• • • low end theory

When I preface what I’m about to say by disclosing that I am a survivor of rape, or child sexual abuse—I am not sure what to call “it,” or really, the series of “its” that “it” was and remains—I am already uneasy about the effects of that disclosure. I already want to snatch it back. It’s not just that I don’t know if you will believe me, or that I don’t know what you will do with that information. It’s also that I cannot help but feel that I am trying to authorize myself to say something that would not be felt as true if I spoke of it in another way. It’s also that I really do believe that someone with none of my experiences, someone who has worked hard enough, or is empathically gifted enough to understand, to feel, might not have had to have experienced firsthand what I have in order to come to the same conclusions. And all the same, I think like you need to know this fact about me, black boy me, to make what I’m saying make sense. I feel like I’ve already said too much. My writing is nothing if not a mess of thinking and feeling and partial disclosure. I am uncomfortable with being in first person this way, and all the redrawing of boundaries it entails. But it’s from this position, and this body, this nexus of accumulated privilege and unprivilege and so much more that I begin to think about rape cultures, even though I am not at all comfortable with the life that term has begun to live of late.

Rape has a history. Histories, actually. One of the patterns of a more local history can be seen and felt in the ways some instances of rape have the effect of mobilizing, even galvanizing people in ways that other acts of violence do not. I am not just speaking of feminists. If my dashboard is any indication, folks in my orbit have expended exponentially more outrage on the recent Julian Assange rape case, and the left’s response to it, than, for example, the human rights abuses that have spurred the prisoner-organized and coordinated strike that’s been going on in Georgia.

These are not equivalent events, in any respect. Nor are they competing with one another. But it’s hard for me not to notice that I hear a lot more U.S. based feminists responding to the former as an issue that concerns “women,” than the latter. I imagine a lot of people would say that this is true, that the fact is, we participate in a culture that sanctions rape, a culture that establishes bonds between men through violence against women, and that the Assange case is revealing the degree to which the “progressive” left is willing to condone—or participate in the enacting of—sexual violence. Willing even, perhaps, to participate in that violence after the fact by placing the victim’s/survivor’s credibility or motives on trial, and not the violent act. To effectively punish the woman who survived the violation (and those who dare to support her) for daring to use the force of the law against a person whose actions have been labeled by many on the left as heroic.

I hope that my description indicates that this response is not something that I think is wrong. At the same time, I do want to sound a note of reservation, as a feminist man and as a prison abolitionist who doesn’t see those as conflicting places from which to speak politically (probably because I see my own role in both of these political formations as one not defined by uncritical loyalty to a set of issues, even as I recognize that it’s essential, politically, to define what your issues are). When I tell progressive folks that I’m an abolitionist, half of the time, they condescendingly smile and nod and say that they’ve read Angela Davis’s book and that they think it’s terrible that so many nonviolent drug offenders are locked up and the system is so unbelievably racist and [insert-anxiety-ridden-nicety here].

The people who are actually invested enough in these issues to disagree with me often show their cards. “If we get rid of prisons,” they’ll say, “what are we going to do with all the rapists and murderers?” When I hear this, I think that feminist descriptions of rape culture have actually not accounted for the ways in which the very idea of rape is tied up not only with a culture that punishes women for attempting to tell the truth, but with a culture that punishes, full stop. A culture punishes populations that include women, but also include people who are gendered differently. I think also about how much we rely on the law, and ultimately, on the penal system, to define what it means to be safe. To the extent that we experience the incapacitation of the rapist—the locking of those convicted of rape—as if it were justice, overlooking conveniently the persistent evidence that more prisoners do not mean fewer instances of sexual violence.

I think about the idea of prison rape, and how rarely I see this invoked in descriptions of rape culture. I recall the “dropping the soap” joke made by a women’s studies professor in a classroom, and the uncomfortable receding of laughter once it was recognized that I wasn’t participating in it. I think about the degree to which indifference to prison rape is also an essential part of popular culture, and how rarely I hear this in feminist outrage toward rape culture. About how the condition of “prisoner” has an underrecognized resonance with the condition of “woman” to the extent to which becoming a prisoner is, to some extent, not only to become rapeable but to be seen by many as deserving of it. Rape culture tells you, insistently, that you shoulda thought about that before you committed the crime. Crime as submission, before the fact, to rape culture.

I think about how rarely I see the myth of the black male rapist referenced in discussions of rape culture, and I think, at the same time, about witch hunts. I think about the systematic rape of black women categorized as the master’s use of his property. Rape culture as the protection and promotion of the sancticity of white womanhood—all of which, I suspect, did nothing to decrease the instances of rape against even those women whom it enshrined as ideal.

I wonder if the victims of prison rape are not victim enough for the feminism I see on my dashboard. I wonder if a black body swinging from a tree will be seen as the victim, or victim enough of rape culture for that kind of feminism. I wonder these things because I want to see a movement that doesn’t isolate rape from other kinds of violence, or as a violence experienced by an amorphous and undifferentiated category of “women.” Because, I suppose, I want to be part of a feminism that understands that certain uses of the idea of rape culture can actually strengthen patriarchy, and that being accountable to complicated histories is not to participate in apologism. So I have to wonder if it isn’t more than a coincidence that the feminists I am reading are not organizing in support of the strikers. I have to wonder at the sense of risk I feel in writing that I don’t think that extending the reach of an already problematic criminal justice system is a solution. I question the flinch I feel in saying that I think it lets this state, one so deeply and fundamentally complicit with rape culture, off the hook. I question my reservation in saying that I want to recognize our reliance on this very state to protect some of us from violence and to enact justice as a tragedy. In saying that I think that rape culture is actually part of a culture that relies on incarceration to solve problems. This really has so little to do with Julian Assange.

I am able to exhale after reading this post. It is brilliant. I am thinking now about the Georgia prison strike again, and I think about these predominantly male persons who are striking in part because they are performing a role for the state that has traditionally been reserved for women—unwaged domestic work. “[T]hey are not paid one single dime, and they are required to clean the floors, clean the showers, do the yard work, do the dishes, cook the food—in other words, to maintain the prison itself.” (And somehow in doing this unwaged work, they managed to learn solidarity across difference, to build coalition, and to organize, as well? These folks must have something to teach us about organizing.) I think it is worth asking, where is the feminist response? The prisoners are denied educational programs. Where is the feminist solidarity? Are these not feminist issues?

I hate to single out Sady, who has received no shortage of hell in recent days for speaking out against Assange. But, I want to push back against the idea that the law, or jurisprudence are sufficient mechanisms for justice. Against, also, the idea that RAINN, which has essentially no criticism of the racist orientation and history of the criminal justice system, RAINN, an organization which has so rarely been willing to work in the direction of imagining or strategizing for working toward justice or healing that will live beyond the machinations of a still racist and sexist state, is an organization worth supporting.

I’m also saying this because Critical Resistance, an organization that I do believe in, an organization that works to end violence by working against state violence and mass incarceration, that works to end violence by strengthening communities and not individualizing the problem, that addresses itself to the intertwining of racialized and gendered histories, toward the abolition of the prison industrial complex, is in a moment of crisis. Having lost a major source of already-scarce funding, they need to raise $100,000 in the next three and a half months. If you’re reading this and have resources that you can spare, please, please consider donating something.