Annie Hill. Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies. Volume 13, Issue 1. March 2016.
Questions about the meaning and value of SlutWalk have generated considerable public debate. This article explores how SlutWalk subverts rape logic, rendering it apparent and absurd while circulating counterclaims to oppose sexual violence. By reclaiming “slut” through performative protest and political mobilization, SlutWalk offers trenchant critiques of rape logic’s conflation of clothes and consent. Although media and feminist commentators alike met this protest strategy with skepticism, I argue that SlutWalk enacts a perifeminist response to rape logic that demonstrates the subversive power of reclaiming a name.
Introduction
SlutWalk started as a protest against advice given at a safety meeting held at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School. During that January meeting in 2011, police constable Michael Sanguinetti stated, “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this, however women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimized.” With this claim, Sanguinetti asserted that women control the conditions leading to sexual assault. His claim swiftly became identified as a consummate example of a common logic that makes sense of sexual violence. SlutWalk’s cofounders, Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett, used Sanguinetti’s claim as a catalyst to confront the idea that women incite violence by how they dress.
Under the slogan “Because We’ve Had Enough,” SlutWalk launched in Queen’s Park on April 3, 2011 in downtown Toronto, stopping in front of police headquarters and drawing an unexpectedly large crowd of 3,000 protesters. As word of the protest spread in news and social media, SlutWalk became an international phenomenon. SlutWalk multiplied through word of mouth, media coverage, and the digital capacity to publicize and organize protests via blogs, social networks, emails, and websites. Protests were independently organized in more than 200 cities and 40 countries including Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, South Korea, South Africa, Morocco, India, and the United States. According to Joetta L. Carr,
Women in bikini tops have marched next to women in burkas, students marched alongside grandmothers and nuns, and significant numbers of men have participated in the events. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people have been well represented in the marches. One young Muslim woman in a burka held a sign stating that her burka had not protected her from rape. The message across the globe was loud and clear: Don’t focus on how we dress—focus on the rape culture.
Given its global uptake, SlutWalk clearly struck a chord in multiple locations where protesters identified discourses and practices that blame victims for sexual violence.
Developing reformist and radical goals, SlutWalk Toronto demanded reforms in officer training to eradicate the suspicions women face when reporting rape. More broadly, SlutWalk issued a radical challenge to rape logic: a pervasive ideology depicting women’s appearance as causal or contributing to sexual violence. SlutWalk Toronto’s website declared, “Our plan was to call foul on the comment made by a representative of our Toronto Police and speak to the bigger picture of common, persistent and documented victim-blaming within Police Services, the justice system and social spheres around us.” SlutWalk identified what Sanguinetti said as a social problem, rather than only a case of individual opinion, by foregrounding the ubiquity of rape logic and refusing its gendered rhetoric of personal responsibility.
This article delineates rape logic and argues for the value of SlutWalk as a perifeminist response, specifically to rape logic’s depiction of women’s appearance as agentic. Rape logic is a discursive and visual ideology that attaches sexual desire and consent to a woman’s appearance; how a woman appears is claimed to communicate messages that men discern through looking. In order to map the concept of rape logic and SlutWalk’s response to it, the article proceeds in two parts. Synthesizing George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s “metaphorical logic of rape” and John Berger’s “ways of seeing,” the first part details how rape logic reverses responsibility from assailant to victim and dislocates agency to de-emphasize an assailant’s actions and accentuate a victim’s appearance. Exposing rape logic is vital feminist work because this ideology informs how sexual violence is enacted, experienced, and represented. Indeed Sanguinetti’s advice reveals the ease with which a truth claim about women’s clothes causing sexual violence can be invoked and, following Lakoff and Johnson, the “logic and structure that unconsciously lies behind the reality the speaker takes for granted.” The advice also illustrates Susan Ehrlich and Ruth King’s insight that “language serves as an ideological filter on the world: language shapes or constructs our notions of reality, rather than labelling that reality in any transparent or straightforward way.” Engaging in ideological contestation, SlutWalk amplifies the claim “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to not be victimized” and situates it within the discursive and visual ideology that attaches sexual desire and consent to women’s appearance.
The second part of this article analyzes SlutWalk as an example of what I call a perifeminist response. The prefix peri, meaning “about” and “around,” foregrounds that a perifeminist response sparks debate “about” feminism’s tensions and traction in a specific historical moment while it mobilizes “around” an instance of sexist oppression. Perifeminist responses proceed from the assumption that feminism is far from finished and feminist gains are not all won. In contrast to postfeminist responses that incorporate feminism to renounce it—according to Angela McRobbie, “Feminism is invoked, in order to be relegated to the past”—perifeminist responses insist on the urgent need for feminist intervention now. Although perifeminist responses may not be entirely faithful to earlier forms of feminist protest, they draw on “the discursive legacy of feminism” and offer fresh articulations of feminist resistance. That perifeminist responses like SlutWalk generate debate is less a threat to feminism than a contribution to its relevance and retooling. The fallout from SlutWalk, particularly the incisive critiques regarding race and class in relation to sexual stigma, suggests that perifeminist responses spark metadiscourse about the strategies and foci of feminism at the same time that they challenge instances of sexist oppression. Rather than discrediting SlutWalk, these discussions underscore the need for critical reflexivity within feminism as feminism works to transform the social and structural norms in which it too is embedded.
SlutWalk received various criticisms, including that it celebrates women’s objectification; capitulates to patriarchy; privileges white, middle-class North American women; ignores how women of color experience the stigma of “slut”; confuses political action with costume parties; makes feminism look superficial; and focuses on a stupid statement instead of serious issues impacting women’s lives. Feminist scholars have usefully thematized reactions to SlutWalk, but it is important to grasp the significance of SlutWalk’s ability to spark diverse engagement; its invitation to sex workers, queer and trans protesters; and its receptivity to criticism from women of color activists. Critiques by observers who expressed productive ambivalence about SlutWalk contributed to making marches in subsequent years more relevant and alive to presumptions of race, class, and sexual orientation. The de-centered, coalitional spirit of SlutWalk meant that protests could be led, joined, and reconceived as protesters saw fit. Nevertheless, some critiques of SlutWalk were distinctly postfeminist, meaning rather than demand a more reflexive, conscious struggle against oppression, they dismissed SlutWalk as unnecessary and used the protest to impugn feminism.
Arguing against those dismissals, this article contends that the value of SlutWalk rests not in its permanence or success as a traditional campaign, but in its perifeminist response: its flashpoint exposure of, and reverberating reaction to, rape logic through performative protests seen and heard around the world. Further, SlutWalk offers an instructive challenge to postfeminist claims that feminism is dead or outdated, and the only tasks left may be legal reform and the rescue of non-Western women. As a perifeminist response, SlutWalk’s taking on a term used to divide women and turning it to collective action exposes some of the deep roots and green shoots of feminism.
Part 1: Rape Logic and Women’s Agentic Appearance
Rape logic regards men’s acts of sexual violence as involuntary, instinctive, or reasonable and depicts women’s appearance as agentic, investing it with the power to communicate desire and direct conduct. Theorizing how women’s signifying presence communicates, John Berger writes,
A woman’s presence expresses her own attitude toward herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her. Her presence is manifest in her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, taste—indeed there is nothing she can do which does not contribute to her presence. Presence for a woman is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of it as an almost physical emanation, a kind of heat or smell or aura.
According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the “sexual force the woman exerts is regarded … as generating certain natural reactions in those affected by that force.” The stimulus for sex is the female body, which is said to provoke reactions that come naturally to men. Sexual force is understood to be the overriding of another person’s will, but this force is figured as power women exert on men. The female body is such a forceful signifier of sex that it must be muted or cloaked in order to reduce its sway. Following this logic, rape victims become legible as causal agents of forced sex, and women can prevent sexual violence by dressing the body differently.
Lakoff and Johnson explain that the metaphorical logic of rape holds a woman “responsible for her physical appearance” and “responsible for the force she exerts on men.” This dislocation of agency enables a claim such as women “should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized” to make sense and to become common sense in rape culture. Rape culture refers to the social and structural norms that excuse perpetrators and demean victims, in effect shoring up and propagating a cultural climate whereby sexual violence can flourish. According to Sarah Projansky, the concept, introduced by feminists in the 1970s, describes
a culture in which sexual violence is a normalized phenomenon, in which male-dominant environments (such as sports, war, and the military) encourage and sometimes depend on violence against women, in which the male gaze and women as objects-to-be-looked-at contribute to a culture that accepts rape, and in which rape is one experience along a continuum of sexual violence that women confront on a daily basis.
Most important, the concept charts the broader context in which sexual violence occurs. Martha R. Burt writes, “rape is the logical and psychological extension of a dominant-submissive, competitive, sex role stereotyped culture.” The diffuse discipline effected by rape culture is not limited to sexual violence, however; it impacts many areas of life from sexuality to activities unrelated to sex. Fear of rape, and of being accused of inviting assault, influences where women go, to whom they speak, and how they experience public and private spaces. It affects what they wear based on the pervasive belief that a woman’s appearance can communicate consent to sex.
Choosing How to Look
To rework John Berger’s influential claim that “men act and women appear,” rape logic holds that women’s appearance directs men’s actions. If “men survey women before treating them,” then women’s treatment depends on what type of woman her appearance signals her to be. According to Berger’s heteronormative theory, women “interiorize” this surveillance, viewing themselves as men might to gain some control over how they are treated. Similarly, Laura Mulvey argues that the
determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.
One assessment of SlutWalk claims the protest puts women in an exhibitionist role, interiorizing a male vision of sexuality and presenting themselves styled accordingly. The argument advanced here assesses SlutWalk as a performative protest to put the power of naming to better effect by resignifying “slut” and returning the gaze that “surveys women before treating them.” In surveying that gaze, protesters render its appraisal apparent and absurd, exposing rape logic to ridicule by wearing clothes culturally coded as “slutty” while bearing messages deconstructing this logic. Put another way, SlutWalk protesters contest the discursive and visual ideology of sexual violence when they speak back to rape logic and enact an oppositional gaze. In bell hooks’s formulation, objects of an oppressive gaze can claim an oppositional gaze by insisting “how they see themselves is most important, not how they will be stared at by others.”
Feminist resistance must oppose dominant ways of looking because rape logic operates by exteriorizing sexuality and distributing women’s desire across the bodily surface. Rape logic depicts the female body as a surface of sexual signifiers and male attention is directed by the body that stimulates it: citing a woman’s unspoken yet visible consent locates responsibility for sex on her body, in her choice of clothes, and in her desire to appear as an object of desire for men. How a woman appears is read back to the prior volitional act of dressing, the moment at which she apparently decided on the message to send to every man looking. The temporal twist of rape logic maintains that women consent to sex not at the moment of sexual contact, but when they choose how to appear. One critic of SlutWalk illustrates this logic under Piece of Advice #94, “Put Your Clothes Back On,” posted on the blog, “The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women)”:
Women dress in miniscule, tight, sexy clothing to get the attention of men. And it is effective. Unfortunately, women can’t always control how that attention channels itself. And instead of acknowledging this limitation—that this is a built-in trade-off for guaranteed male attention—they throw a tantrum, wave a bunch of fingers, and attempt to control the reaction they provoke through chanting, and shaming, and what have you.
In this passage, men do not control how their attention “channels itself”; men cannot bear responsibility if their way of looking gets channeled into violence. After all, when “women dress in miniscule, tight, sexy clothing,” they direct men’s attention, but cannot always control men’s actions. The blogger, rape-logically, faults women for failing to acknowledge their limitation and throwing “a tantrum” about reactions they provoke, including rape.
Piece of Advice #94 exemplifies that based on rape logic men do not choose to see women as sex objects. Rather women act on men’s senses by deciding to appear before them as sex objects. Rape logic declares that women choose to look (appear) in a particular way, but denies that men choose to look (perceive) in a particular way. Due to this pervasive ideology, women are told by police, and others invoking rape logic, to adjust their appearance and how they are seen, while men are not routinely told to curb how they see and what they do based on their views of women. When making sense of sexual violence by citing the female body, how a woman appears is depicted as simultaneously static and agentic, conveyed without ambivalence or the possibility for misinterpretation. In the “he said / she said” contests taking place in rape culture, a man’s account of how a woman appears is granted authority, while woman’s clothes can speak for her.
Qualifying Rape
The focus on female appearance and male perception is fundamental to rape logic and informs legal assessments of how a “reasonable person” (formerly “man”) views a rape victim and the violence committed against her. Judges continue to make sense of sexual violence by de-emphasizing the assailant’s actions and accentuating the victim’s appearance. In 2008, a teacher received a month in prison for raping a 14-year-old student that the judge said “appeared older than her chronological age.” Reference to the victim’s appearance implies that she appeared to be a reasonable sex object to her 47-year-old rapist and, evidently, to the judge. Defending his sentence, the judge later remarked that the case did not involve “forcible beat-up rape,” effectively minimizing the violence committed by a teacher raping an adolescent student. Discussing policy, Congressman Todd Akin reversed responsibility from assailant to victim by claiming pregnancy rarely results from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down.” Akin was discussing access to abortion after rape, an option he dismissed by opining that if a woman is pregnant, then she is unlikely to be a rape victim. Akin shares the belief that the female body controls sex and, based on a woman’s bodily response to sperm, there is a distinction to be made between legitimate and illegitimate rape. Rape logic functions flexibly in these examples to depict the female body as stimulus for sex and as physical evidence that sexual violence never happened.
Discursive qualifiers are now common for designating certain sexual assaults as more violent or less consensual than others. Rape is more recognizable when it leaves marks on the body, corroborating a victim’s claim, and when it cannot be assimilated into a romance narrative: stranger rape, gang rape, and certain forms of interracial rape. These less common, but culturally legible, forms of rape function as signal crimes, referred to using qualifiers such as real rape, forcible rape, and legitimate rape. According to Rebecca Campbell,
Prevalence studies consistently demonstrate that nonstranger rape is far more typical (approximately 80% [of assaults] are committed by someone known to the victim) and that assailants use a variety of tactics—not just weapons—to gain control over their victims. Our social systems are least likely to respond to the most common kinds of assaults.
Rape remains hard to recognize when it takes the form of less stereotypical, but far more typical assaults. New terms emerged to identify rape previously not viewed as rape: date rape, spousal rape, acquaintance rape. Thus, in addition to qualifiers, references to rape now include situational modifiers that specify the circumstances and relationships in which sexual violence occurs. Despite attempts to render rape recognizable through discursive emphasis, distinguishing forms of rape in contexts where rape logic prevails can engender a hierarchy of harm that ranges from the real to the reasonable or not-really-rape.
Ideological contestation is necessary because rape logic informs multiple discourses, including safety advice, police interrogations, legal judgments, media reports, and everyday conversation. The legerdemain of rape logic cites women’s bodies as speaking subjects capable of announcing desire and consent as it discounts the words coming out of their mouths. It is worth recalling the feminist definitional demand “No means No.” This antirape slogan insists on the meaning of the ultimate term of negation to counter the practice of severing signifier and signified when a woman says no to sex. Sally McConnell-Ginet writes, “meaning is a matter not only of individual will but of social relations embedded in political structures”; rape logic propagates a cultural climate in which a woman’s “direct negative” is translated into an “indirect affirmative.” Rescripting women’s words is a core strategy of sexist oppression, as Yale University’s chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon demonstrated with its chant, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”
Sharon Marcus’s definition of rape is illuminating here. She defines rape as a “scripted interaction which takes place in language and can be understood in terms of conventional masculinity and femininity.” As such, “a rapist follows a social script and enacts conventional, gendered structures of feeling and action which draws the rape target into a dialogue which is skewed against her.” Reading consent to sex from a woman’s appearance is a violent interpellation that scripts her subjectivity in line with the rape alibi “she wanted it.” Rape logic lies behind the gendered structures of feeling and action of those who draw on and participate in a dominant ideology that naturalizes sexual violence. It depicts men at the mercy of a feminine assault on the senses and requires women take responsibility for their agentic appearance by, for example, not dressing like sluts. Before I analyze SlutWalk as a perifeminist response to rape logic, the next section situates Sanguinetti’s claim in standard safety advice for women and gendered repertoires of denial and blame.
The Gendered Rhetoric of Rape Prevention
At the Osgoode Hall safety meeting, Sanguinetti’s parrhesiastic disclaimer, “I’m not supposed to say this,” suggests awareness that he was breaching the bounds of professional speech. Instead of using a varnished version of rape logic, Sanguinetti evinced a need to speak an uncomfortable truth, departing from prepared remarks to offer women some real practical wisdom. He violated the official mode of address to assert that women control through clothes whether or not they are victimized. Sanguinetti’s statement is not notable; it was noticed in part due to its phrasing and his use of the word “sluts.” Sanguinetti’s slang, confessional tone, and professional position helped to sediment out his claim as a consummate example of rape logic, making what might have been another drop in the discursive flow of victim-blaming to be marked and challenged by an eruption of counterclaims.
This causal claim about women “dressing like sluts” places definitional power in the eye of the beholder. Rhetorically, it employs a simile that divides women and imparts stigma through the danger of similitude. To explain, Sanguinetti did not say that women in the audience were “sluts.” He advised that they avoid dressing like “sluts.” This advice reveals three core beliefs constituting rape logic: (1) belief in a hierarchy of women predicated on sexual purity; (2) belief that women are raped because of their sexual activity or signs of it; in other words, women are raped because they are “sluts” or they dress like “sluts” and are thus victims of mistaken identity; and (3) belief that a woman’s appearance signifies her sexual desire and consent. The advice simultaneously elides the racism embedded in rape logic, which hyper-sexualizes nonwhite women by fixing “slut” to skin color and making it impossible for them to assume an innocent appearance. Rape logic asserts that women who look sexy to men invite sexual violence and are the primary targets of it, which is supposedly why preventing rape pivots on how women appear.
Sanguinetti gave sartorial advice as safety advice because it chimes with gendered ideas of sexuality. His advice, directed at women only, implies that men have no significant role in preventing rape. SlutWalk protesters replied to this skewed thinking with signs stating, “Don’t Tell Us How to Dress, Tell Men Not to Rape” and “Society Teaches Don’t Get Raped, instead of Don’t Rape.” Since men commit most sexual assaults, Sanguinetti might have addressed them as a class, but rape logic makes that approach seem odd, confrontational, even accusatory! Rape prevention tips routinely imply that men can do little to stop the violence. Yet a women-focused assignation of blame dominates the script of rape prevention, despite the patent absurdity of making men relevant to rape in the guise of authority figures telling women what not to wear.
Feminist counterclaims are needed because Sanguinetti echoes a general endorsement of women’s responsibility for sex. According to Rosalind Gill,
Girls and women are interpellated as the monitors of all sexual and emotional relationships, responsible for producing themselves as desirable heterosexual subjects, as well as for pleasing men sexually, protecting against pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, defending their own sexual reputations, and taking care of men’s self esteem.
Women who experience sexual violence are taken to be promiscuous for taking part in indiscriminate sex, i.e., sex that somehow got out of (their) control. Appraisals of femininity judge women via scales of female propriety, overdetermining appearance and turning the body and clothes into explanations for assault. As argued above, this logic figures female bodies as signifiers of sex and renders women responsible for sex and its outcomes.
Given this gendered allocation of responsibility, it falls to women to prevent sexual violence and become expert at knowing, and projecting, their limitations. In her superb review of safety literature for women, Carol Brooks Gardner found that “prescriptions to women in public places as to how to achieve safety are framed in terms of a rhetoric of limited competence, that is, a series of presentational strategies that project dependency and lack of skill.” Safety advice instructs women to engage in deception (e.g., feign “male co-presence” by pretending to have a male roommate, wear a wedding ring, answer the phone in a man’s voice); dependence (e.g., create a network of male escorts to avoid walking alone, run up to a man when you think you are being followed), and self-profanation (e.g., act crazy, claim to have an STD, wear clothes that facilitate escape and do not “invite attack”). Typifying women’s full-time job of evading sexual violence, Ottawa Police issued safety tips in 2014 to “help females protect themselves.” Its women-focused approach advised: “Try not to walk alone at night but if you do, be alert and avoid dark or isolated areas. Instead, walk out in the open, away from walls, doorways and pillars,” and added the well-worn refrain, “Know your physical capabilities and limitations.” Advising women to arrange their lives to be vigilant against sexual assault requires that they restrict mobility, limit action, and regulate appearance to preempt attack.
The advice that respectable women (students) avoid dressing like culpable women (sluts) relies on the belief that innocent-looking women do not get raped. Making sense of sexual violence this way infers that women who are raped committed some indiscretion that caused their victimization. The question becomes identifying what women do to incite violence because it is women’s irresponsibility that makes them responsible for rape. Preventing rape focuses on changing women’s conduct because the precipitating factors of assault are attached to the victim. Rape logic’s reversal of responsibility from assailant to victim means that women must defend their conduct and explain why violence happened. Moreover, it demands that women show themselves worthy of victim status—not sluts or dressing like sluts—for their claim to be credible. However, if women are viewed as putting themselves in danger by dressing “provocatively,” rape can be rationalized as foreseeable and avoidable. This focus on a victim’s appearance deemphasizes the assailant’s conduct, rendering it incidental, due to chance and female stimulus, rather than willful action.
Rape prevention advice is fundamentally informed by rape logic and that affects how police and criminal justice personnel handle rape complaints; how the public views rape victims, which impacts jury deliberations and victims’ treatment; and, crucially, whether victims report rape. Discourses of denial (nothing criminal happened) and blame (she caused what happened) make women acutely aware that their appearance and account will be viewed with the suspicion that they are lying, regretful, vengeful, or should have expected what they experienced. As a result, rape logic’s gendered repertoires of denial and blame participate in a diffuse discipline that only intensifies when women are the victims of sexual violence.
Part 2: SlutWalk and the Politics of Reclaiming a Name
As a perifeminist response to rape logic, SlutWalk mobilizes against a specific instance of sexist oppression and, as this section argues, its politicized use of clothes challenges the pervasive ideology of sexual violence. SlutWalk subverts the meaning of “slut” by resignifying the term and proliferating parodic performances of its stigmatized referent. The performative protest resonates with ideological contestations that take how we see and what we say to be central to what constitutes common sense and social reality. Marches take place in contexts where women face a continuum of sexual violence and stigma when they flout feminine codes and when they conform to them completely. It is in such contexts that SlutWalk found traction and spread.
The carnivalesque atmosphere at some SlutWalks offers a keen counterpoint to the banality of victim-blaming and slut-shaming and the silence promoted by these practices. SlutWalk protesters held signs to render rape logic apparent and absurd: “I Was Wearing Pants and A Sweater, Did I Deserve It Too?” and “My Clothes Are Not Louder Than My Voice.” Statements such as “My Dress is Not a Yes” appeared in protest after protest, hammering home this retort to rape logic’s conflation of clothes with consent. Accompanying these messages, the other potent signs at SlutWalk were clothes. Some protesters walked in clothes similar to what they were wearing when they were raped. A 41-year-old woman at SlutWalk Philadelphia explained, “I was wearing jeans the night I was raped, and I had to be here for myself, for the 19-year-old me.” While clothes were a vital component of SlutWalk’s critique, no dress code was enforced, with the inaugural SlutWalk invitation stating,
Whether a fellow slut or simply an ally, you don’t have to wear your sexual proclivities on your sleeve, we just ask that you come. Any gender-identification, any age. Singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children, friends. Come walk or roll or strut or holler or stomp with us.
At SlutWalk, wearing one’s sexual proclivities, via clothes or placards that spelled out sexual orientation or preference, demonstrates the critical distance between articulating one’s own sexual desire and the rape logical presumption of a women’s consent based on what she wears. SlutWalk protesters walked to turn “slut” to better ends, changing the intent of its use from reducing women to their sexuality to affirming women’s autonomy and survival of sexual violence. SlutWalk Toronto’s website clarifies,
Historically, the term “slut” has carried a predominantly negative connotation. Aimed at those who are sexually promiscuous, be it for work or pleasure, it has primarily been women who have suffered under the burden of this label. And whether dished out as a serious indictment of one’s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word is always to wound, so we’re taking it back.
Because every woman can be called “slut,” protesters could work together to resignify this weapon word. The standard reply to the accusation “slut”—”I am not a slut”—does not reject the abject category, it accepts the term but denies its application to oneself. Responding to Sanguinetti with “we are not sluts” or “we don’t dress like sluts” affirms the stigmatic division of women operative in rape logic. Employing a different strategy, SlutWalk shows how term and referent can be reworked when the target speaks in that name rather than dodging or denying it. As such, SlutWalk enacts a strategy of resignification that is more than inversive rescripting (i.e., slut isn’t bad, it’s good!). It subverts interpellating women as bad or good, rapeable or respectable. Subverting rape logic’s divisive discourse and illusory protection, SlutWalk enters public space with parodic performances of “slut” and political mobilization against entrenched practices of sexist oppression: “victim blaming” (punishing women for sex they didn’t want) and “slut shaming” (punishing women for sex they wanted).
To reclaim “slut” is to resist the practice of overseeing women based on a sexual division of labels. SlutWalk refuses to “walk [the] slut/not-slut tightrope,” but confronts the conventional use of the term, destabilizing its referent and insisting on feminist interpretations of sexual violence. In so doing, SlutWalk threatens the stigma on which “slut” depends and “avoids the straightforward opposition of earlier feminist reactions to the way women’s sexuality is constructed, replacing it with a more complicated response which puts the ambiguity and difficulty of representing female sexuality at the service of women.” Alternative responses to the policeman’s hail being to remain silent, walk away, or challenge him alone are not replaced, but joined by ideological contestation and subversive appropriation. Consistent with Chela Sandoval’s methodology of the oppressed, such “self-conscious production of another level of signification parasitically based on the level of dominant ideology serves to either display the original dominant ideology as naïve—and no longer natural—or to reveal, transform, or disempower its signification.” To resignify “slut” is to use it to reveal, transform, and disempower its dominant meaning by exposing its oppressive logic and destructive effects.
Resignifying Slut or Reaffirming Patriarchy?
Although SlutWalk uses performative protest calibrated to subvert rape logic, clothes classed as “slutty” discomfited observers who saw SlutWalk as pageantry pretending at politics. In the Guardian, Victoria Coren confesses, “Mostly, I am sad that feminism is suddenly all about clothing. … The only piece of clothing which is relevant for modern feminists to debate … is the burqa.” Wendy McElroy agrees, “SlutWalks are an expression of privileged women who mistake a costume party for a political cause. While Iranian women fight for the right to pursue an education, North American feminists fight to reclaim pride in the word ‘slut.'” These comments make SlutWalk a vehicle for Islamophobic claims about what feminism should really be about: what Muslim women wear, and their status as “real victims” of oppressive cultures. Such claims reveal how Islamophobia and slutphobia can unite to dictate what feminists talk about and mobilize against. SlutWalk provides the occasion for these remarks at the same time that its traction as a grassroots, coalitional, and de-centered international protest provides a practical demonstration that contests narrow, hierarchical visions of feminism. SlutWalk offers an opportunity to counter postfeminist critiques and their use of SlutWalk as a way to impugn feminism. Melanie Phillips’s conclusion distills the postfeminism animating these critiques:
Feminism surely takes up such absurd or offensive positions because it is past its sell-by date. The great causes which animated it have been won. It now has as much purchase on reality as the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat which continued long after the cat itself disappeared.
In postfeminist discourse, other women function as foils for Western feminism. With an ostensible focus on non-Western women, the discourse in effect privileges Western women as living in a postfeminist present when feminism is not neccesary because its (legal) battles have been won. Such critiques ignore that SlutWalk was not limited to North America or the West; protests were organized across the globe by people who found SlutWalk relevant to their reality. That uptake is unlike the Western campaigns championed by Coren and McElroy in which “modern feminists” speak for and act on behalf of Muslim women. As McRobbie puts it, “In a post-feminist frame, the only logic of affiliation with women living in other, non-Western cultures, is to see them as victims.” An alternative approach proposed by Lila Abu-Lughod is to address the forms of global injustice shaping the world, “rather than seeking to ‘save’ others (with the superiority it implies and the violence it would entail).”
For postfeminist commentators, the Cheshire cat that disappeared, and thereby made feminism irrelevant in the West, is de jure sex discrimination. They do not see the cat as de facto sexist oppression, which is why SlutWalk’s ideological critique is for them invisible. Seeing only “slutty” clothes, they miss the critique of rape logic that an analysis of SlutWalk as a perifeminist response makes available. This point is crucial because if feminism is resigned to legal battles, then it can, in hyperbolic fashion, be diagnosed as dead. To deliver that verdict, however, would be to ignore rape prosecution and reporting rates; to disregard the cultural contexts that enable sexual violence; and to forget that SlutWalk’s catalyst was a claim made by a member of law enforcement.
Although not one of its stated aims, SlutWalk also departs from the confidence in legal reform exhibited by dominance feminism. Ratna Kapur argues that SlutWalk is a “space clearing gesture” and “an important normative and discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality.” She explains that SlutWalk moves beyond dominance feminism because the protests are
situated as techniques of critique, not only of dominant attitudes towards women’s sexuality, but also of some segments of the feminist movement’s complicity in reinforcing a sexually-sanitised understanding of female subjectivity. These campaigns mark, at one and the same time, the demise of a politics based on dominance feminism and the reincarnation of a politics of productive critique.
According to Kapur, part of SlutWalk’s value is its catalytic potential for feminism, rather than its ability to create a permanent template or consolidate into a clean and proper feminism that sees its primary task as petitioning the state. She affirms that SlutWalk “marks a moment when it is perhaps time to stop thinking in terms of revolution, while at the same time not resign to the impulse of liberal reformism as the only option left.” SlutWalk makes this move by rejecting the position, expressed best by Andrea Dworkin, that under patriarchy “the only choice for the woman has been to embrace herself as whore, as sexual wanton or sexual commodity with phallic boundaries, or to disavow desire, disavow her body.” For Dworkin, women in male supremacist society can choose celibacy or celebrate themselves as whores and call that freedom.
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity complicates the idea that there is either capitulation or patriarchy’s overcoming. She says, “Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms. … This is not freedom but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.” For Butler, there are moments when discourses and practices are subverted, although not fully and forever more, by parodic performances that derive agency from skewed social norms and attend to the regulatory power of gender. “Dressing like a slut” does not in itself indicate subversive parody, but its use in a feminist protest against rape logic attends to gender regulation and empowers protesters to fight the sexist skew embedded in sexual norms. To work the trap and policing of norms, SlutWalk takes a key term of oppression and turns it to unlock the meaning and menace of the word.
Analyzing SlutWalk as a perifeminist response elucidates its uneasy strategy of performative politics. Karen Zivi describes a performative politics as “neither perfectly subversive in its effects nor an exact replication of existing regulatory norms.” SlutWalk is neither an exact replication of regulatory norms—its contexts and the content of its critique do slut with a difference—nor can a protest be perfectly subversive. Rather, SlutWalk enacts a performative contradiction: it reclaims “slut,” someone unentitled to sexual autonomy and respect, while making claims for both. In effect SlutWalk shows how “slut,” and the logic of which it is a part, function to rationalize sexist oppression and violence. Through this lens, SlutWalk can be seen as a valuable and complicated intervention that does not augur the future or end of feminism.
Historicizing SlutWalk: Feminist Intervention Now
Women protesting in bras may appear at odds with the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant when women threw bras into the Freedom Trash Can, but both protests oppose the social status of women’s sexuality. The Miss America protest confronted the ranking of women based on their bathing-suit bodies: trashing bras was a perifeminist response to such gendered objectification. SlutWalk refutes the advice that women avoid dressing like sluts because their bodies incite violence: protesting in bras is a perifeminist response to such gendered responsibilization.
While SlutWalk is a fresh articulation of feminist resistance, it takes part in a discursive legacy of feminism that combines protest, parody, and politicized visuals. For instance, the Guerrilla Girls, a group of “masked avengers” founded in 1985, use “outrageous visuals to expose discrimination and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture.” Lesbian Avengers use protest performances, including eating fire and organizing the first Dyke March in 1993, to increase lesbian visibility in the gay and feminist movements. In the same decade, Riot Grrrls scrawled “slut” and “rape” on their bodies “to draw attention to constraints placed on women’s sexuality and to publicize issues such as sexual abuse and rape that were largely ignored by the media.” Recently, Pussy Riot, a band of Russian feminists wearing bright dresses and balaclavas, staged performances against Vladimir Putin, for which three of its members were jailed. These protests, along with what have become mainstream actions such as Take Back the Night and Pride marches, produce politicized visibility and collectivity to critique cultural conditions and celebrate community. Some of the groups use terms typically deployed to denigrate participants: “dyke,” “pussy,” “girl.” Reclaiming names is a strategy of ideological contestation, such as the resignifying of “faggot,” “queer,” and “bitch” and, after the removal of the “n-word” in the media, its explosive re-emergence in rap music. SlutWalk resonates with these ideological struggles and joins the discursive legacy of feminism, contributing its own inflection to the form because it is in direct response to rape logic.
As controversial as “slut” may be, the international walk shows the potential of perifeminist responses to mobilize against sexist oppression. That people around the world walked in solidarity with victims and against victim-blaming is a significant event. That they walked under the SlutWalk banner suggests that the word hit a nerve. That the name “SlutWalk” was translated, changed, or expanded indicates the plasticity of the protest and its applicability in diverse locations. While SlutWalks take many forms, the pervasive logic holding rape victims responsible for violence shapes the local and global reality the protest addresses, in contrast to it being a movement to reduce women to a single stigmatic label.
Subverting the Victim Script by Calling Out and Going Public
Additionally, SlutWalk speaks not just to those who commit sexual violence, it addresses their defenders, enablers, and apologists. Custodians of rape culture are called out for the violence they help to make possible; they are essential in shoring up and propagating the cultural climate whereby sexual violence can flourish. Rape culture’s continuum of sexual violence is not created by rapists alone; it is produced through social practices, scripted interactions, physical and symbolic violence, institutional discourses, and cultural logics to which many people contribute, and which must be challenged by creative, collective, and unyielding opposition.
The public presentation of angry (or, for that matter, joyful) and politicized victims contributes to reframing what it means to be a victim and to be seen as such. Popular images of female victims—and we must wonder at this popularity—portray them as sad, silent, and alone. While media stories about rape feature stock images of women with heads bowed, shoulders slumped, and hands over their faces, in recent years more victims are releasing their names and going public with their experiences and demands for social change. Rather than assume the position of object of pity, victims are publicly presenting as people that sexually abusive men and their custodians ought to fear.
In this historical moment of victims’ increasing visibility, SlutWalk offers an instructive example of the international coalition and breadth of solidarity realizable for feminist action against sexual violence. Sharon Marcus explains that “cultural productions and reinscriptions of our bodies and our geographies can help us to begin to revise the grammar of violence and to represent ourselves in militant new ways.” SlutWalk’s mobilization of feminist militancy and sexual self-assertion provides an alterative to what Gardner defined as the “rhetoric of limited competence”: the self-profanation required of women to stay safe, blameless, and believable. Marcus writes, “patriarchy acquires its consistency as an overarching descriptive concept through the aggregation of microstrategies of oppression such as rape. Masculine power and feminine powerlessness neither simply precede or cause rape; rather, rape is one of culture’s many modes of feminizing women.” Similarly, Sara Ahmed writes of resistance to sexual harassment, yet another microstrategy of sexist oppression in the patriarchal mode of feminizing women:
When a woman is harassed by an individual man, she has to work hard to call him out. She often has to keep saying it because he keeps doing it. Calling out an individual matters, even when the system is also what is bruising: the violence directed against you by somebody is a violence that leaves a trace upon you whether that trace is visible or not. And there is a system which creates him, supports him, and gives him a sense that he has a right to do what he does. To challenge him is to challenge a system.
Ahmed advocates the discursive practice of calling out to assert oneself against the oppression occurring along the continuum of sexual violence. Calling out challenges not just an individual, but the system which enables and enacts violence. SlutWalk calls out Sanguinetti and the “bigger picture of common, persistent and documented victim-blaming within Police Services, the justice system and social spheres around us.” The calling out and going public by victims at SlutWalk makes visible a reality of violence that contradicts rape logic’s claims about who is raped, who causes rape and, ultimately, why rape goes unrecognized. SlutWalk demonstrates that victims fight sexual violence, its logic and systemic normalization, by refusing responsibility for it; locating violent agency in the body that attacks; and calling out sexually abusive men and the custodians of rape culture who make a world like this.
Conclusion
What SlutWalk offers then is the uneasy strategy of using performative protest to work towards structural reform and cultural transformation. This protest is attuned to current conditions because more women are refusing to inhabit a sanitised sexuality or conventional victim identity, although both remain seductive due to their cultural acceptance and legibility. SlutWalk’s critics have cited clothes to dismiss protesters, without recognizing that appearance is a critical part of resistance. In their view, SlutWalk is a form of apolitical panto, the easy slipping on of an identity without pain, struggle, or risk. SlutWalk is thereby relegated to sexual, not political, desire: to be looked at, not listened to. Stripping SlutWalk of its politics, this view promotes the very logic that SlutWalk exposes and contests: that what a woman wears establishes whether one hears what she has to say; how she appears determines how to treat her.
This article has argued that protesters who appear to assume a look styled for the male gaze are appropriating visual codes of “sex appeal” to make feminist appeals against rape logic. Ironically, that strategy proved to be both too brash and too subtle for commentators skirting the surface of SlutWalk’s ideological critique. Another way of looking at SlutWalk appreciates its work to circulate feminist inscriptions and to disarticulate the forced connection of clothes and consent. It also recognizes that the protest restages the long-held feminist claim that women can give or withhold consent no matter who they are or what they look like.
Reclaiming names and public protest are not enough, nor do they embody the only future of feminism, but struggles over naming and resistance to classificatory violence are crucial to feminist movement. Through performative protest, SlutWalk reveals that the dominant meaning of “slut” is an interpellation that does not refer to any ontological quality, attribute, or activity. Like other slurs that shore up inequality, it is vulnerable to resignification. It can be turned toward collective action, cultural critique, and political solidarity, rather than serving only as a word that wounds.
This article analyzed SlutWalk as a perifeminist response to rape logic to show that “slut” is one of the names through which sexual subjects become culturally intelligible. Whether one is, is like, dresses like, or is not a slut, rape logic informs conventional understandings of gender and sexuality. It disciplines from within and without, influencing how women are viewed and treated and how they are women. SlutWalk thus serves as a vital reminder to attend to gender regulation and the emergence of subjects where the stigma of slut remains a constitutive condition of womanhood. SlutWalk’s contribution to feminism is a perifeminist response that works the trap we are in, not by being decent or docile, but by doing gender trouble at many moments around the world.