Rape Without Bodies? Reimagining the Phenomenon We Call “Rape”

Issue Cover Volume 25 Issue 4 Winter 2018 Holly Porter Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Volume 25, Issue 4, 1 December 2018, Pages 589–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxy029 Published: 18 December 2018 Abstract “How do you define rape?” When one does research on rape, this question is one of the most basic and common. Ostensibly, the question is about methodology. But if we scratch beneath the surface, it is fundamentally an ontological question: what is rape? This article explores where the threshold which separates sex that is okay from sex that is rape comes from. Does it come from a deeply embodied sense of being violated, a normative limit that is socially and/or legally constructed—or something else? Ultimately, the article suggests a reimagining of rape as a sexual trespass on the boundaries of being.