The task of this research has been to identify and critique dominant narratives that exclude particular versions of victimhood from widely circulated discourses. This research is thus ultimately both the product of classical discourses on sex as well as potentially a springboard for the production of counter-knowledge on who may and may not be a victim or perpetrator of what can or cannot be considered sexual abuse. This analysis is not external to the discourses and knowledge that shapes it and therefore emerges as a consequence of a contested network of forces, of which the study forms a part (Bowman & Hook, 2010). As such the study draws on the very gendered language that it hopes to erode by extending modes of sexual surveillance across the genders. For Butler (2004), this is evidenced by the very fact that a theoretical desire to do away with sexual difference exists and this, in turn, reinforces the enduring and efficacious character of sexual difference. That is, “anything that might be said against it is oblique proof that it structures what we say” (Butler, 2004, p. 177). Despite mainstreamed visibility of trauma and victim discourse globally, and in South Africa specifically, FSA victims have escaped academic, medical, legal and public surveillance such that they remain invisible or at least peripheral. This research therefore both materialises and produces part of the emerging apparatus of discourses, scientific accounts and theoretical propositions that surface the productive possibilities of FSA victimhood. The possibility for these conditions to produce FSA subject positions in this study thus highlights the politics of human science knowledge in its constitution of who qualifies for victimhood under current constructions of sexual abuse. Accordingly, the exploration of conditions of possibilities for FSA victimhood represents a strategic point of entry into investigating how sexuality, gender and identity intersect to produce a ‘new’ mode of social and sexual transgression that is itself
both an instrument and effect of modern power. Because the social world is characterised by “implicit accounts of ontology” that determine which genders, sexualities, identities and bodies can be considered ‘real’ (Butler, 2004, p. 214), this critical investigation reveals how discourse operates through selection, exclusion and inclusion in the discursive fields of abuse, violence, sexuality and gender. By specifically questioning the exclusion of FSA victimhood from modern discourse, this research actively engages in Halperin’s (1989, p. 273) process of de-centring sexuality so that the “histrocity, conditions of emergence, modes of construction, and ideological contingencies” of FSA victimhood particularly and gender and sexuality more broadly can be identified. In so doing, this study examines counter-discourses for sexuality and gender and thus further refines, solidifies and reifies new possibilities for thinking gender, sexuality and violence (Weedon, 1987).
Making FSA victimhood thinkable will no doubt serve to further reify this object of human science knowledge. This potential reification will certainly impact on a number of other institutional practices. For example, the possibility of an FSA victim will, in turn, shift policing and the criminal justice system, which currently reduce femininity to passivity and victimisation. This will influence FSA visibility such that there may be a rise in reporting and incarceration rates and thus the appearance of a rise in rates of female sexual offending. Science may declare that such abuse has always existed and was merely waiting to be discovered and the ever-expanding net of discipline will be cast wider. Whilst this expansion may still be constrained by a cultural fabric that cannot yet fully conceive of an agentic and sexually transgressive woman, the emergence of FSA victimhood will surely disrupt the gendering of sexual violence and trauma. Revisions to terms such as ‘rape’, ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘sexual victimisation’ “filter into the culture at large”, with the effect of subjects ‘realising’ the applicability of these new definitions to their experiences (Koss et al., 1994, p. 510). It is thus likely that counter-knowledge on FSA victimhood will inform further revisions to understandings of sexual abuse and this in turn will provide conditions for a wider range subjects to identify as FSA victims. This has both ethical and political implications. The manifestation of increased female sexual offender incarceration rates may result in the construction of an FSA pandemic and consequently widespread moral panic. At least in South Africa this will serve to amplify the recent surge in moral panic about rape and other forms of sexual violence and in turn drive the increasing scrutiny and regulation of female (and other) sex offenders and the social regulation of sexual behaviour. On a more political level, the project of making possible a sexually violent female may serve to
rationalise and fuel the continued pathologisation and repression of women’s sexual agency. In the context of contemporary narratives on women’s sexualities, feminist responses to this research may be concerned with the potentially anti-feminist consequences of FSA reification. Specifically, the implication is that the production of a sexually violent woman aligns with dominant gender discourses that insinuate the corruptive potential of sexually agentic women. In turn, women become like men (aggressive, sexually potent for example) and, female sexual agency is pathologised and punished. Thus, whilst the focus on female perpetration does well to provide possibilities for destabilising heteronormative gender binaries and binaristic positions on power and subjection, it also runs the risk of driving an antifeminist position.