Katie Gentile. Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Volume 18, Issue 4, 2017.
Legal scholar Christopher Stone (1972) wrote that humor often functions in culture as a way of dealing with “social growing pains.” Jokes like rape jokes, then, become a form of “testimony” to the anxiety and defensive reaction of the privileged to being asked to acknowledge the basic foundational legitimacy of the call for equal rights, in this case, the call for women to be treated as subjects not objects (p. 455).
Although the jokes of Place’s performance (this issue) focus on the proliferation of heteronormative, male perpetrator–female victim rape jokes, it is important to situate these jokes as occurring not only within a misogynous culture facing increasing public visibility and leadership of women but also within one struggling to integrate legal shifts around genders and sexualities. In this context I propose the function of these violently heteronormative rape jokes is an attempt to metabolize and resist not only the growing influence of women within the public sphere but also the increasing visibility of lesbian women, gay men, and people who are transgender. This (hopefully) mounting pressure on the gender and sexuality binary that has shaped U.S. culture and of course, dominant subjectivities, may be resulting in the targeting of women’s bodies for unfettered penetration, humiliation, and control and of men’s bodies as weapons. As Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker (2016) observed in relation to the rancor against Hillary Clinton, in some ways our current U.S. culture is not fueled so much by sexism as by rampant misogyny—a “hate and fear filled objectification of women.” This misogyny was wielded not only to hurt women but also to resuscitate an antiquated model of masculinity.
This discussion integrates psychoanalytic and cultural theory to explore some functions of rape jokes. Certainly it is clear that in this changing and highly volatile public space, the proliferation of rape jokes must be functioning in some way for the social body. There is a unique temporality for the rape joke. Most often it is a description of an assault in the past, used to create a sense of fear in women in the present by conjuring up risk in the future, resulting in a life constrained and limited by the behaviors of risk management, often known as rape prevention strategies.
But although women are located as sites of violation and conquest in the jokes, men are cast as simply potential or actual rapists and conquerors of what was, is, and should be rightfully theirs: women’s bodies and desires. But present also in the proliferation of these jokes is the rescuer or “well-meaning” guy who may not laugh or rape but whose refusal to do so becomes coded as heroic and special versus just being ethical or humane. Thus rape jokes function temporally not only as potential threats but also to lower the bar for masculinity, valorizing those men who treat women as human. In both cases women’s bodies are merely the pawns in a dangerous game of male subjectivity.
The female body and displacement and disavowal
It has been well documented that in times of cultural stress and disarray, the social body often calls upon traditional and binary gender structures as an attempt to order chaos and anxiety, reestablishing the patriarchal order (see Cavarero, 2007; Oliver, 2007). Cavarero and Oliver each describe how in Western subjectivity, the female is identified as the body of the culture whereas the male, in dialectic relation, emerges as a disembodied subject. By associating the female body with “flesh, contingency and becoming” (Cavarero, 2007, as cited in Oliver, 2007, p. 35), that is, the future (Dinshaw et al., 2007; Gentile, 2011, 2013, 2016), the male body is maintained as an “abstract image of proportionality, perfect balance and timeless stability” (Oliver, 2007, p. 15). As many have observed, this containment of embodiment in the female means females are socialized to communicate through their bodies, to identify their physical appearance as the site of their power, control, success, and mastery. The body produced by this culture is assembled as a series of measurements such as weight, calories consumed, clothing size, and it is split into parts—thighs, breasts, butt—that are isolated and judged.
Within Western culture, subjectivity is granted only to the rational male citizen, whereas the female is cast as the object, the other, the irrational body saddled with its flesh, destiny forever tethered to biology. Within this construct it is not just women who function as the “Other” but also any denigrated group that can be cast as somehow “feminine” or vulnerable. Paraphrasing Oliver (2004), these denigrated groups are expected to carry and contain the affective burden of shame for the culture. In each joke it is clear the shame of being out of control, taken over, subdued, and made an object is the role of the female. It is the female body of the joke that carries the shame of the “failure” of the masculine to meet the impossible expectations of impenetrability.
Thus the call for the rights, the granting of citizenship to nonbinary categories of gender and sexuality, is a call for the deconstruction of the very foundation of Western subjectivity, in particular, white, heterosexual, cisgender, male subjectivity and domination. As such it demands a new form of affective labor. So given the high stakes of subjectivity it should be no surprise that, as McRobbie (2009) notes, the new sexual contract for women is visibility without a voice. As women gain more visibility within various public spaces they are to stay small, stay thin, stay silent. The price of rebellion is high: if one speaks and is heard, one is then subject to harassment, threats of violence on social media, and so on.
So rape jokes may be yet another use of women’s bodies becoming the target for displaced rage about the many forms of gender equity being called for and the anxieties and dysregulations that follow the calls for such seismic social change. Shame is woven through these responses, fueling the rape jokes. It is not necessarily the equality that is being resisted (after all, the current state of affairs is still far from equal in terms of gender or sexualities) so much as the call for rights that is being silenced, the claim to subjectivity.
Shame is known to be an affective state that shuts down processing. It is also a central anchor for narcissism and, as masculinity scholars observe, our cultural ideals of masculinity (see, e.g., Kimmel, 1994). Yet anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) writes of shame as an important form of social containment. Similarly, Watkins (2016) describes how in the Maori cultural system shame is one step from heaven. In Korean culture the capacity to experience shame is a recognition of a mistake and an acknowledgment of the need for transformation. It is also one of the four “noble” qualities (Watkins, 2016, p. 10) that undergird the development of compassion. Here shame is not so shameful and collapsing but actually an affective road sign to guilt, which can then lead to reparations, remorse, reflection, and empathetic connection. So instead of being an isolating affect it is the link to being able to meaningfully connect (Watkins, 2016). Thus, for other cultures shame can be a signal of a problem and the indication of an opportunity for growth.
Exploring shame in all its potential is important because shame is often deserved but the use of it can be misguided. Shame is extremely important and needs to be held and cultivated when appropriate as it holds the potential to be redemptive, to “alert us to the potential to be better than we are” (Watkins, 2016, p. 12). It is only collapsing and delinking when it is targeted at our entire person. When it is targeted at the action, there is room for redemption and transformation. Shame ideally “prompts reflection upon where we have gone wrong as moral agents and brings into view the principles we affirm but which we have violated” (LeBron, 2013, p. 13, as cited in Watkins, 2016, p. 12). But the old adage urging us to condemn the act not the actor is key. Otherwise any path to remorse and restitution is destroyed. Even if we cannot imagine doing this for the perpetrator, it is important to do so for the victim. Shaming the perpetrator as a person collapses the space that is required for the victim to receive any form of restitution, remorse, or meaningful apology. But in a culture that is so shaped around narcissistic patterns of affective circulation and interaction, we all need to shift in order for shame to be guided toward a fruitful process.
Circulations of affect disavowing shame in the cultural body
As many have observed, the present U.S. culture is one in which spaces of reflection and meaning making have collapsed (Oliver, 2007; Layton, 2010; Gentile, 2011, 2016). Without this reflective space, we are unable to transform affect into embodied action, to create and use symbolization and representation. This can result in a dependence on prepackaged commodified experiences that provide an easily digestible, linear, unidirectional temporal narrative. This prepackaged affect can be used to create a fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future (Brown, 2005; Gentile, 2011). Through the use of such commodified affects, a neoliberal fantasy of invulnerability and autonomy can be maintained (Oliver, 2007; Layton, 2010; Gentile, 2011, 2013, 2016).
Rape jokes may function as containers for commodified affect, in particular those affects that help disavow shame. Nostalgia, in particular, becomes a contagious state with its capacity to conjure a “simpler” time, (i.e., “Make American great again”), literally when time was unidirectional and flat. This fantasy of simplicity is one where everyone knew their place (no spatial hopping), and the future was seemingly secured by holding people and affects in “their” respective places. Linear, progressive, forward—where forward equals white Northern European—time dominated in this simplistic fantasy world where white male privilege is buttressed by adhered-to social codes and spaces.
Commodified affects such as nostalgia (Huyssen, 2000) and romantic sentiment (Berlant, 2008) are particularly popular remedies, trading manufactured emotion for innovative meaning making, to create a fantasy of simplicity unencumbered by the pain and anxiety of ambivalence and oppression (Huyssen, 2000). These commodified affects function to produce what Berlant (2008) terms the “intimate public,” the mediating spaces transforming the personal/psyche to the social/cultural in the service of a truncated version of recognition and reflection.
Temporal functions of the rape joke
Oppression can become invisible through nostalgia and sentiment because the past is rewritten, manufactured to create the present that is desired (Love, 2007). Because affect emerges in nonrepresentational social spaces and produces nonlinear networks of transmission (Clough, 2004), it can function as both a space of resistance (Massumi, 2002) and of biopolitical control and manipulation (Clough, 2004). The latter can occur through a particular relationship to time that becomes rigidified through a spatially collapsed, linear repetition—a “simpler” time.
When affect is commodified, as in rape jokes, fear can easily be sparked and repeatedly fanned to justify increasing regulations and surveillance based on some fantasy of risk management. Here the future is seen as catastrophic and the present becomes marked by strategies of risk management designed to avoid certain futures while creating the conditions for others. So for instance, as Doyle (2015) has noted, sex education for girls begins to revolve in large part around sexual assault prevention. Sex becomes equivalent to assault. Living the future in the present this way further collapses any potential spaces for reflection or a temporally rich meaning making. Here objects can be used to create a fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future (Brown, 2005; Gentile, 2011). With women as the identified bodies of the culture (Oliver, 2007) rape jokes function to identify, locate, and trap all risk as embodied by the female. (This fantasy of masculine impenetrability is tenuous not only due to the realities of material existence but also because it is divided into those who are body poor and men of color.)
Warding off danger requires the strategic use of planning and neoliberal anticipation where living the future in the present becomes a mandate to create the sensation of going on being in lieu of having the space to reflect and generate a meaningful innovative response in order to go on being in relation (Gentile, 2015, 2016). Such an approach to the future eliminates what Bergson (1913) termed duration—the generative unfolding of time—by forcing a particular future to take over the present. As a rigid form of anticipation takes the place of experiencing unfolding durations of time, mastery of affect and experience is achieved through preparation and victim/”other” blaming. Anticipation is self-perpetuating (Massumi, 2010), “keep[ing] uncertainty on the table” thus generating an unlimited set of potential futures, rendering control of behavior limitless (Adams, Murphy, and Clarke, 2009, p. 250). This production and use of anticipation describes the psychological state of being locked in traumatic repetition; here, hypervigilance becomes a normative approach to engagement and thus a basis of “self” experience, subjectivity, and recognition (Gentile, 2013, 2016).
So for the narrator, rape jokes function to create a specific past that is produced through a tale of violence, read as prowess and domination. This past then works to create a future of vulnerability for the female body, a future filled with rape threats that must be managed in the present through strategies of risk management. Rape jokes are doing temporal work for the cultural body in terms of isolating, identifying, and locating risk conveniently in the female body, not only freeing the male body from vulnerability but also creating a fantasy of absolute neoliberal autonomy, heroism, or/and domination. Risks posed by economic instability, global climate change, and so on can be disavowed as the focus is on women (Gentile, 2011, 2013, 2016).
Chortling as a particular form of shattering
Stone (1972) writes, “The fact is that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘use’— those who are holding rights at the time” (p. 455). Thus, to even contemplate the rights of the object is unthinkable, unspeakable. It requires a shattering of the dominant subjectivity that must then be reassembled in relation to the newly formed subject that was formerly an object. Therefore, as women fight for equality and gender privilege is dismantled or at least complicated and potentially threatened, those with gender privilege, that is, those identified as male in the culture, are “never able to see women as they are (and might become). All they [can] see [is] the popular ‘idealized’ version of an object it needed” (p. 455), that is, an ideal of the past. Thus whereas women fight for equality within this tenuous but tenacious social system of gender-binaried hierarchies, the privileged can only see the “version of an object it needed” for its own stability, an object that, as an object, cannot refuse penetration, even as that object is calling for recognition. Calls for recognition are met by interpellating forms of penetrations, material (verbal, physical, economic, etc.) and affective (psychic), to reproduce objectification as the only viable and legitimate form of social legibility.
Certainly jokes can be a cloak for sexism and misogyny, but humor works to both conserve and change attitudes and behaviors (Kember, 2015). Humor exists in the in-between space, Winnicott’s (1971) potential or transitional spaces, the spaces we must hold for any sense of potentiality to emerge. In theses transitional and potential spaces we can see the ways humor moves between positions, resisting and reenacting misogyny.
So, for instance, it is not just that the woman/victim is the site of the joke, the body of the action, the penetrated. The narrator of the joke, the male body/mind, is also all body. This narrator is not a transcendent Western subject but an uncontrollable animal or beast produced by a need for an Other. The jokes may “poke” “fun” at women, but they do so by lowering the bar for masculinity to the floor. Western subjectivity is based on the creation of the category of human as distinct and domesticated, civilized in comparison to the animal. The jokes locate the narrator also as a body that is created exclusively through what could be seen as a Lacanian lack (Ruti, 2008). But here the lack is not sublimated or used toward creativity but instead a signal of animality. The story the jokes tell is one where masculinity is so fragile that the male body is weakened by desire, thus animalistically dependent on domination. It’s a very old story that is circling back again.
As Kember (2015) also notes, there is a physical release with humor. This physicality of a sudden chortle, a “hysterical” laugh, allowing a spontaneous snort to break the affective hold of normalcy, can defamiliarize the familiar, propelling the laugher into a transitional or potential space where the familiar is rendered strange. It moves us into a new space from which to view gendered dynamics. It provides the space necessary for reflection, Massumi’s (2002) idea of an echo, from which potentialities of the future emerge. Laughter is neither words nor action nor silence nor passivity. It erupts (not emerges) from the spaces between our representational distinctions. Kember (2015) calls it a “rhetorical strategy” but I would add that the brilliance and enlivening capacity of humor is that it is not so tied to the politics of rhetoric and not so prescribed as to be a strategy. It is a fleeting moment of surprise that jolts and jostles us, spatially shifting us to see, feel, experience anew. Certainly, as Kember notes, we laugh out of our contact with a socially defined perversity—rape jokes. Sure. But we also laugh because the anxiety, excitement, anger, rage, depression all meld into one chortle that shakes us up, pushes us into an uncomfortable space of transition and movement. It punctures (vs. penetrates) the stasis, forcing it into movement, a form of action. (Penetration involves a taking over, whereas puncturing relieves pressure enabling a transformation.) Of course this is an ideal use of the rape joke.
Rape jokes can function to ward off the dangers of calls for equity around gender and sexuality, calls to recognize the objects of patriarchy as subjects. Rape jokes can violently project male anxiety not just onto but into the female body, putting it back in its objectified place. They produce a female body that exists solely not for sexual satisfaction for but anxiety amelioration. The jokes are not about sex or pleasure. The rape joke then also functions to produce a precariously situated male narrator, so undone by anxiety, so unraveled it can only be rendered legible through its relation to the female body. Although this dependence is an old psychoanalytic story (see Chodorow, 1978), here this dependence casts the male body as coming into being within such a narrow and limited scope that it is almost only a barely recognizable sliver. The male is a subject only when the female is an inert, voiceless, silent, desireless, penetrated thing. It is the definition of precarity for masculinity. And of course, it is a fantasy, a dangerous, horrifying fantasy. But the danger is not just for women. The proliferation of rape jokes can also be seen as a warning, the canary in the coal mine, if you will, of the desperation of certain forms of masculinity.
Although rape jokes can function as complicated forms of complicit resistance, it is also important to gauge how they both reflect and challenge our cultural atmosphere of neoliberalism that squashes collective action and the networks and the meaningful reflection that simultaneously supports and emerges from it. These jokes can both (re-)produce “poisonous encounters between bodies that decompose a body’s relations of parts” (Parisi, 2004, p. 45) for both men and women and force an encounter with the familiar as unfamiliar. They puncture normality through embodied traumatic and transgressive repetitions, creating an explosive, destabilizing chortle that leaves us in a different, more expansive space than we had at the beginning … hopefully. But as Emily Nussbaum (2017), writing about the rise of Donald Trump, warns, a “liberating joke” can easily and quickly “corkscrew into a weapon” before we know it (p. 68).