Jessica Robyn Cadwallader. Australian Feminist Studies. Volume 31, Issue 88. June 2016.
Introduction
Trauma and traumatic memory have taken a central place in recent critical scholarship, building on long-standing concerns about the ways that injustice and suffering affect and effect social and political futures. This has been echoed by a focus on memory and especially traumatic memory across those disciplines concerned with the individual brain or psyche: from psychoanalysis and psychology through to the ‘hard’ sciences of neurology and neuroscience. The discovery of a pharmaceutical, propranolol, that has a ‘dampening’ effect on traumatic memory has thus prompted a range of different responses from diverse disciplines, such as bioethics, legal studies and neuroscience. To date, however, there have been limited responses from critical disciplines, including feminist approaches, despite the focus on trauma and memory in recent scholarship in these areas.
Propranolol, a beta-blocker that has been used predominantly in the treatment of heart irregularities and anxiety for almost 50 years, is considered fairly safe even for long-term use. Thus the focus of these predominantly bioethical commentaries that have been developed so far has been primarily whether we—whoever ‘we’ are—should use it. In these engagements, particularly from bioethicists, rape is routinely taken to represent a class of traumatic memory arising from injustice, and thus the rape victim is viewed as an ideal candidate for propranolol. Yet I will demonstrate that such accounts fail to adequately grapple with the cultural conditions that support and sustain rape. They focus on the ‘wound’ of rape, treating it as separate and separable from the context within which it occurs, ignoring what Sara Ahmed identifies as the ‘scene of wounding’ (Ahmed 2004, 33).
The concept of the ‘wound’ has a long history in political theory and philosophy, originating with Nietzsche (1992, 15) and producing a series of critiques. It has become a way of naming the injustices, pain and injury experienced by particular individuals, and the impact that it has on them, emotionally and psychologically. Wendy Brown provides a detailed discussion of the wound in relation to feminist political theory in States of Injury, where she focuses on the impact that woundedness has on feminism’s various struggles with a misogynist status quo, especially in terms of how the future is envisaged from a position of woundedness (1995). Ahmed’s commentary highlights that in both Nietzsche and Brown’s accounts, there is a disproportionate focus on the wound as experienced by the individual, and inadequate attention paid to the political, social and cultural conditions for the wound occurring. This ‘scene’ of the wound, as Ahmed describes it, is too frequently obscured in the focus on the wound and how we respond to it. Thus in this paper, I explore some of the inadequacies of the accounts of propranolol available in the literature thus far, focusing as they do on the wound and how to respond to it.
I then turn to feminist theories of embodiment to demonstrate the complex incarnatory context (Cadwallader 2013) that sets the ‘scene’ into which propranolol enters. The term ‘incarnatory context’ is used to capture the social, political and cultural context—often embodied in the corporeal styles of others—which produce particular styles of embodiment. In this paper, my focus will be on how the gender norms of contemporary Western incarnatory contexts both shape the reception of therapeutic forgetting, and condition its impacts. Consequently, I demonstrate that propranolol’s potential impact both on the bodily being of individual survivors of rape, and on the shared bodily styles, which are part of this ‘scene of wounding’, may not align with feminist approaches to sexual violence. Finally, I argue that propranolol ought not to be understood as unique, but rather as a limit case which throws into relief ongoing problems in how contemporary Western culture deals with sexual violence and trauma.
Propranolol and the ‘Wound’ of Trauma
According to various studies, taking propranolol before or immediately following a traumatic incident modifies the creation of the memory (Brunet et al. 2008; Pitman et al. 2002; Reist et al. 2001; Taylor and Cahill 2002; Vaiva et al. 2003). The explanation usually offered—and as with much of neuroscience, it’s worth remembering that these are theories—is basically as follows: the beta-blocker reduces the release of stress hormones, which usually affects the way that the memory is ‘written into the brain’ in the transfer from short term to long-term memory (which happens sometime in the 6 hours after the incident itself). A lot of these stress hormones all at once produce what some call ‘overconsolidated’ memory—a memory that is so deeply fixed that it can produce flashbacks or a tendency to avoidance and the other symptoms often associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (Taylor and Cahill 2002). Thus, blocking hormone receptors, such accounts explain, prevents such overconsolidation from occurring (Taylor and Cahill 2002; Vaiva et al. 2003). I want to point out here that the use of the term ‘overconsolidated’ is already implicated in the finding of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD, in that it implies a ‘proper’ level of consolidation, which is surpassed in this instance.
The ways that the effects of propranolol are described are quite telling: sometimes it is called ‘memory blunting’, ‘memory dampening’, or ‘therapeutic forgetting’. Propranolol appears to be able to reduce the emotional significance of a particular event, working best if taken before, or in the 6 hours following the trauma, but potentially also effective as part of later therapy, where the memory is evoked and ‘reconsolidated’ with a pharmaceutically reduced emotional reaction. While numerous advocates for propranolol argue that it does not affect the ‘facts’ of a memory but only the emotion, there are others who argue that stress hormones assist with maximising the clarity of the memory, as well as its emotional content. The discussion of propranolol in the academic literature has predominantly been a debate between ‘bioconservatives’ and ‘transhumanists’. Bioconservatives generally believe that a divine force gave us the natural order and we deviate from it at our peril. Those in the transhumanist camp generally believe that humans are uniquely situated to participate in their own evolution. An example of a bioconservative approach to propranolol lies in the US President’s Council on Bioethics’ report, ‘Beyond Therapy: Bioetechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness’, headed by conservative Leon Kass and involving almost entirely male scholars. The Council held up ‘therapeutic forgetting’ as an example of ‘enhancement’ which goes too far, undermining authenticity, the character-building negotiation with trauma, and a conception of life as shaped by both joys and sadness (President’s Council on Bioethics 2003). Although the majority of the interest in propranolol’s development has come from Veterans’ Affairs in the US, and the usual example cited by neuroethicists in favour of propranolol is the traumatised returning solider, Elisa Hurley, in perhaps the only feminist account of propranolol thus far, points out that women who have survived sexual assault may well constitute the largest group that ‘therapeutic forgetting’ is likely to affect (Hurley 2010). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no reference in the Council report to the fact that many more women than men experience the supposedly character-building negotiation with the trauma of rape.
Indeed, one of the unfortunate consequences of the bioconservative approach in this context is that it tends to naturalise not only ‘the body’ and its capacities, especially where and how people might feel ‘wronged’, but the role of social and political dynamics in producing the wrong itself. For example, in a staff working paper associated with the final report, a description of a potential use of therapeutic forgetting is:
Just as drugs that dull the emotional sting of certain memories might be desired by the victim to ease his trauma, they might be useful to the assailant to dull the victim’s sense of being wronged. Perhaps no one has a greater interest in blocking the painful memory of evil than the evil-doer. (Remembering and Forgetting: Staff Working Paper 2002)
This account of ‘evil’ is focused firmly on the wound itself—the trauma—rather than on the conditions which make the ‘evil’ possible—the ‘scene of wounding’. It is implied that the ‘evil-doer’ in this scenario is motivated by the wrongful use of the person or property of another, rather than in asserting power over another, as feminist accounts of rape usually emphasise. Thus the bioconservative narrative about propranolol focuses on the specific incident of rape, not its prior conditions or context.
On the ‘transhumanist’ side of the debate, especially amongst those who focus on ‘neuroethics’ (a kind of bioethics focused on neuroscientific discoveries), propranolol is hailed as a great discovery. The focus is unsurprisingly on propranolol’s capacity to liberate us from suffering, understood as just another example of the extraordinary capacities of science to improve lives (Hall and Carter 2007; Henry, Fishman, and Youngner 2007; Illes 2007; Kolber 2007; Liao and Wasserman 2007; Rosenberg 2007; Sade 2007; Tenenbaum and Reese 2007; Warnick 2007). Amongst those who identified problems that could possibly arise from widespread use of propranolol, they tended to also express great faith in science to be able to inform regulatory frameworks to minimise such problems (see especially the work of legal scholar Kolber 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011). Yet the difficulties that Kolber identifies are limited to legal responses to crime and questions such as admissibility of evidence, and do not interrogate the broader social dynamics with which propranolol would inevitably interact. Once again, these accounts are limited to legal responses to the individual(ised) trauma, rather than the systemic social and political valences of the scene of wounding.
Sedimentation and Femininity
As demonstrated above, much of the literature on propranolol is unsurprisingly focused on the individual brain and individual memory. Yet memory is inherently social in multiple ways. Meaning-making is a social activity, and thus an event and the memory of it is always shaped by these social processes. Sociality shapes individual reception of an event in advance, supports the meaning made of it at the time and informs the recollection and reconstitution of the memory as time passes. And in turn, memory becomes a social matter, and its significance is negotiated between subjects. However, much of this sociality is obscured in each subject’s own experience.
Bringing this lens to bear on the neuroethical literature discussed above reveals a number of absences in these accounts of memory, and thus in their discussion of the potential impact of propranolol. It narrows focus down to the brain’s memory systems, where the ‘declarative’ memory’s capacity to retain facts is understood as the primary function of memory, over and against emotional recall. It narrows focus to the individual, failing to account for the effect that modifying individual memory has for the social world in which that individual is imbricated. And, perhaps most importantly, it implies that trauma is the result of transgression against naturally given, universal vulnerabilities.
In contrast, I want to suggest that approaching trauma and memory through feminist phenomenology, with its long focus on the sociality of embodied subjective experience, can enable an account that grapples with three key elements. First, it enables an account of the role of bodily being in the experiences both of trauma and traumatic memory and the impact of propranolol as a result. Second, it lets us consider the sociality of memory and trauma and thus how an individual’s use of propranolol might have effects beyond the individual. Third and relatedly, it helps demonstrate how such vulnerabilities might be constituted in and through processes of embodiment within a particular context, and thus be affected or modified by the use of propranolol. Essentially, then, this exploration helps situate ‘traumatic memory’ in a larger context, where memory is inherently social, and fundamentally embodied.
Feminist theories of embodiment grapple at length with violation and victimisation, and how these experiences are both constituted and understood. To explore this, I want to delve back into Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty deviates from previous understandings of the subject in arguing that both the mind/body dualism, and the self/world dualism, are problematic. Through a detailed analysis of child development (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 96–158) and ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ embodiment (Merleau-Ponty 2002), he argues instead that the embodied subject only develops as a subject from the primordial bodily being-in-the-world-with-others. The subject develops, that is, through and on the basis of a fundamental sociality—what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘syncretic sociability’ of embodiment (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 120). The child does not originally differentiate between their own body and that of others, and this enables a sharing of comportment across bodies. The child gradually develops a sense of themselves as a separate embodied being from others, but this is never quite a complete separation:
[b]oth by the objectification of one’s own body (say, through the mirror phase) and the constitution of the other in his difference, there occurs a segregation, a distinction of individuals—a process which, moreover, as we shall see, is never completely finished. (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 119)
This means that throughout our lives, our embodiment is always fundamentally social, never solely our ‘own’.
Each subject’s bodily being-in-the-world is thus always in flux, dependent upon the other bodies and bodily comportments we encounter in our incarnatory context, but this mutability is not without limitation. Merleau-Ponty argues that bodily being-in-the-world is shaped by the ‘sediments left behind by some previous constitution’ of a body through bodily style (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 249); this is what he also calls bodily or perceptual ‘habit’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002). Such sedimentation, he later suggests, results in ‘tolerance[s] allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 528). It is this tolerance that makes it unlikely, for example, that
I should at this moment destroy an inferiority complex in which I have been content to live for twenty years. That means that I have committed myself to inferiority, that I have made it my abode, that this past, though not a fate, has at least a specific weight and is … the atmosphere of my present. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 514)
Bodily tolerance is the term for the limitations, always in process, that previous (sedimented) modes of being-in-the-world place on experiences.
Rosalyn Diprose, a feminist philosopher, focuses on this brief element of MerleauPonty’s phenomenology as a primary concern in the differentiation of bodies, expanding on a feminist commitment to critiquing, adopting and adapting Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment in terms of corporeal difference (Ahmed 2001, 2006, 2005; Grosz 1994; Weiss 1998; Young 2005). Diprose uses the idea of ‘bodily tolerances’ to explore how both this embodied sociality and unique individual histories are implicated in varying experiences of sex and sexual violation. She uses this concept for two main reasons. One is that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sedimentation of particular styles of being in-the-world offers a way of thinking through the persistence of particular forms of embodiment through time and across bodies. Tolerances are shaped by the adoption and adaptation of the corporeal styles of others. Thus certain bodily tolerances can come to recur across different embodied subjects within a given incarnatory context, meaning that these bodily tolerances regularly become naturalised and universalised, taken for granted and treated as common sense. Second, exploring bodily tolerances as arising from the sedimentation of specific, situated styles of being-in-the-world enables an account of how and why discomfort, violation and suffering occur differently for different people, and cannot be universalised. In other words, the concept of bodily tolerances assists in exploring the mutability and specificity of individual bodily styles, while also accounting for the sociality of embodiment, and how our imbrication within an incarnatory context is implicated in the persistence, across bodies, of particular bodily styles.
Diprose uses this exploration of embodiment to discuss how sexual violation occurs and is experienced. In response to radical feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys, Catharine MacKinnon and Wendy Stock, who argue that any sexual encounter that involves an inequality of power results in sexual violence, she argues that,
because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world, my freedom to be open to a particular project, including a particular sexual encounter, is limited by my social history, and, in the way of this, my bodily tolerance to the present situation. (Diprose 2002, 92)
In other words, some radical feminist descriptions of heterosexual sex, or sex that involves domination or submission, tend to assume that all women do—or ought to—experience it as violation, but many do not. The bodily tolerance to these forms of sex is limited by a ‘social history’ or bodily memory which is not simply individual, but is constituted within an incarnatory context—the social situation where I become a subject through the intercorporeal generosity of others. Thus, this embodied social history is bound up with contemporary conceptions of sex and sexual relation, corporeally memorialising the dominant logics of heteronormativity, racialisation, ability, class and so on (Ahmed 2006, 2001, 2005; Weiss 1998). This helps to give a sense of how, as Diprose puts it, bodily tolerances engendered in the context of sexism are likely to often be limited in terms of what they can tolerate before experiencing violation and trauma, even as the unique bodily history of any given woman may differ. This account means that trauma cannot be understood as the result of breaching naturally given limitations; rather, those limitations are socially, corporeally produced.
Ann J Cahill uses feminist phenomenology to explore the impact that rape has on feminine embodiment. Like Diprose, Cahill develops Iris Marion Young’s famous description of feminine (or more particularly, white, able-bodied, Western and middle-classed bodily styles): ‘women often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy … lack[ing] an entire trust in [their] bodies to carry [them] to [their] aims’ (Cahill 2001, 154–156; see also Young 2005, 33. Such bodily styles demonstrate that ‘the three modalities of feminine motility … exhibit … an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings’ (Young 2005, 34). Young’s specifying of feminine styles is offered as a corrective to the implicit universalisation of the masculine body in Merleau-Ponty’s account. Many factors shape these sedimented feminine styles of bodily being-in-the-world. Cahill argues that amongst them is the social and political fact of rape.
Cahill is not the first feminist to argue that women are ‘kept in line’ by the threat of rape, that rape is a specific manifestation of patriarchal power. However, Cahill argues that rape’s effect on women’s experience does not only occur as a consequence of rape, but in advance of it:
the socially produced feminine body is precisely that … of the guilty pre-victim … In acquiring the bodily habits which render the subject ‘feminine’, habits which are inculcated at a young age and then constantly re-defined and maintained, the woman learns to accept her body as dangerous, wilful, fragile, and hostile. It constantly poses the possibility of threat, and only persistent vigilance can limit the risk at which it places the woman. The production of such a body, of course, reflects and supports a status quo which assumes that the victim is morally responsible for the behaviour of the assailant. (Cahill 2000, 56)
This constant negotiation with the threat of rape, then, is physically memorialised— sedimented—as feminine bodily styles. This is how a bodily tolerance is set by the ‘bodily and institutional data of our lives’, (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 528) sedimented in and as the feminine body. The physical memorialising of these heteronormative bodily styles also shapes the meaning of the trauma associated with rape. The experience of the transgression of this bodily tolerance, which produces the trauma, is constituted in advance and through the intercorporeal sharing and corporeal memorialising of bodily styles. Therapeutic forgetting, then, is a medical response to a socially produced experience of trauma, a factor neglected in neuroethical accounts of its use.
Cahill’s account of the way that the experience of rape gains its significance for the embodied feminine subject from the dominant styles of embodiment within a particular incarnatory context is an exploration of the constitution of a bodily tolerance in relation to rape. It is, of course, a fairly particular context, attached to Western norms of femininity (drawn predominantly from Young’s account). Such feminine corporeal habits, then, are formed precisely in guarding against victimhood, but a victimhood which is thereby constituted as the body’s incautious uprising as rapeable, against the self’s will. The habits of caution, of ‘being sensible’, the containment of feminine corporeality, are guards against rape, but this means that if and when rape transgresses the limits of a bodily tolerance produced by these habits, it is experienced as a personal lapse, a lapse already configured as within the body. Feminine styles of being-in-the-world, then, are not only intolerant of rape, but constitute it and the trauma as her own responsibility. In turn, the use of therapeutic forgetting, where and when available, becomes her responsibility as well; the choice of whether to experience trauma is thus made her choice and her responsibility. In this context, therapeutic forgetting is far less politically innocuous than neuroethical accounts would suggest, reinforcing the embodied social and political dynamics that render rape the victim’s responsibility.
Constructing (Therapeutic) Forgetting
Identifying women’s bodily styles as re-membering rape before it even happens is unsurprisingly contentious, especially given the feminist (and otherwise) interrogation of ‘victim’ politics or attachments to the ‘wound’ (Brown 1993). Yet the understanding of embodiment enabled by Cahill’s account assists in providing a fuller context for grappling with what is forgotten and obscured in the treatment of therapeutic forgetting. It enables an examination of the ‘scene of wounding’, as Ahmed identifies it, and a consideration of the impacts therapeutic forgetting is likely to enable. The ‘scene of wounding’ in relation to rape is complex and multifaceted, as dominant bodily styles of masculinity and femininity play out a very specific ‘script’ (Marcus 1992). These scripts are in turn enabled by an array of other economic, social, political and institutional factors which in various ways support men’s access to women’s bodies. This corporeal re-membering of the rape script in a specific encounter is key to producing it as traumatic. It also cites and affirms the rape script, supporting the continuation of feminine embodiment as ‘guilty pre-victim’. It is into this context, with its complex and specific politics and ethics, its bodily being and its lived experience, that propranolol enters, and within which its political and ethical significance, both social and individual, is shaped.
Many of the bioethical and neuroethical engagements with propranolol are problematic because the medical model of memory they adopt narrows their focus to the individual, as demonstrated earlier. This cannot do justice to the potential and risks of the use of propranolol, because memory is not restricted to individual brains, but is part of how broader cultural dynamics are sustained, including as they are embodied. Feminist theories of embodiment, then, can assist in thinking through plausible and likely outcomes, which are important for meaningful policy development and activism, especially feminist activism. Additionally, this mode of problematisation avoids falling into the essentialising traps that bioconservatism regularly encounters in its rejection of certain biotechnological change.
First, pharmaceutically reducing the experience of trauma may enable styles of bodily being-in-the-world which are not simply broken apart by rape. I mean this in two senses: first, it may mean that rape survivors find their existing style of being-in-the-world is more easily recaptured, or perhaps may never even shift under the impact of rape; and second, it may also work to help reconstitute the relationship between femininity and rape. Cahill provides an example of what she believes enables the reconstitution of feminine styles of being-in-the-world as other than ‘guilty pre-victim’ (Cahill 2001, 202). She writes,
Taking feminist theory at its word—namely, assuming that the feminine body can be shaped into other, more empowered, forms than the ones imposed by patriarchy—women’s selfdefence seeks to transform women’s bodies into defensive weapons. This bodily transformation necessarily constitutes a shift in the being of the woman who undergoes it … To change the habits and abilities of one’s body—as well as the assumptions and expectations one holds of one’s body—is to change one’s very self (Cahill 2001, 202)
Similar to my concerns with propranolol, Cahill also interrogates the individual(ising) effect of self-defence training. However, because embodiment is constituted socially, in the intercorporeal incarnatory context within which each of us is embodied, these changes are not limited to the individual. They also modify the incarnatory context within which each of us is embodied. Similarly, propranolol’s capacity to reduce the trauma attached to the experience of rape may also reconstitute feminine styles of being-in-the-world as more resistant to the trauma of rape. In other words, in intervening in the relationship between the trauma of rape and the constitution of rape, propranolol may reshape bodily tolerances, making rape less a site of guilt, trauma and responsibility. In doing so, according to Cahill’s analysis, it may intervene in part of what makes rape both so traumatic and so much more likely to happen, given that the fear of rape is often what paralyses women when a rapist attacks them.
Second, however, and the flip-side of the first point is the observation that trauma often enables change, and propranolol may impede this (Hurley 2007, 2010). Reducing trauma for survivors may also plausibly enable those survivors to continue to be embodied in accordance with what Cahill calls rape culture. The disruption of bodily tolerances produced by trauma, and the progressive reconstitution of bodily being-in-the-world in recovery (a difficult process which may never be complete) may enable the transformation of the embodied subject’s bodily style. With propranolol dampening the trauma, the embodied subject may simply go on as she has been, in a style of bodily being-in-the-world shaped by an anxiety about rape, a bodily tolerance which constitutes any rape as traumatic and her own responsibility—a style that is reinforced within her incarnatory context. This may not be a bad thing, at all—indeed, most of the bioethicists writing about propranolol would suggest that this is the ideal outcome, where propranolol functions to reduce trauma but change nothing else—but it does mean that the shift in bodily being that can be occasioned by trauma’s disruption of bodily tolerances is less likely to happen
Third, ‘treating trauma’ like this—pharmaceutically—inevitably medicalises it, and constructs it as pathological. Arguably the creation of post-traumatic stress disorder already did this, and it is clear from the psychological and neuroscientific consensus that certain memories are ‘pathological’ or ‘overconsolidated’ that this is part of a larger medicalised approach to suffering, informed by a sense that all suffering is wrong. However, as sociologists such as Peter Conrad and Deborah Potter have underlined, the capacity to treat is part of what produces a particular state of being as pathological (Conrad 2005; Conrad and Potter 2004). It renders the problem of rape a medical problem, and, more than this, a medical problem experienced by the survivor. This narrows the clinical and societal focus to the survivor, and the aftermath, responsibilising her as an individual, and thus obscuring the responsibility of the perpetrator (Rose 1999, 239). Perhaps of more concern is that in placing the decision about how intense or how long the trauma associated with rape might be in the hands of the individual survivor brings with it the appearance of responsibility. The discourse of victim-blaming in the context of rape is already so well established that it seems inevitable that it will shape the reception of propranolol.
These changes are not limited to an individual, because of the incarnatory context within which we all become embodied subjects. The institutional knowledges of medicine are likely to reinforce the embodied experience of rape increasingly as a site of pathology rather than injustice, as well. These medical and legal institutional responses also obscure, and thus reproduce, an incarnatory context shaped by rape culture, which produces women as fearful and responsible, and legitimates the irresponsibility and violence of perpetrators. In a broader social policy sense, then, the use of propranolol may impede other justice-based responses to rape, including explicitly addressing misogyny and inequality.
Fourth, and finally, I’d like to make a few brief points about the potential effects on the law as a response to rape. Law is a key site for the negotiation and production of formal, collective memory (Savelsberg and King 2007). It is also a factor in the production of embodiment in the phenomenological sense, as a sedimented element of the ‘institutional data of our lives’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 528). On the one hand, propranolol might mean that more survivors will be willing to testify in court in support of rape cases, particularly if the reduction in suffering also helps decrease the ‘re-traumatising’ effects of legal proceedings, recognised by feminist legal scholars as a major problem that affects the high attrition rate of rape cases from reporting through to conviction. (e.g. Larcombe 2011, 18). They may also perform more in line with the implicit requirements of trustworthy witnesses to be calm, reasonable and coherent in court (Hengehold 1994, 2000; Larcombe 2002). These factors may result in better rates of conviction, which have been in global attrition for some time (Kelly, Lovett, and Regan 2005). Such an approach, however, reinforces and complies with the privileging of rationality (and masculinity) through the law, in ways which ensure that the failures of the law to do justice to victims and survivors never need to be addressed. Indeed, with some survivors and victims using propranolol and thereby living up to legal expectations of testimony, those who do not use propranolol may be even further disadvantaged.
Of course, on the other hand, a lack of trauma may mean that survivors may no longer seek potential closure through legal means, which may also lead to attrition in conviction rates (Hurley 2010). There are also the more obvious legal pitfalls, such as Kolber’s point regarding the potential inadmissibility of testimony affected by propranolol. This is especially significant in rape cases given that generally the victim is the only witness to her own lack of consent, and is another factor that may mean that the use of propranolol worsens the attrition rate of rape cases. These issues remain thorny, and I will return to them shortly.
Laws are developed out of the legal recognition of and negotiation with particular kinds of experience, more and less successfully. In some ways, the rapid adjustments to rape law over the past century, but particularly in the past 50 or so years, reflect the shifts in how women’s experience of themselves and the world are understood to matter institutionally. Given that rape law is designed to address an injustice that is indicated by an experience of suffering, it relies in certain ways upon that experience. The risk, then, in modifying the individual memory of rape, is that it may have long-term effects on how the law negotiates with rape as a crime. If the trajectory of the increased medicalisation of responses to trauma combined with the availability of propranolol continues, it seems likely that the crime of rape will be situated more as a medical problem. This may take the form of explicit legal reform, but it is important to recognise the role that the social understanding of the experience of rape already plays a key role in many courtrooms and in the outcomes of many rape trials, especially those with juries. Some feminist legal scholars have already expressed concern that high potential sentences for rape, achieved through long hard work in legal reform, is resulting in an unwillingness to convict, because of a widespread belief that rape is ‘not that bad’ and does not deserve the sentence laid down in legislation which automatically comes into play upon conviction (Larcombe 2011). In this sense, propranolol’s reduction of traumatic affect attached to the memory of rape would only support and sustain the belief that rape is not that bad.
These changes may be understood to simply recognise that propranolol is a better response to individual trauma. Yet a legal system reshaped by propranolol as described above becomes especially problematic if a survivor chooses not to take the drug following a rape: if the law is shaped—whether by juries, legislation, or legal professionals—by the presumption that survivors will take the drug, those who do not are likely to suffer greater injustice, for example, in terms of their performance in the witness box.
These concerns, both about the institutional recognition of rape, and about the embodiment of femininity in relation to rape, demonstrate that the memory of trauma is an intense and vexed site. It is also a site on which many of our institutional responses to injustice depend. The forgetting of trauma is thus far more significant than the neuroethical accounts suggest. The medical constitution of an embodied subject as unaffected by injustice also enables a social, legal and political community which is also unaffected by injustice. Forgetting is a complex phenomenon. It can be enabling, in many positive ways, but it can also be a way of refusing to confront injustices and our complicity in them. As Sara Ahmed argues, forgetting may not be anywhere near as innocuous as it appears:
forgetting would be a repetition of the violence or injury. To forget would be to repeat the forgetting that is already implicated in the fetishisation of the wound. Our task might instead be to ‘remember’ how the surfaces of bodies (including the bodies of communities … ) came to be wounded in the first place … Following bell hooks, our task would be ‘not to forget the past but to break its hold.’ In order to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action. Bringing pain into politics requires that we give up the fetish of the wound through different kinds of remembrance. The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present. (Ahmed 2004, 33–34)
For Ahmed, then, a forgotten wound is a rejection of a history that nonetheless lives on. According to her argument, without the explicit negotiation with the wound, the wound, and the scene of wounding, through ‘different kinds of remembrance’, the woundedness that attends femininity lives on, both in its institutional recognition, and in the feminine embodiment of the ‘guilty pre-victim’ (Cahill 2001, 202).
Conclusion
As I have shown throughout this paper, the ‘scene of wounding’ for the trauma of rape is expansive, extending far beyond an individual subject’s traumatic memory. It is imbricated with a subject’s style of bodily being-in-the-world, with broad cultural dynamics about femininity and responsibility, and with institutional attempts to recognise rape. Attrition rates of rape cases demonstrate that, through a variety of means, contemporary Western cultures already successfully erase the memory of rape from public formal knowledges, including legal knowledges but extending into policy responses to violence against women and other political discourses. Rape is already so frequently forgotten, whether the erasure takes place when survivors are shamed into silence; or when police officers refuse to take reports; when physical examinations are not done, or are inconclusive; or when prosecutors decide a case is too hard to win; or when judges lead or affirm juries in thinking that rape is not rape because of drunkenness or skinny jeans. With such constraints on the explicit, institutionalised collective memory of injustice in the law, rape becomes solely a private matter. This is reinforced by the medicalisation of rape-related trauma: it becomes a problem with the survivor, something to be medically ameliorated. These existing dynamics that delimit the memory of rape to a single embodied subject are plausibly enhanced by propranolol. The individual forgetting becomes a means for a social and political form of forgetting—a forgetting of injustice.
Yet these legal and medical forms of forgetting are also the forgetting of the role that our social norms and institutions play in reproducing styles of masculinity and femininity in ways that enable rape. The incarnatory context within which we become, bodily, continues to produce and reproduce feminine bodily tolerances that experience rape as a manifestation of her body’s fragility and dangerousness, of her own failure. In this way, bodily being-in-the-world becomes a subject’s memory of what may come. This shift in temporality is important. It means that therapeutic forgetting is unlikely to intervene in this incarnatory context in ways that help to end rape, though it may have a positive role to play in ending the trauma associated with rape.
The shift of temporality enabled by understanding embodiment both as the sedimentation of the ‘institutional data of our lives’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 528) and the conditioning of what may come is, I would suggest, a fruitful site for rethinking justice. Propranolol may make it more difficult for rape to be legally tried, but the law fails on this front all too frequently: it regularly fails to do justice to the experience of rape. There are two elements about how justice is currently imagined and practiced that makes propranolol a problematic means of negotiating with rape. First, criminal legal systems rely not simply upon memory, but upon the individual subject’s memory of suffering or harm as a means of measuring the significance and severity of a crime Second, legal justice must come after the experience of trauma.
It is these two elements, amongst others, which render the ‘scene of wounding’ surrounding the trauma of rape a problematic scene for propranolol to enter into. Propranolol brings with it potentially troubling effects, but it also functions as something of a limit case: an extreme case which casts into relief existing dynamics. The complex intertwining of institutional, embodied and temporal dynamics helps construct rape as an individual wound, as an individual wrong, as an individual failing, as a pathology which must be treated. This construction may be exacerbated by propranolol, and the attendant medicalisation of corporeality, as I have suggested. Yet it also helps reveal that this construction of rape as an individual matter is already a problem with both the justice system and medicine. The failure to grapple with the complexity of corporeality—of how we come to be intercorporeally, as embodied beings in our incarnatory context—is a key impediment to understanding how to do justice to rape. Bringing an understanding of corporeality to bear on this issue reconfigures justice from being a response to a memory of a wound, but perhaps more significantly, enables a grappling with how our institutional, social and political dynamics shape bodily memories, and how they might do that in ways that will enable a future without rape.