Handbook on Sexual Violence (18 page)

V.S. Naipaul’s
Magic Seeds
– which is narrated from the point of view of a male fighter – is not impacted upon by the gender of the character:

And the figure who had been trembling in and out of the gun-sight half spun to one side, as though he had been dealt a heavy blow, and then fell on the path on the slope.

(Naipaul 2004: 145)

The violence in both passages still performs as aggressive action regardless of the gender of the assailant; the purpose of the character to injure or even kill is clear in both extracts. Indeed, the sense of nervous energy present in ‘trembling in and out of the gun-sight’ in Naipaul’s narrative directly corresponds with ‘My heartbeat quickens to the sound of his breathing’ in my own. These are human reactions to violence, rather than male or female reactions. By engaging in the conflict in this way, Aoife/Cassie attempts to dismiss her status as a woman within male-dominated discourses of violence as irrelevant.

However, to repeat the Morgan quotation, ‘The woman who rebels via the male mode can only do so up until the point where her own rebellion might begin.’ This is important because, however much Aoife/Cassie may wish to discount her gender in participating in the conflict, her sex impacts upon her ability to be perpetrator due to the physical differences between male and female. That is, the body itself calls into question her participation in implicitly male – or ungendered – discourses of violence.

Within the context of the Troubles, the body is the currency of the conflict, as Allen Feldman argues in writing that ‘the practice of political violence entails the production, exchange and ideological consumption of bodies’ (Feldman 1991: 9). Yet this manifests – conventionally – in different ways across the gender divide, with women typically being heavily involved in the ‘production’ and ‘ideological consumption’ of bodies, through childbirth and the subsequent rearing of their children: ‘Women are idealised as the emotional guardians of hearth, home and for children’s upbringing and morality’ (Baillie 2002: 124). Women are often portrayed as being passive, however, when it comes to the ‘exchange’ of bodies, with the bodies utilised as the hard currency of the violence more often being male; those of their sons or husbands rather than their own. Aretxaga categorises this dichotomy succinctly by noting:

In republican culture men’s suffering is inscribed in their own bodies through their fighting; women’s is inscribed in the bodies of others: fathers, sons, brothers, husbands or friends.

(Aretxaga, 1997: 50)

This is not to say that practices associated with degradation of women and sexualised violence towards women – such as the strip-searching of women carried out by the security services – do not operate as violations against women’s bodies, but rather that women are rarely presented as actively utilising their own bodies for the purpose of engaging in the conflict. They are not involved in the ‘exchange’. Instead, they watch passively as the men are maimed or killed, their pain derived from association and felt as emotional pain, at a remove from the actual physical pain inflicted upon the body. This is represented, within the narrative of
rubber bullet, broken glass
, by Aoife’s suffering at the sight of her brother struggling with his injuries:

The bullet had struck and everything had been crushed and squeezed backwards into his beautiful face, beneath the skin everything was crumpled and disfigured, whilst on the outside it only showed whenever he tried to smile, or laugh, or frown, or sleep, or cry. Or look up.

(
rubber bullet, broken glass
)

Later in the novel, however, Aoife dispenses with this passive suffering and assumes the guise of Cassie in order to actively utilise her body in order to gain revenge against those she views as responsible for Damien’s pain. As Cassie, she puts her body forward as a battleground, by way of the broken glass hidden within her vagina. That this causes her physical pain – the glass ‘shifts and stabs, stings and slits, scrapes and scours’ (
rubber bullet, broken glass
)

– is of little consequence when compared with the benefit of being able now

to engage in the ‘exchange’ of bodies, being able to use this weapon of her body to inflict damage on those she deems responsible for having inflicted damage, as in this passage:

A sudden, high-pitched screech of pain. He’s scurrying and scuttling

beneath me. I’m not for letting him go, though, not yet. Clamping my thighs, keeping him in. My own teeth set together with the agony of it. I close my eyes, grind down, and listen as the screams grow louder and sharper. I listen as the hurt and sorrow of it all penetrates through his whisky-addled confusion. Opening my eyes. I’m for waiting until his cries crack, until the tears stream, until he’s ready to plead. Until enough blood has been spilt.

(
rubber bullet, broken glass
)

In a modern rendering of the biblical ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, Aoife/Cassie rationalises that as Damien was harmed by a member of the British Security Forces, she will retaliate by harming policemen and soldiers – thereby transitioning from victim to perpetrator.

Thus, following on from Wittig, the character of Cassie can be seen to be challenging the gender demarcations imposed upon her by a patriarchal society. In other words, Aoife/Cassie is undergoing the second part of her double rebellion. She rejects the role of mother and aligns herself, instead, with the idea of a woman freedom fighter/terrorist – distinct from a male of the same ilk – in a way that echoes one of the Palestinian women Morgan discusses in
The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
, who asserts: ‘My body is not a weapons factory. I am done with being the mother of martyrs’ (Morgan 1990: 287).

By presenting her body as a weapon, Aoife/Cassie is laying claim to agency and identifying herself as a participant in, rather than a spectator to, the violence. She is doing so – explicitly – as a woman. It is her sexuality and her (female) body, and her use of both, that allows her to lure her victims away from safety with the promise of sex, in a way that mirrors the IRA practice of the ‘honeytrap’. Such actions may, of course, strike the reader as abhorrent, but they are necessary in order for Aoife/Cassie to operate as a female paramilitary, not subservient to either (male) power structures or to her gender.

To conclude, the narrative of
rubber bullet, broken glass
should not be seen as an attempt to portray women as perpetrators of sexualised violence any more than it should be seen as a furtherance of existing discourses that see women as victim. Instead, it proposes a transition that allows the female protagonist of the novel to lay claim to agency, to follow the example of the Armagh women prisoners, whom Aretxaga sees as ‘stepping out of their assigned allegorical value as suffering mothers and victimised girls and [laying] a claim to subjecthood’ (Aretxaga 1995). The character of Aoife/Cassie does so through sexualised violence, furthering and complicating an existing (male) discourse by imposing her own (female) body onto the conflict. The question inherent in this transition, however, remains whether this movement from victim to perpetrator, through the course of the narrative, is successful in achieving the subjectivity that the character desires.

Conclusion

As Carol Vance contends, ‘It is not enough to move women away from danger

and oppression; it is necessary to move toward something: toward pleasure, agency, self-definition’ (Vance 1989: 29). The texts discussed in this
chapter, from canonical male authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth), through the late twentieth-century feminist work of theorists (Butler and Wittig) and novelist (Angela Carter), to contemporary writing (Liam Murray Bell) all query the ways in which women move ‘away from danger’ and the role of victim in order to gain ‘agency’. At times that attempt to attain independent subjectivity leads to women becoming perpetrators of sexualised violence themselves. At the same time, it is debatable, in the end, whether women are able to assert their independence through becoming perpetrators, just as it is arguable whether Wittig advances a response to (male) sexualised violence by responding with female militancy. In posing this problem, however, and charting the transition from (female) victim to (female) perpetrator of sexualised violence, it is hoped that this essay will challenge the literary precedents that often stigmatise women as passive and powerless victims of sexualised violence and instead explore the ability of women to transgress and subvert (male) discourses of patriarchy and seek a subjectivity of their own, and add a dimension to the Kelly continuum of violence that she does not address.

Further reading

For a nuanced perspective on various narratological techniques employed in writing of and about rape in literature, see Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson’s
Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives
:
Violence and Violation
(2009). For a further discussion of authors and literary texts mentioned throughout this
chapter, L.E. Tanner’s
Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth Century Fiction
(1994) provides an interesting account of violence in Hubert Selby Jr’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
(1964), as well as Brett Easton Ellis’s psychological journey into unmitigated violence,
American Psycho
(1991).

References

Aretxaga, Begon˜a (1995) ‘Ruffling a few patriarchal hairs: Women’s experiences of war in Northern Ireland’,
Women and War
, 19(1). Available at: http://www.culturalsurvi- val.org/ourpublications/csq/article/ruffling-a-few-patriarchal-hairs-womens-experi- ences-war-northern-ir
eland (accessed 22 September 2010).

Aretxaga, Begon˜a, (1997)
Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland
. Chichester: Princeton University Press.

Baillie, Sandra M (2002)
Evangelical Women in Belfast: Imprisoned or Empowered?
London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Brownmiller, S. (1975)
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
. New York: Martin Secker and Warburg.

Butler, Judith (1990)
Gender Trouble
. New York/London: Routledge. Carter, Angela (1977)
The Passion of New Eve
. London: Virago.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (1992)
The Tales of the Clerk and the Wife of Bath
, Marion Wynne- Davies (ed.). London: Routledge.

Coogan, Tim Pat (1996)
The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1996 and the Search for Peace
.

London: Arrow Books.

Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam (1989) ‘Bakhtin, discourse and feminist theories’,
Critical Studies
, 1(2): 121–39.

Easton Ellis, Brett (1991)
American Psycho
. New York: Vintage Books.

Feldman, Allen (1991)
Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frayling, Christopher (1986) ‘The house that Jack built: some stereotypes of the rapist in the history of popular culture’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds)
Rape: An Historial and Social Enquiry
. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 174–215.

Giles, James Richard (ed.) (1998)
Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Gunne, Sorcha and Brigley Thompson, Zoe (eds) (2009)
Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation
. London: Routledge.

Irigaray, Luce (1985)
Speculum of the Other Woman
. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Little, Adrian (2002) ‘Feminism and the politics of difference in Northern Ireland’,

Journal of Political Ideologies
, 7(2): 163–77.

Maguire, Tom (2006)
Making Theatre in Northern Ireland: Through and Beyond the Troubles
.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Morgan, Robin (1990)
The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism
. London: Mandarin.

Naipaul, V.S. (2004)
Magic Seeds
. London: Picador.

O’Brien, Edna (1995)
House of Splendid Isolation
. London: Orion Books.

Pelan, Rebecca (2005)
Two Irelands: Literary Feminisms North and South
. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Porter, Ray (1986) ‘Rape – Does it have a historical meaning?’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds)
Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry
. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 216–36.

Rose, Christine, M. and Robertson, Elizabeth (eds) (2001)
Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
. London: Palgrave.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves (1986) ‘Rape and the silencing of the feminine’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (eds)
Rape: An Historial and Social Enquiry
. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 84–101.

Selby, Jr., Hubert (2004)
Last Exit to Brooklyn
. London: Bloomsbury.

Shakespeare, William (1954)
Titus Andronicus
, J.C. Maxwell (ed.). London: Routledge.

Sielke, Sabine (2002)
Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790–1990
. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stockton, Sharon (2006
) The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth Century Literature
.

Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Vance, Carol S. (ed.) (1989)
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
. London: Pandora.

Tanner, L.E. (1994)
Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction
. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wittig, Monique (1969)
Les Gu´erill`eres
. Boston: Beacon Press.