A New Epistemology of Rape?

In this essay I take issue with entrenched conceptions of individual autonomy for how they block understandings of the implications of rape in patriarchal cultures both ‘at home’ and in situations of armed conflict. I focus on human vulnerability as it manifests in sedimented assumptions about violence against women as endemic to male-female relations, thwarting possibilities of knowing the specific harms particular acts of rape enact well enough to render intelligible their far-reaching social-political-moral implications. Taking my point of departure from Debra Bergoffen's call for ‘a new epistemology of rape’, I consider what such a call can amount to within an instituted social imaginary where male domination and female subordination are taken for granted—naturalized.