IN HER FINAL STATEMENT TO THE COURT, Gisèle Pelicot scorned categorizations of rape as atypical. Her assailants, she remarked, weren’t rogue actors in a population of morally unobtrusive men; they did exactly what they’d been trained to doby a “macho and patriarchal society” that systematically disenfranchises and debases women and “trivializes rape.” Her analysis arrived at a horribly apt moment. The very day of the verdicts, German broadcaster ARD reported findings from a yearlong investigation into rape chat groups on the social messaging service Telegram. These groups have more than 70,000 members, many of whom bragged of having assaulted women in their households: mothers, sisters, daughters, wives. They shared photos and videos; others offered instructions on purchasing and utilizing sedatives to subdue possible targets. This was the precise tactic Dominique Pelicot used against Gisèle Pelicot; during the trial, she referred to it using the official term, “chemical submission.”
It goes without saying that victims of sexual violence experience victimization individually. But the abiding cultural formulations of rape as unspeakable—a private and singular tragedy for which words will not suffice—serve mainly to shore up stigma and secrecy surrounding these violations, leaving rape a kind of insoluble fog saturating life under patriarchy. As a physical trauma, at least, rape is a delineable event: it happens in a particular time and place; specific, divisible bodies are involved; and presumably, at some point, the incident concludes. Either you live or you die. Your rapists are held to account or they are not. (Mostly they are not.) While the psychic aftershocks of rape are murkier, it’s nonetheless experientially intelligible; trauma does not categorically defy utterance, as is frequently insinuated or proclaimed. If narrative is at times an ill-fitting container for grief, the alternative—silence—is unthinkable.
On the animating force behind her novella This Is Pleasure, Mary Gaitskill has said that the essay is “best for making an argument that is more or less rational,” while fiction, in turn, grants breathing room to the “contradictory” feelings she has toward contemporary conversations on sex and violence. A novel won’t solve woman hating, but it might be the place where stories of trauma are able to arc toward complicatedness and the provisional, where the shifting opacities of consent, desire, and violation are less immediately intelligible.
Though instrumental to practices of consciousness-raising and coalition-building, storytelling alone cannot eliminate rape. As we see also in responses to climate catastrophe and genocide, and in rapidly consolidating apparatuses of political suppression, unembellished gestures of “bearing witness” remain inert if unoriented toward action. Eight years after #MeToo, the question remains: what now? While art in the wake of the movement is no stranger to stories concerning gendered abuses of power, fiction that explicitly reckons with #MeToo is still coming into focus. As a possible mode of redress, how should the novel be? {read}