierarchies of victims: why are certain rapes worthy of reporting in the newspapers and others merely attributable to the generalized violence of the poor, the racialized, the Aboriginal-ized, and the lower classes? One response would be that the need to confine trauma within the bounds of discrete events is symptomatic of imaginations that either cannot or refuse to construe systemic oppression as traumatic because it does not conform to the “event” model, as such construal would indeed be “trauma out of bounds,” as Stef Craps has suggested (2013). Trauma out of bounds, which is what I am advocating here, sees violence, including sexual assault, within the context of structural violence, the context of the structural violence under my lens being settler-colonial capitalism. Our focus, then, is not a foundational traumatic event, but an environment in and of itself.

The “Value” of Foundational Events in Narrative and Diagnostic Trauma Theory

The history of the development of trauma theory can be seen as a history of repeated substitutions of the investments of viewers, readers, and audiences, often professionals attached to these activities, such as critics, doctors, therapists, psychoanalysts, archivists, for those of the traumatized subject(s) whose interests such professionals and other empathetic persons assume they are supporting, or even advancing, in their descriptions of traumatic events. While others have pointed out the problems with the constitution of trauma as an event, rather than a series of “quasi-events” with no beginning or end in sight, we owe it to ourselves, as humanist scholars with aspirations to humanitarianism, to take into account the ways in which the genre of trauma as singular, overwhelming event emerged in the academy as an interest of a group of humanist scholars at the same time that the humanities themselves were being broadly recognized to be “in crisis,” owing to their inability to conform readily to instrumentalist assumptions about what should constitute the proper “job” of tertiary education.

Trauma theory coming out of humanities departments in the 1980s and 1990s linked traumatic event to narrative in ways that invoked a particularly strict sequence of tense in narrative that I contend has arguably more to do with the power of modernist/postmodernist paradigms in Western humanities departments, dependent upon a core set of culturally specific and obviously culturally apprehended “crises,” such as agnosticism/atheism and the Holocaust, than it has to do with identifying a transhistorical and/or transglobal set of narrative forms that can be confidently associated with either the diagnosis of trauma, on the one hand, or its “working through,” on the other. This has to do with a substitution of a particular configuration of the relations between trauma and narrative in Western academies for the task of imagining trauma otherwise, elsewhere, and in other times. The tendency of trauma theory to short-circuit its own ethical potential through invocation of the exigency of the trauma in question, or what I think of as an addiction to the genre of trauma as a singular, overwhelming event, is a repeated pattern in the hiccupped history of its development.

One of these hiccups has to do with the fact that an addiction to the generic understanding of trauma as a singular event demands exemplary singular events, the choice of which immediately bears witness to the colonial imaginary of the Western academy: the identification of such exemplary events is deeply logo-centric, the Holocaust or 9/11 being cases in point. In this dependence on a “founding trauma,” the trauma is offered as a founding experience for an individual or a generation, but it emerges as the founding trauma, or at most a set of founding traumas, depended on by the theory itself, and well within the investments of the North American academy in terms of its archetypal referents. That is to say, what is determined as an archetypal referent says more about those determining it to be archetypal than it does about what a global economy of trauma might look like, were the dominance of Western catastrophe to be somehow neutralized. For example, while Dominick LaCapra acknowledges the centrality of the Holocaust throughout his work, and acknowledges that the focus on the Holocaust could indeed mask unpalatable traumas closer to home, such as slavery (and, we might propose, “rape” or sexual assault culture), he nevertheless asserts that “slavery, like the Holocaust, nonetheless presents, for a people, problems of severe traumatization, a divided heritage, the question of a founding trauma, the forging of identities in the present, and so forth” (2014, 174). Craps comments on this insistence on a foundational trauma and its dubious claims to comprehensiveness via analogy: “Slavery, apartheid, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are occasionally mentioned alongside the Holocaust—for example, as instances of ‘founding trauma’ ” (2013, 81), but “in general these other histories play a very limited role in [LaCapra’s] book” (10).

Here I argue that the remedy is not one of simple supplementation—add non-Western traumatic events and stir—but a critical investigation of how the traumatic event came to be defined as such within the confines of Western academic and medical collaborations over the definition of event-based/foundational trauma. The selection of sexual assault as a test case makes the limitations of traditional trauma theory even more visible than the easier-to-render analogies of slavery, apartheid, and the atomic bomb, largely because the personalization of sexual assault within the genre of the “foundational trauma” highlights its isolation from considerations of structural, intersectional violence. This insistence on a foundational traumatic event, rather than a sequence of events, can have negative consequences in the treatment of childhood-trauma survivors, where children who experience one traumatic event demonstrate far more resilience than those who experience repeated trauma, even when ensuing trauma is not necessarily (repeated) sexual assault.9

I once cosupervised a PhD student who insistently wanted to research the violence endured by women in rural KZN within the framework of interpersonal violence (IPV). The wish was particularly to research whether women were being beaten by their intimate partners particularly when they disclosed to those partners that they were HIV positive. Despite my advice to the contrary, the student decided to run a set of interviews on this question. I fully acknowledge that the investment as a PhD student in public health was informed by the fact that the IPV model was (and in some places, remains) the dominant model for addressing partner violence. But the questionnaire responses provided little by way of connection between “I am HIV-positive” and “I am being abused,” to the extent that this approach had to be abandoned. This was because women do not necessarily know why they are being beaten, especially in a context in which what is called IPV occurs both prior to and after events that we might think of as key beginning and ending points, or founding traumas, such as an HIV diagnosis; the women themselves experience the abuse as duration, not as an event with a beginning and end. Further, one cannot assume that perpetrators “know” why they are beating their partners. There is, in this sense, no founding traumatic event. The contextual factors in this case are the dispossession of Black, rural men under British colonial and apartheid regimes, the continuance of that dispossession after apartheid, and the colonial teaching, entrenched in Black communities by the long durée of various forms of colonization, that respect is a zero-sum game (Jolly 2010).

The “founding trauma” concept is codependent with definitions of traumatic events as they are given in medical terms, most especially in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now in its fifth edition (DSM-5), which has a history of moving from earlier conceptualizations of diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as based on a singular event that occurs as an exception to quotidian experience to a new concept of multiple-traumatic-event exposure. While the DSM-5 has expanded the singular-event conceptualization of traumatic syndromes, the conceptualization has maintained its paradigmatic status in both diagnostic manuals and trauma theory concerned with outlining the relation of narrative to traumatic event, even where it is recognized that multiple-traumatic-event exposure can occur.10 Once again, I suggest that this is in part the role the humanities took during the rise of trauma theory to define narrative studies in terms of the late-capitalist logic of the usefulness of trauma, since a narrative event or symptom, such as silence, conforms to the generic configuration of trauma as a medical event: both can be identified, recognized, and in fact “diagnosed,” then treated with pharmaceuticals and/or various forms of narrative therapy.11 Most notable in terms of influence in this regard is indeed LaCapra, whose work on the Shoah has been instrumental in contemporary constructions of how to read silences not only in fictional narratives, but in personal ones (see for example, LaCapra 2016, 2004, 1994). Further, the categorization of trauma as event-based, rather than environmentally contextualized through intersectional readings of structural violence, will never be able to see trauma within the framework of fifth-wave public-health theory, as traumatic experience is the symptom, and the environment itself the cause.

Event-based trauma analyses, then, are consonant nonintersectional “diagnoses” of rape as nonintergenerational and isolated from other events of sexual assault and abuse.12 These diagnoses may have been overdetermined by concentration on the classifications of the sex and/or sexual orientation of both perpetrator and victim, and age of victim, as I argue happened in the Sandusky case. In the remainder of this chapter, I reflect on changes required to situate “trauma” as a valid term within actual sexual assault victim-survivors’ lives. In order to register the impacts of both structural violence and intergenerational trauma, I propose we need to rethink perpetration and victimization in terms that exceed the individual, and ditch assumptions that trauma attaches only to the victim side of the perpetrator–victim dyad. That is to say, we need to see ourselves as having been traumatized, the symptom of which is our insistence on seeing victim-survivors as having had exceptional experiences. What’s in it for us in adopting this false view is that it enables us to overlook the ubiquity of sexual violence in order to, first, render ourselves safe both from conceiving of ourselves as potential perpetrators or victims and, second, have a containment strategy that views rape as exceptional so it can continue to believe that the normal life excludes not only rape perpetration and victimization, but also gender-based coercion of all kinds.

Traumatic Histories within a Global Comparative Framework: Deconstructing Spectator/Reader Privilege

To see traumatic events as part of ongoing histories of oppression, rather than exceptional events—inconceivable, immoral ruptures in the fabric of history—is in part to expose the assumption that persons grounded in the supposedly relatively “safe” spaces of the “first” and “second” worlds have access to personal safety. It is also to encourage comprehension of complicities in both perpetration and victimhood that exceed the present moment and the category of the individual. In other words, we need to reconceive of traumatic time and space as the spatial, temporal, material, spiritual, and political reality that many inhabit, not as a singular event visited on them in a past that needs to be put in the past, narratively speaking, for the trauma to be “worked through” “successfully.”

If, as Rob Nixon argues in his 2011 Slow Violence, what makes environmental harm so challenging to recognize is its failure to conform to the genre of the singular, spectacular, traumatic event, instead revealing itself in the scales of intergenerational (or even geological) time and in nonspectacular increments, then I am proposing we consider the slow violence of living within sexual-coercion trauma: trauma as an experience of cumulative “quasi-events,” as Elizabeth Povinelli terms them, rather than the traumatic event, such as sexual assault, as a singular, spectacular exception. The failure of the imagination posed by the exceptional approach, I have argued above, has to do with the refusal of the privileged, or more accurately self-assumed privileged, observer of the trauma to see the traumatic event as exemplary of certain forms of catastrophic, unsustainable structural violence. Here, the trauma observer prefers the fetishization of victimization without the entanglements of radical, systemic transformation that would change the material, intergenerational conditions of the structural violence that produce traumatic duration as (intergenerationally) lived experience, and without framings of traumatic experience and resilience as mutually inclusive categories.

Berlant offers one of the most trenchant critiques of trauma theory focused on trauma as event. Her argument appears to be akin to Povinelli’s, in that they both reject the extraordinary, singular identification of trauma described in the work of LaCapra and Cathy Caruth. What such critics see is the failure of trauma theory to account for suffering that is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” (Povinelli 2011, 3). Povinelli writes from her position as a companion both in social projects in the United States and in daily life with the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, while Berlant confines her critique, explicitly so in her 2011 Cruel Optimism, to the Unites States and Europe. In Berlant’s case, the turn away from trauma theory is grounded in the understanding that trauma-as-singular-event entrenches a liberal sentiment based in a profoundly conservative optics of spectacularized suffering, described in her 2001 “Subject of True Feeling.” Yet her work depends on an assumption that the spectators in such instances are already living, or believe themselves to be living, in a context of relative privilege and isolation from the time and space of the catastrophic events. This means that the spectators always envision themselves as observers of atrocity, in this case sexual assault, including rape, and not as potential victims or perpetrators.

Further, while it does not explicitly make this claim, Berlant’s work (both “The Subject of True Feeling” and the subsequent Cruel Optimism) appears to assume that all relatively privileged citizens of the late liberal era (or those who identify themselves as such) can address the suffering of the other only through a politics of recognition that frames bearing witness to such suffering through the optics of sympathetic subject and traumatized “object.” (Whether this is because she actually believes this to be so or because it’s the only dynamic she describes, remains unclear.) Her references in this instance include issues such as child-soldiers in Africa and garment workers in India; she points out that the vast geography of such an optics of sympathetic spectacularization prevents solidarity between members of communities at home in the United States, when disparities in wealth and other resources result in what I am calling, after Povinelli’s influence, the “grotty” trauma of the quotidian (2011, 3).

Berlant’s compelling reading of trauma in “Subject of True Feeling” positions the spectator as politically embedded in late liberalism in a commodity culture that cannot deliver on the promise of the “good life.” In her configuration, the suffering spectacle or object, which is actually the primary subject of the trauma in her argument, is displaced/misplaced elsewhere either spatially, temporally, or both; she is either too far away or too close to home to be recognized within an actual politics of affect grounded in communal resilience; she is either the incinerated garment worker (too far away) or the single mother, imprisoned for being too poor to pay fines (dangerously close to home in terms of pure geographical proximity, perhaps, but distanced by the barriers of an assumed middle-class decency.) What Berlant overlooks is yet another “switch and bait” move in the development of trauma theory and its responses, in that she writes as if all North American inhabitants have only emerging genres of how to deal with their own suffering under late liberalism.

This is an assumption that carries its own late-liberal misconceptions in the name of displacing those very misconceptions, in that many Aboriginal, postslavery, and migrant postcolonial communities have intergenerational knowledge and the genres to go with them capable of apprehending the late-liberal present not as a deepening shadow whose genres have yet to be developed for it to be understood, but instead as a belated repetition of colonial trauma proper to those who invested in the state and individual property rights in the first place. This does not include all North American inhabitants. Here I am thinking of Aboriginal literatures that include reproductions of administrative authorities as naive to the point of foolish, as we see in Wright’s Uptowners of the next chapter, or Armand Ruffo’s Catholic priest in the film A Wendigo Story. I am also thinking of how Wright and Ruffo’s narratives not only know but also embody the fact that colonialist culture brings with it the patriarchy of entitlement through not only land ownership, but also the presumptive ownership of women’s and children’s bodies under the guise of patriarchal protection. I am also thinking of the conventional reading of Appalachian communities as apathetic in their apparently mystifying refusal to either “develop” or “be developed,” without an understanding that their relation to their land is one of co-constituted identity over generations, which makes moving to take up work in a city or destroying the land in the service of industrialization inconceivable—they refuse neocolonial-capitalist “protection” in its destructive capacities.

When the abuse of women and children in sexual violation is mourned in many social spheres, it may appear as caring for those victims as persons; but it may also in fact be outrage at the rape of bodies presumed to be in the ownership of, and under the protection of, the patriarchal family and its mirrored structures in the state and university governance. This means that, when sexually aggressive behaviors, such as Trump’s self-described “locker room talk,”13 coincide with the identity of the president of the country, he appears in public discourse to be comparatively exempt from the outings of the sexual coercion and assault of other men of his generation. We have yet to see, then, whether the current outing of hyperpowerful men as predatory in the United States under the “#Me Too” movement actually eventuates into changed structures of business and governance that have hitherto formed pathways for accepting and managing the fallout of high-profile accusations, such as nondisclosure agreements paid for by companies and the U.S. government.

Patriarchal protectionism explains to some degree why the sexual assault of students has become such an issue in recent years, in that students are associated with the stereotypical vulnerable subject: they are young, are away from the presumed (but not necessarily actual) safe space of home, often have reasonable-to-good socioeconomic status, and are adolescent. In this respect, the Obama children were the exemplary potential victims “in need of” protection. As adolescents, university students are conceived of as that impossible subject who is both supposedly autonomous yet entrusted to the university for “safe-keeping.” Trafficked women, Aboriginal women, migrant women, and those of other low-socioeconomic-status groups are far less numerous on a campus such as mine than are middle- and upper-class women whose families can afford a university education, or at least afford, or think of affording, the debt burden that follows in its wake. This makes me suspicious of the isolation of the campus rape from other spaces and places of sexual violence in North America. While I would never turn down advocacy to prevent rape anywhere, including university campuses, this does not mean that I cannot view critically the recent focus on female students. Are such students more valuable than trafficked women, in the same way that children are perceived of as more “valuable” than adult women when it comes to rape prevention? Is the exercise in “saving our female students” yet another performance of the patriarchal desire to “save” the child from becoming damaged goods, rather than to pay attention to the structural violence of patriarchy itself?

These are women who receive a double message from society and parents alike: be whatever you want to be and don’t get pregnant; don’t get raped; don’t get drunk; don’t become spoiled goods. Or, as one State College high-school student explained to me, “My parents tell me I can be whatever I want and go wherever I want; but they also say I mustn’t go near Penn State on football weekends because I won’t be safe.” This contradiction takes a slightly different form in rape-prevention work on campuses: women must be careful not to get drunk or imbibe liquids laced with rape drugs such as Rohipnol, and if sex is forced upon them without their consent, even if they are unable to form consent, the man is responsible, but because the law is based on consent being formed or not formed between two people, and the inebriated cannot form consent, these cases have notoriously low prosecution and conviction rates. At stake is who is in a better position to claim the protection of citizenship.

Think, for example, of the repeated scandals of football players being released from potential prosecution for sexually assaulting women because of the commodity value they hold for their institutions. While such players may indeed be regarded as privileged in this situation, the fact remains that, even as perpetrators, their status as commodity, just as their purported victims’ status as commodity, is what makes their fate a context they share with those purported victims, not a consideration of them as human beings on a perilous trajectory from adolescence to adulthood.

There is a vulnerability to perpetration, but it manifestly lies too little in the area of consequences when commodity value is at stake. We see this vulnerability play out spectacularly in cases in which gifted players from underprivileged backgrounds are suddenly thrown into the spotlight owing to their commodity value for their universities. Any youth navigating such a dramatic change in social, cultural, and material circumstances would find this challenging, let alone in an environment such as the United States. The common reluctance to discuss racial privilege, among other forms of inequity, in the name of a supposedly already-achieved nonracialism in the sports arena, as well as the fact that talking about it with affected individuals is difficult, makes such discussions exceptionally challenging, if not virtually impossible. Here the presumed remaindered or “effluent” player is rendered a full citizen supposedly through his “gift,” but actually through the value of the commodification of that gift. What is rendered effluent here is the adolescent himself: he “falls out of” the fiction of full manhood, fully gifted, full citizenship. In this respect, the $950k paid by the University of South Florida to the purported victim of Jameis Winston can be seen as a form of fine for refusing to deal with Winston-as-effluent as opposed to Winston-as-sports-hero, winner of the Heisman and other trophies.

My point is not to call Winston an effluent character in terms of Judith Butler’s current theories of disposability or ungrievablity. Indeed, his salary in 2017 was $615k. Instead, I aim to supplement Butler’s argument by claiming that those seen as valuable through commodification, such as sports heroes, themselves become nongrievable in that their failings or losses can be registered only ever in relation to their performance as players, in relation to their commoditized value. That is to say, their failures are regarded as threats to, or actual loss of, their commodity value. I am not giving my key term, effluence, a negative connotation, but precisely the opposite: once the patronizing spectacularization of victims and the demonization of perpetrators is put in context, one can see that what remains in excess of viewing the perpetrator or victim as a commodity is that which has value in and of itself, regardless of social bias: the remainder-as-effluent.

Indeed, one can use Povinelli’s concentrations on the tense of late-liberal notions of citizenship to construct a decolonial critique of some of the assumptions that frame Berlant’s nevertheless astute observations about the conservative workings of sentimentality in the wake of the entrenchment of trauma-as-event as the dominant genre for managing suffering—more specifically, the suffering of “others”—in the United States in the past three decades. One can also use the debate I am staging between the work of Povinelli and Berlant to begin to frame the questions: How do we begin to envision what is left out in framing suffering as either failing or that which is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy”? How do we frame effluence outside of this binary? How is sexual assault not exceptional, and how do we deal with that fact without confusing the ubiquitous with the acceptable? (Not that Povinelli makes this error, it should be noted.) In other words, how do we describe a world in which the spatiotemporal distinctions between that ordinary, chronic suffering and that which is catastrophic decrease rapidly and occasionally collapse into one another?

This “remainder,” or “effluent,” as I call such unspeakable collusions between catastrophic and cruddy, is important material. Its connections between the quotidian and the meaningful event are capable of giving the lie to formulations of chronological time on which the projects of eschatological Christianity, empire, nationalism, and late liberalism all subsist; and the genre of trauma-as-event lies within this deeply limited framing of tense. To bring it home: for the trafficked woman, the woman in an abusive relationship, the child in an abusive home, sexual assault is not normally a rape, but a continuum of abuse that includes multiple rapes and other forms of sexual assault; and she knows she may well not be valuable enough to command respect in this situation, let alone a successful chance of prosecution of her abuser. In many instances, it may be more comforting to suffer the abuse than risk society reminding her of how valueless she is by refusing to hear her voice and/or refusing her the material conditions to escape her abjected world.

The remainder, meaning the conjunction of the cruddy and catastrophic in which the actual experience of repeated trauma, including sexual trauma both from perpetrator and victim positions (which may well be exchanged through time), also suggests ways in which we can begin to address the suffering of others outside of the framework described by Berlant. That is, we can begin to conceive of bearing witness to suffering in spatiotemporal formulations that exceed the structure dictated by the optics of spectacularization, with its attendant substitution of the seen suffering (the raped child, for example) as object in place of the subject, the viewer as the never-have-been and never-to-be perpetrator or victim. Further, we can begin to think beyond spectacularization’s attribution of the suffering of the privileged-world viewing “witness” as invariably the consequence of secondary trauma produced by the suffering of those with whom s/he is not co-incident (the rape victim of disaster in a far-flung corner of the world; the rape victim in the sociopolitical apartheid of the slum next door; the raped student; the sexually abused child). Indeed, we can begin to see the politics of spectacular witnessing as dependent on a refusal to see the viewing subjects as themselves mired in traumas properly attributable not only to the cruel optimism of late liberalism, but rather to late liberalism as a product of colonial commodification.

The politics of spectacular sympathy produces the suffering of the privileged-world viewer as secondary trauma. Secondary trauma is commonly defined as the effects of seeing a traumatic event in which one cannot intervene or cannot intervene to the benefit of the victim(s). This formulation of secondary trauma can actively disguise a form of suffering on the part of the viewer that is primary to that viewer and related to their embeddedness in a set of values that always produces material wealth as a place of unsufferability. The history of late liberalism not only as cruel optimism, but as product of colonial commodification, provides an alternative in terms of a historical long durée, or prehistory, to that which Berlant outlines.

This history and the critical genres for its telling are available in the form of the persistence of communities who live, and have always lived, outside the promise of the (eventual) good life proffered by the supposedly redemptive teleologies of colonization and its descendant, late liberalism. These redemptive technologies can be named, in view of this alternative history, as a set of ways of being in the world that are profoundly neocolonial in their material, moral, and social regimes. This is the knowledge, the epistemology, of those who already know themselves to be effluent, in the sense of being immaterial to the ruling regimes and genres of commodified settler colonialism.

Effluent Epistemology as a Basis for Sexual Assault Prevention and Healing: Body-Mapping and Forum Theater as Effluent-Enabling Interventions

With this effluent option for reenvisioning the meaning of sexual coercion and assault on the horizon, I now return to the challenge I posed earlier: the need to extend trauma theory beyond its Freudian origins in the therapist–victim-survivor dyad and the Western juridical and moral models that tend to assign trauma only to the victim side of the perpetrator–victim dyad. Michael Rothberg points out that “the categories of victim and perpetrator derive from either moral or legal discourse, but the concept of human trauma emerges from a diagnostic reality that lies beyond guilt and innocence, good and evil” (2009, 90). The problem here is twofold.

First, it would be appropriate for Rothberg to say the concept of human trauma should emerge from a diagnostic reality that extends beyond guilt and innocence, good and evil, rather than to claim that it does. That is to say, much of the energy and ethical imperative or urgency of trauma studies is invested in advocacy on the part of the victim-survivor; exploring the intergenerational condition of systemic trauma that leads to victims becoming perpetrators is a far less popular activity. Victim and victim-survivor support are far more attractive than the preventative resources that lie in the histories of perpetrators.

Second, to see traumatic events and their perpetrators as parts of ongoing histories of oppression, rather than exceptional events that erupt as inconceivable, immoral ruptures in the fabric of human history, entails a reworlding of the genres of modernism and postmodernism. A modernist rhetoric of origins that resurrects the crises of human morality in terms of secularism, industrialization, and the First and Second World Wars, is a profoundly Western set of generic concerns. It also depends on an eccentric, not to mention absurd, alliance of the integrated psyche of the individual with a mythic original wholeness fractured by the (very culturally specific) crises of Western modernism.

The refusal of the trauma of the perpetrator also rests on a transnational appeal, unfortunately not nearly so globally specific, to the socio/psychopath as the common perpetrator of traumatic harm—Harris’s “monster”—rather than the perpetrator who either is a victim-survivor of systemic harm or is trained to perform that harm through professional or other modeling, or both. It is always a relief to my students when I explain to them that the specialists in the “dirty tricks” of the apartheid regime had to be trained to overcome their aversion to torturing, maiming, and killing other nonhuman animals: they started with small rodents and worked their way up through dogs and horses to violence against humans. They required training to overcome the common inhibition to wound others. While humans are not inherently moral, they are not inherently bound toward violence either. Of course, there are sociopaths who inflict traumatic harm; but professional torturers for the most part require training to overcome basic inhibitions against the deliberate maiming and killing of others.

The refusal to explore the trauma of the perpetrator has much to do with a terror of perpetratorhood trauma expressed in moral terms. Yet this terror, like the terror attached to infant rape, both masks our refusal, in lateral terms, to acknowledge communal perpetratorhood and victimization in conditions of structural violence in which we become complicit, often with little awareness of doing so, and masks our refusal, in historical terms, to identify intergenerationally with entangled histories, presents, and futures of perpetratorship and victimization. It’s far easier to delimit the subjectivity of victims and perpetrators within the containment strategy of individual subjectivity. Easier by far to contain the traumatic event to a singular moment in time. However, this means limiting sexual-coercion prevention to a structural inequity in which females are always encouraged to see themselves as potential victims, whereas men are not encouraged to see themselves as potential perpetrators because they are too busy being told how to save young women from rape as a prevention strategy. Why would any young man ever be brought to see himself as a potential perpetrator within the steadfast vision of man-as-protector posed by the majority of prevention programs? Why the steadfast avoidance of “shame” in the instantiation of the perpetrator and the endurance of cultures of “shame” around victim-survivors?

In my 2010 Cultured Violence, I argued that there is a reason for the supposed shame experienced by sexual assault victim-survivors. I rehearse and add to that argument here. Following Butler, the rape victim-survivor is often seen to be ashamed. In the apprehension of the victim-survivor who seeks anonymity as if she had herself “done something wrong,” the world of speakable discourse, following Butler, implicitly realizes this retreat from public view as a recognition of her devaluation. Yet, in feminist terms, it is seen as the ramblings of the insane attributable to the unspeakable, in that the raped subject “should not” see herself as ashamed. The lack of meaning comes from the notion that she, the victim-survivor, is in fact insane to attribute blame to herself within feminist terms. However, in this quintessential moment of misrecognition by a public entrenched in the structural violence that devalues victims, the survivor loses the witness to her harm that Oliver argues is so crucial to the affirmation of those who bear witness to their own violation: “Our experience is meaningful for us, only if we can imagine that it is meaningful to others. Creating or finding meaning for oneself is possible only through the internalization of meaning for others” (2001, 83).

Giorgio Agamben, drawing heavily upon the writings of Primo Levi and others in relation to survivors of the death camps, argues in his 1998 Homo Sacer that the shame experienced by the survivors is not that of “survivor guilt,” because it has nothing to do with the culpable states of either guilt or innocence. Instead, this shame derives from “being assigned to something [let us say, using Oliver’s vocabulary, a subject position] from which we cannot in any way distance ourselves” (105). Here shame is specifically not an assertion of responsibility on the part of victim-survivor for her violation; it is instead her registering of the impossibility of her distancing herself from the subject position to which she has been consigned by a publicly constituted visibility that sees her exclusively as (the raped) woman. She sees herself being seen as that which is not coincident with her sense of herself.

This moment is characterized by the double movement in which, simultaneously, the subject, by instantiating herself as a subject within what Butler calls the domain of the speakable, is at that very moment witness to her own desubjectification:

Here the “I” is thus overcome by its own passivity, its ownmost sensibility; yet this expropriation and desubjectification is also an extreme and irreducible presence of the “I” to itself. It is as if our consciousness collapsed and, seeking to flee in all directions, were simultaneously summoned by an irrefutable order to be present at its own defacement, at the expropriation of what is most its own. In shame the subject thus has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame. (Agamben 1998, 105–6)

The framework constructed through a theoretical triangulation of Butler, Oliver, and Agamben allows us to read such shame as the victim-survivor’s recognition of her own irrelevance to the social order in which she finds herself. This irrelevance is thrown in her face when her violation cannot be registered because she is, at best, a quasi-subject, whose violation is therefore a quasi-violation—itself, tellingly, an impossibility. As we have seen, the victim-survivor’s awareness of her impropriety as a subject in the order in which she finds herself is registered by her, in narrative form, in the tropes of shame in terms of the public view of her. The tropes that appear when she reflects on her own position of being an impossible subject are those of insanity.

The healing task then becomes the engagement of the effluent remainder of this process: the sense of self of the victim that lies between the social sense, the structurally violent forms of shame and abjection, and the crushing subjective perception of one’s abject status as constructed by those forms. This is a tiny space, and in my experience, it requires trust and great skill on the part of the survivor and their allies to grow that space. It also requires cohort-building among victim-survivors who have themselves borne witness to their own desubjectification, overcoming the trauma of that desubjectification through sharing the experience of it with others who, in Oliver’s terms, affirm the subject’s experience. In this context, I find two of the activities most proven to succeed in this arena are forum theater and body-mapping, as both provide space for mutual affirmation and exploration of the roles and effects of perpetrators and stigmatizers consonant with structural violence on the collective beings of survivors. The opening of this space is accomplished through the persistence of the effluent, which in this specific context I define as an embodied epistemology of co-constituted subjectivity that exceeds the double moment of subjectification and desubjectification of Agamben, which is does by creating alternative modes of affirmation: modes of affirmation that are not defined by the coincidence of the speakable and the insane in the construction of the violated subject as, simultaneously, not supposed to be feeling shame (“it’s not your fault you were raped”) and absolutely supposed to be feeling shame (“there is something about you that makes you improper, something you did that enabled you to be violated, despite the order of our lives, so we approve when you exhibit the appropriate shame in our presence. It relieves us”).

Forum theater, pioneered by Augusto Boal in the 1970s, is used to enable youth to develop a body language (which ultimately moves to include spoken language) to communicate what survivors see as the key issues in their communities. Following Butler’s research on the speakable as the terrain of the empowered/unstigmatized, it follows that new gestures, new languages, or very old languages not usually recognized within the sphere of the normate are needed for survivors to express their fears and desires outside the realm of the speakable, which brings with it the gaze of judgment and censorship that restricts activities of self-expression before they can even be thought. Groups are encouraged to use their bodies to interact with one another in the first instance without spoken language, to enable novel languages of movement and attitude to be borne and/or practiced. They then develop scenarios that express their thoughts, fears, needs, hopes, and dreams using each other’s bodies to formulate the gestures of a story. Eventually the story is developed into a basic scenario in which any participant can “roll back” the action to produce a different outcome. In this sense, forum theater provides an arena of communal rehearsal of scenarios feared and dreamed, enabling survivors to envision themselves differently: not simply as reactors to an oppressive set of institutionalized judgments, but as literally authors of their own stories, for which they seek reflection and support from their survivor cohort as commenters, intervenors, and enablers. The movement from survivors’ perceptions of themselves as actual or potential instruments of exploitation can be navigated instead through self-perceptions of decision-making ability, skills-building, self-esteem, and empathy needed for positive outcomes in the face of serious forms of structural violence.

Body-mapping takes place in workshops of eight or thereabouts. It originated and was used in mapping the progress of early highly-active-antiretroviral-therapy (HAART) patients who are HIV-positive in South Africa, where the body-maps did bear witness to scenes of GBV, despite the explicit focus on HAART (Solomon 2008), and has been piloted in an initiative to support survivors who are writers and poets in Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Each workshop participant works on a life-size outline of their body, supported by trained facilitators; or the facilitator draws the outline. The participants then fill in their body-maps in relation to a series of carefully queued questions about personal histories, vulnerabilities, and areas of resource and resilience. No previous art training is required, although the body-maps can turn out to be striking. Body-mapping is a very intimate space, and the appropriate supports, such as special ethics for highly vulnerable populations, the potential for triggers, and other potential supports needed arising from body-mapping are planned for in advance. The process produces cohort-building among stigmatized groups and a strong sense of how survivors see their bodies and how they see themselves being seen by others and raises consciousness of these self- and social lenses.

With the permission of the creators, the body-maps and some portions of the forum theater—usually advanced segments of the performance workshop—may then be used to facilitate group and community discussion at the level of structural determinants of vulnerability, impossibility, support, and possibility. That is to say, they can be presented in facilitated workshops in which potential and as-yet-unidentified actual perpetrators of gender-based violence are offered the opportunity to bear witness to the effects of its structural and interpersonal harms. These activities have more hope of success than normate behavior-change interventions, many of which are based on a model of “Don’t do this” because it is illegal or morally wrong or will be bad for you, as opposed to an approach that explores the realm of what can happen if one (the third-person singular generic, not the potentially accusatory second-person you) does engage the spectrum of gender-based violence in the full range, from implicit verbal threat to explicit sexual assault. (Here I am also careful to explain that the range does not imply a range of less to more damaging behaviors, as harmfulness depends on more factors that involve both rhetorical and physical violence in all their combinations thereof, and is context-specific to each case.)

I would additionally propose that these activities are also highly valuable to undertake with groups in which unidentified perpetrators, victim-survivors, and potential perpetrators and victim-survivors, as well as those who may have occupied both positions at different times, are likely to be present. I once was involved in a forum theater workshop with youth at high risk of perpetration and victimization in gender-based violence in rural KZN. I remember two scenarios vividly. One occurred when we asked the youth to give us “body pictures” of the troubles they saw in their community. They set up what was obviously a shebeen (informal pub) scene where, in a valley away from the scene, one young man viciously raped another, to the extent that his body movements made us aware that he had either raped or been raped or had witnessed the episode at close hand. However, the point is that he was able to demonstrate his knowledge of the violence outside of the economies of judgment and censorship that terminate youth’s ability to explore what they witness in crucial forms of playacting.

On another occasion, I was aware that one young man was teased by the others as having some sort of alternative gender identity, although I was unable to put my finger on what exactly this was; it could have been anything on a range from LBGTQA to having been a recognized victim-survivor of GBV (or both; I couldn’t say). My isiZulu is far too basic to catch nuances of this sort, and the extralinguistic cues the others were exchanging among themselves and with him were not within my capacity to “read.” He consistently refused to volunteer himself as a role player in the forum theater process, until toward the end of the day, when he inserted his body in a montage, or “still life,” made up of the other participants in various stances. At the last call for those present to “play,” I inserted my body next to his, and with great caution, extended my hand toward his in such a way that if he rejected it, no one could easily see the gesture. I was, after all, a white workshop facilitator, and he was a young Black man for whom the post-apartheid stakes of our relative positions could not be more loaded. Nevertheless, to my surprise, he grabbed my hand and held on to it so hard that his fingers left marks on my skin, at the joints of my fingers. To this day I do not know whether this was a pull of support or something else entirely, but I do know it was the only responsive gesture the participant made in the course of a two-day workshop that I saw in the context of the workshop activities: and whatever it may have meant, an emotion was intensely expressed.

I remember being melancholically sad at one team member’s response when I recommended that our team should interview perpetrators of GBV from the local prison. They said in outraged tones that they had no intention of dedicating time to “converting sex offenders” (presumably to the ways of gender equity). I had no intention of such a goal. It was a research team and I was looking to see how patterns of victimization and perpetration repeat themselves in specific sublocales of the district in which we worked. This story tells me once again how quickly we jump to judgment before we understand anything about the forms of structural violence that produce GBV perpetration. This means that we rarely, if ever, arrive at deep, differentiated, and subtle understandings of how to change the parameters of structures in which GBV is, as I have argued before, cultured rather than contested. Imagine what Jameis Winston could tell us about the conditions of elite-university-sports-team perpetration were he ever offered the opportunity to do so without further incriminating himself in the network of big-player-makes-it-good-then-shows-his-real-self, his supposed innate violent and racialized masculinity (with his status as “sports hero” recovered through the re-covering of that “real self” in his recruitment by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers despite the accusations of sexual assault and abuse from his university days). Within the making-invisible of structural violence, the knowledge of the effluent—that which could enable us to address the violence of the structure—is lost to us. The making-invisible of structural violence appears as a form of resilience against harm; but like so many outworn structures of self-preservation, it has not only lost its applicability, but in fact also renders us all quintessentially vulnerable, “privileged” and exploited alike, albeit differentially. As Million’s work suggests, naming structural violence without sufficiently describing its mechanisms in a specific context is yet another way of obscuring its operations in that context. Effluent methodology and epistemology offer settler cultures different frameworks for conceptualizing, and therefore developing preventative strategies for, sexual assault in settler- and postsettler-colony contexts. In my final chapter, I present a reading of Wright’s magnum opus, Carpentaria, that attempts to deploy the aspects of effluent visions I have touched on here and in the previous chapters: mourning the dead in an intergenerational, animistic milieu in a way that is indeed generative (chapter 1); understanding what illness and its antecedents look like from an effluent perspective in the postcolony (chapter 2); naming the ethic failures of extractive industries in relation to the earth and the body (chapter 3); and sexual assault in the postcolony, as well as the rhetoric that papers over failures to apprehend the effluent in it (chapter 4). Let’s see what the entire architecture of the effluent vision looks like in a practical application of it to that most elusive of forms, a radically decolonial manifestation of the novel.