The participants in this study drew on normative constructions of gender and sexuality as a means to demonstrate how FSA victimhood is ‘abnormal’ even in the context of sexual abuse. However, in the contestations between FSA as innocuous but hyper-damaging, the outcome of severe pathology but also a compromised morality and the tension between the hypersexual man and an emasculated victimhood are counter-coordinates for the knowledge that is the outcome of hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality. Together, these counter-discourses may disrupt human science knowledge on sexuality in the further and
refined production of the emergent female sexual perpetrator and her victims. As participants progressed through their interviews, female sexual violence began to become increasingly thinkable, palpable and dangerous. This thinkability and danger implies at least some disruption to our modern technologies of sex and subjectivity.
6.8.1. Tracing the history: Patterns of public knowledge
Sex abuse knowledge has been subject to various definitions and frameworks across time according to prevailing cultural conditions that make aspects of sexual violence possible (Rutherford, 2011). The historical pattern of small and gradual developments of sex abuse human science knowledge governs that which is considered legitimate and relevant research subject matter in the discipline at a given point in time and, in turn, that which should be subject to surveillance and regulation. Whilst FSA was previously inconceivable, there is a current trend in academia, the law and the health professions that is actively engaged with the ‘discovery’ of female sexual violence. This trend is a function of particular modern global and South African conditions that make FSA possible. Examples of these conditions include the current wave of panic and public concern in South Africa about sexual violence (see Abramjee, 2013; Bauer, 2013, Evans, 2013; Knoetze, 2013; Swart, 2013) as well as political and public calls, campaigns and advocacy projects to counteract it. In addition, due to enhancements to birth control technologies and the increasing share of women in the economy (Collins et al., 1993), most Global North contexts and some South African contexts are currently typified by a gradual erosion of the male-female binary that has neatly demarcated who can and cannot sexually transgress and be transgressed upon. This has resulted in female bodies now representing a greater threat to the order of things than they did before.
The participants noted how the emergence of FSA into circulated discourse parallels earlier trends in other types of sex abuse. Of particular interest was P7’s comments regarding why FSA is only emerging as an object of knowledge at this specific time in history:
You know for those days…people just got away with that type of thing…Those days…I think it was more of a…you don’t talk about those types of things because it doesn’t happen to people…Today we are more, um, open about these type of things…Um, as you said, there’s, there’s actually groups. Where people can go to. And they talk about it. Those days they wouldn’t have…If it happened to you, you keep it to
yourself…Those days, you tell your mom, she’ll probably beat the living shit out of you for lying.
P7’s comments on the increasing ‘acknowledgement’ of the possibilities for FSA show how the exclusion of a particular object of knowledge in discourse results in its invisibilisation and thus its ‘un-truth’. Only by virtue of its ability to be ‘written’ into discourse, is an object of knowledge made real, possible and conceivable. However, this easing of the parameters of who counts as a victim requires the alignment of new and alternative discourses (based on a body of scientific evidence) in order to be realised into the corpus of ‘real’ knowledge. 6.8.2. Alternative discourses: The fluidity of sexuality and gender
Given that the dominant cultural narrative on sex abuse depends on heteronormative discourses, FSA, and more particularly FSA victimhood, lies at or beyond the boundaries of contemporary understandings of sex and sexuality. FSA victimhood discourse is, in this sense, a vehicle for counter-knowledge. Since the dominant narrative on sex abuse is constructed upon rigid and narrow definitions of gender and sexuality, the counter-narrative on FSA victimhood is likely to be dependent on discourses that support the fluidity of gender and sexuality. Breaking apart the binaries of modern heteronormativity thus seems to be a precondition for identifying as a victim of FSA. For example, FSA is conceivable for P2 because he is able to split sex from gender and desire from sexuality:
As a homosexual man, there are certain women that I find attractive but I don’t necessarily, I won’t necessarily build a life with but I find them attractive…I know I can be attracted to heterosexuals and some homosexuals actually enjoy it but hear what I’m saying, from that point of me being homosexual and having sex with a woman, I don’t find it disgusting.
Likewise, for P8 to construct FSA required restructuring our understandings of men and women:
I think personally that people should, that more people should know that women are capable of doing these kind of things…And that they can, that they are capable of the same things that men are capable of…I want people to understand that it isn’t just men that are doing wrong. It’s women as well. And so that people have the voice to speak up and tell, tell someone if their mom or their, or a girl or someone is abusing them so that they don’t go through the amount of pain that I went through when my mom abused me.
The participants’ use of alternative discourse on sexuality and gender coupled with their recognitions of historical patterns in sex abuse knowledge are vehicles for the identification of FSA victimhood and further reification of this object in human science knowledge. The movement from FSA impossibility to possibility and then, in some cases probability, across their interviews parallels the current emergent FSA victimhood discourse in the institutions of research and the law. In keeping with the logic of the confessional and its relationship to these institutions, participants were able to utilise the study interview as a context in which to perform gender and sexuality in ways that intersected and often produced new configurations of victimhood. Taken together, these discursive aspects of the interview material provide an overarching demonstration of those historical and material conditions that make FSA victimhood real and unreal; and possible and impossible. These discourses are however themselves now implicated in a reconstitution of these realities and possibilities.