Between Rape and “Desired” Sex: Making a More Complex Difference

Feminist legal theorists have struggled to demonstrate that the category “rape” may include sexual acts between acquaintances or spouses, as well as acts involving little or no violence, only the threat of economic or physical coercion.1 Yet scholars are just as troubled by the difficulty of finding a common denominator among these offenses as women struggling to evaluate the justice or injustice of their sexual experiences. As Linda Bourque observes, “definitions of rape are more diverse than is generally acknowledged,” and even women “vary in the extent to which they define sexually demeaning or assaultive behavior as criminal” (285-286). Although both radical feminists and psychoanalytic theorists challenge the simplicity of the consent criterion for distinguishing between rape and “desired” sex, one wonders how the very possibility of drawing such a distinction functions as an obscure (if necessary) object of feminist desire.

The following paper seeks to understand how the difficulty of “making this difference” contributes to the trauma of sexual coercion in its own right. I suggest that the Lacanian distinction between desire and demand helps to explain how the presumption of indifference to possible sexual objects can damage women as much as the physical violence involved in many rapes. However, the legal procedures through which women attempt to reassert the particularity or specificity of their desire in the aftermath of an assault may not be able to “demonstrate” this specificity any better than other cultural rites, because the law can only represent citizens insofar as they are subjects of an undifferentiated demand. If the goal of antirape theory and practice is not to defend women's desire through a rigid legal shell but to make it possible for women to affirm their sexuality even in the absence of any demonstrable “right,” it seems important to understand how the psychological dynamics of rape transcend categories which can be represented or punished by