On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  All of which, once again, might make us wary of the idea that, in relation to sexual harassment and violence, a corner has at last been turned. If we are dealing with the drag, the ugly undertow, of sexual difference in a toxic world, then institutions can only do so much (though genuinely getting on the case and doing something would surely help). We also need to look beyond the plush corridors and gilded cages of Westminster and Hollywood. According to a 2017 TUC report, more than half of women in the workplace experience sexual harassment, most of whom do not report it or fail to achieve a positive outcome when they do (which more or less takes us back to the 1970s where we started).102 Today, women who are casually and precariously employed are the most vulnerable, their numbers steadily rising in an economy in the relentless grip of profit. #MeToo was founded in 2007 by Tarana Burke, an African-American woman, as a grassroots movement for women, particularly women of colour, in underprivileged communities, with the motto ‘Empathy stamps out shame.’103 At the height of the Weinstein scandal, although it received comparatively little attention, seven hundred thousand women farmworkers sent a joint letter in solidarity to the most prominent figures to have spoken out in Hollywood, protesting against the constant harassment they experienced at work.104 It would take two more years, however, before the systemic and violent harassment of workers in the garment industry – fashion’s ‘dirty secret’ – was even acknowledged let alone redressed: the 2019 Lesotho Agreement threatens loss of contract with international firms such as Levi’s to any factory not implementing a zero-tolerance policy on harassment (although these hard-won gains are now threatened by job losses following the pandemic).105

  * * *

  I have never so regretted agreeing to write on a subject. But as I have sunk deeper into the morass, Roxane Gay is the writer who more than once has come to my aid. Gay rose to fame as the ‘bad’ feminist who sang along to Robin Thicke’s lyrics, had fantasies about Bill Clinton and likes to wear pink. She has also made assault against women more or less her life’s writing work. Reading the tales of sexual harassment both here and in the US, I have started to feel that all the attention has served not only as an urgent call for a better world but, oddly and at the same time, as a diversionary tactic to help us avoid having to think about sex. Or to put it another way, if harassment and sexual violence are the whole story of human sexuality, then we may as well lock the door on who we are and throw away the key. How, then, can we acknowledge sexual harassment for the vicious endgame it is, while leaving open the question of what sexuality, at its wildest – most harmful and most exhilarating, sometimes both together – might be?

  Gay was gang-raped at the age of twelve. The gang included a boy she loved who set the whole thing up and whom, although he had treated her badly, she had more or less trusted until then. The legacy of that moment – above all a manic appetite that turned her body into a fortress against pain – is the subject of her memoir, Hunger, which was published in 2017: ‘If I was undesirable, I could keep more hurt away […] My body could become so big it would never be broken again.’106 She also recounts the episode towards the end of Bad Feminist but it was not the part of the book to receive most attention nor, I suspect, what led to its huge success. Amongst other things, Hunger is a one-woman riposte to those who find it odd that a woman could go on loving a man who treated her with unforgivable violence (‘I woke up the next morning and cooked him breakfast’; ‘As with all things shitty, this too shall pass. I love you’), or that it might take a very long time for what happened to fully register, for the experience to break the threshold of its own anguish and pass into speech. Gay does not shy away from the word ‘victim’. She prefers it to ‘survivor’: ‘I don’t want to pretend I am on some triumphant, uplifting journey.’ Far from rendering her passive or pathetic, naming herself in this way is a form of agency that fuels her capacity to live and to write: ‘I am stronger than I am broken.’107 Even if she also pays a price: ‘Writing that kind of story requires going to a dark place. At times, I nauseated myself in the writing and by what I am capable of writing and imagining, my ability to go there.’108

  At the same time as telling this gruesome story perhaps more graphically than anyone I have read, Gay also explores the furthest limits of a woman’s imagination, the lengths to which she can be driven, or choose to go, in the domain of love and intimacy. This is especially true of her second collection of short stories, Difficult Women, also published in 2017 but which received less attention than Hunger. Critics seem to have greeted Difficult Women with either disappointment or false cheer (in tune with the options available to many women in a heartless world). Gay has been accused of exploitation. She has also been praised for having ‘fun’ with her ‘ladies’: ‘no shrinking violets’, they give ‘as good as they get’.109 She is, I suggest, a borderline writer, a term I intend not as diagnosis but as praise. Despite, or perhaps because of, what happened to her, Gay is always on the side of the untamed. Untamed State is the title of her first novel. It too tells the lurid story of a rape which – and this is one of the strengths of her writing – is given its fullest race and class dimension: the daughter of a rich arriviste Haitian businessman is kidnapped, held to ransom and repeatedly raped by a gang of men who roam and spread fear on the streets.

  In Hunger, revulsion towards fat people is seen as fuelled by anxiety at unruly bodies, bodies whose outlines stretch to infinity and which break all the rules: ‘My body is wildly undisciplined’ – ‘undisciplined’ and ‘unruly’ are a refrain.110 A fat person stands as a terrifying rebuke to those who foolishly believe that their mortal body, not to speak of their inner life, could ever be truly under control or in shape. Hence the ‘strange civic-minded cruelty’ with which Gay, like all fat people, is greeted, as if such cruelty were the only way the people hurling the insult or turning away in disgust can feel confident of keeping their place in the ranks of the civilised.111 ‘My wife and I’, explains the narrator of the short story ‘Florida’, in Difficult Women, ‘watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves.’112 Despite the ugly beginnings, Hunger – which portrays appetite as uncontrolled, unruly, untamed – slowly but surely becomes a testament not only to trauma but to the intensity and breadth of human desire, for which the word hunger becomes the drive and metaphor: ‘I often tell my students that fiction is about desire one way or another […] We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.’113 This is for me what Gay does so brilliantly: point the finger without reserve at male violence and its deadly aftermath for women, while exuberantly – and some would say perversely – keeping open all the pathways of the mind.

  ‘There’s a lot to love about breaking things,’ observes the narrator of ‘North Country’, another story from Difficult Women, and then to her new lover, the first man, we are told, who has ever said that he likes her, ‘You don’t have to be soft with me.’114 This story also includes a fleeting episode of sexual harassment at the University of Michigan, where Gay herself studied for a PhD. The narrator is the only black person and the only woman in her department – which may well also have been the case. She is seduced by her dissertation adviser, who endlessly promises her marriage and then takes up with his new lab assistant – she finds them having sex in the lab – when she fails to move on after the death of their unborn child. Babies who have died recur in Gay’s stories. They are often, but not always, the cause of the agonised pleasure her protagonists take in psychic and physical pain: ‘At a bar I found a man who would hit me […] I used one hurt to cover over another […] I tried to lose myself in my bruising.’115 She would be a much less interesting writer if that were always the explanation, as if there must be a get-out clause for women who travel to the most tortured places of the heart (violated virtue as a woman’s only possible route to vice). Gay sits on a border between a space in which trauma is the sole cause of anguish: ‘look what has been done to me’, and that of a mind which, in spite of trauma – thum
bing trauma, one might say – takes flight: ‘see how far I can go’. A mind that does not shy away from deploying the full psychic palette in its most raucous and bloody hues (think ‘bleeding heart’ with a twist).

  Perhaps the most disturbing story opens: ‘My husband is a hunter. I am a knife.’ She likes him to mark her body and takes pleasure in skinning and disembowelling his prey. Long ago, when her sister lay dying by the roadside after their car was hit by a drunk driver, she used her knife to cut out the heart ‘he did not deserve’ and placed it inside her sister’s chest, until the two hearts ‘started beating as one’. At the end of the story, she delivers her sister’s unborn child, and then loses her own: ‘I wish I could carve the anger out of my body the way I cut everything else.’116

  To borrow the title of psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s 2018 book, Gay’s characters are ‘beyond doer and done to’, or more precisely they participate in both.117 They are violated, but they are also agents as they proceed, with exceptional energy and cutting determination, on their way through their lives. As a writer, Gay shunts between the acuity of her rage and the creative mess of her mind. In the world of sexual harassment, the idea of fiction or fabrication is, as we have seen, almost invariably bad news for women, as in ‘She made the whole thing up.’ Gay is there to remind us that fiction, rather than being suspect or fraudulent, is an imaginative tool that belongs at the centre of these debates. It can depict damage as well as freedom, seized from a wretched past. In her hands, telling stories – her own story, the stories she invents – is the place where impossible paths meet.

  2

  TRANS VOICES

  Who Do You Think You Are?

  Some time in the 1970s, in the home of the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, I found myself in the company of another distinguished cinema critic, who had just returned to London from the Berlin International Film Festival. Over dinner he took pleasure in regaling us with stories of male-to-female transsexual prostitutes he had met on the city streets, and how difficult it was to ‘complete’ the transaction since the body interprets the surgically created vagina as a wound, which it attempts to close. I could not tell if he had persisted down this path, but his delight in telling the tale of sexual encounters which, by his account, could only be sadistic for the man and painful for the women involved was repellent. He was boasting. I had no doubt that he thought he was promoting their case. He registered my disapproval. Twice I declined when he offered to refill my glass with red wine. Faced with his persistence, I put my hand over the glass to make myself clear. Refusing to take no for an answer, he proceeded to pour the wine over the back of my hand. It was my first inkling, at a distance, of what transsexual people, even from those purportedly on their side, might be up against.

  Just a few years before, one of the most renowned instances of transsexuality in the UK had been in the news. In 1969, Arthur Corbett, first husband of the famous male-to-female transsexual April Ashley, sought an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that at the time of the ceremony, the respondent (Ashley) was ‘a person of the male sex’. In the course of the proceedings, Corbett – or ‘the Honourable Arthur Cameron Corbett’, as he introduced himself to Ashley after initially using the alias ‘Frank’ – presented himself as a frequenter of male brothels and a cross-dresser who, when he looked into the mirror, never liked what he saw: ‘You want the fantasy to appear right. It utterly failed to appear right in my eyes.’ He then explained how, from their first meeting at the Caprice, he had been mesmerised by Ashley. She was so much more than he could ‘ever hope to be’: ‘The reality […] far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.’* It took a while for Ashley, along with her medical and legal advisers, to realise what Corbett was up to (no fewer than nine medical practitioners gave evidence in court). He was, in her words, portraying their marriage as a ‘squalid prank, a deliberate mockery of moral society perpetrated by a couple of queers for their own twisted amusement’.1

  Corbett’s ploy was successful. The marriage was annulled, in a case that is commonly seen as having set back the cause of transsexual women and men for decades. Transsexual people lost all right to marry for more than thirty years. The decision ruled out any change to their birth certificates, a right they had enjoyed since 1944, thereby denying them legal recognition of their gender. In 1986, female-to-male transsexual Mark Rees, in the first challenge to the ruling, lost his case at the European Court of Human Rights against the UK government for its failure to recognise his male status, entailing loss of privacy and barring his marriage with a woman.2 Only with the Gender Recognition Act of 2004, which introduced the requirement of a Gender Recognition Certificate, was the law changed to permit transsexual people to marry as their chosen gender. The January 2016 UK parliamentary report Transgender Equality noted that the medicalised certificate pathologises transsexuality and ‘is contrary to the dignity and personal autonomy of applicants’. Describing the Act as pioneering but outdated, it called for a further change in the law.3 In 2018, it was recommended that the law be changed to make gender a matter of self-recognition, a change that has provoked intense controversy, which will be discussed later in this book. But Corbett vs Corbett cast its shadow over public understanding of trans experience for a very long time. ‘Not since the Oscar Wilde trial’, Ashley comments in her 2006 memoir, The First Lady, ‘had a civil matter led to such socially disastrous consequences.’4

  For Justice Ormrod, the case – ‘the first occasion on which a court in England has been called on to decide the sex of an individual’ – was straightforward.5 Because Ashley had been registered as a boy at birth, she should in perpetuity be treated as male. Suggestions of intersex were dismissed on the grounds of medical evidence attesting that she was born with male gonads, chromosomes and genitalia. Although there had been minimal development at puberty, no facial hair, some breast formation and what Ashley referred to as a ‘vestigial penis’ because of its diminutive size, the judge also ruled out intersex or hermaphroditism as a consideration. Nor did the fact that Ashley had undergone full surgical genital reconstruction, and that there had been some penetrative sex, albeit unsatisfactory, between her and Corbett, make any difference: ‘the respondent was physically incapable of consummating a marriage as intercourse using the completely artificially constructed cavity could never constitute true intercourse’ (what would constitute ‘true intercourse’ is not specified). Ashley was not, to his mind, a woman. For Ormrod, this was a more correct way of phrasing the issue in relation to the validity of the marriage than in terms of whether or not she was still a man. At the outset he had been sympathetic towards her, but as the hearing proceeded, he became progressively less persuaded: ‘Her outward appearance, at first sight, was convincingly feminine but on closer and longer examination in the witness box it was much less so. The voice, manner, gestures and attitude became increasingly reminiscent of the accomplished female impersonator.’ Her femininity was pastiche – in the words of one of the expert witnesses, her ‘pastiche of femininity was convincing’ (although you might argue that a convincing pastiche is a contradiction in terms).6

  If the judge found for the plaintiff on the grounds that Ashley could not fulfil the role of a wife (‘the essential role of a woman in marriage’7), it is nonetheless obvious from Corbett’s statements that this was never exactly what he had had in mind. For Corbett, Ashley was never an object of desire, but of envy. He coveted her freedom, her scandalous violation and embodiment of the norm. She was someone he wanted to emulate. Corbett’s wording is precise. Ashley was his fantasy or dream come true, the life he most wanted, but could not hope for, for himself: ‘The reality […] far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.’ He did not want her, as in desire; he wanted to be her, as in identification (for psychoanalysis this is a rudimentary distinction), or rather the first only as an effect of the second. In this, without knowing it, he could be seen as coming close
to obeying a later transsexual injunction, or piece of transsexual worldly advice. As Kate Bornstein, one of today’s most celebrated and controversial male-to-female transsexuals, puts it towards the end of her 2012 account of her complex (to say the least) journey, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, A Memoir – The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today: ‘Never fuck anyone you wouldn’t wanna be.’8

  One of the challenges mounted by transsexual people to the popular image of human sexuality is to insist, in the words of author and political activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, that: ‘It is not about who you want to go to bed with, it’s who you want to go to bed as’ (she was explaining the difference to Michael Cashman, co-founder with Ian McKellen of Stonewall).9 This, it can be argued, is the province of gender – how you see yourself and wish to be seen. In fact the term gender with reference to transsexuality was first used by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, a matter of months before the Corbett/Ashley case, in his 1968 study Sex and Gender, the second volume of which was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first – many transsexual people today say the same thing.10 To talk of a ‘gender dysphoria syndrome’ was therefore as inappropriate as to talk of ‘a suicide syndrome, or an incest syndrome, or a wanderlust syndrome’.11 Stoller’s best-known transsexual case was Agnes, who had secured genital reassignment surgery having duped Stoller and his associate Harold Garfinkel into believing that her female development at puberty was natural (they diagnosed her as having a rare condition of intersex in which an apparently male body spontaneously feminises at puberty). Eight years later, she returned to tell them that since puberty she had in fact been regularly taking oestrogens prescribed for her mother: ‘My chagrin at learning this’, Stoller wrote, ‘was matched by my amusement that she had pulled off this coup with such skill.’12 Stoller was always careful to insist that his own category of gender identity was not sacrosant: ‘With gender difficult to define and identity still a challenge to theoreticians, we need hardly insist on the holiness of the term “gender identity.”’13