Politicizing Rape and Pornography by Trine Rogg Korsvik

Author:Trine Rogg Korsvik
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030556396
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Theory Development

The politicization of sexual exploitation and violence against women led to the development of theories regarding these issues. For women activists associated with Marxist-Leninist parties, the issue caused them to direct their attention to oppression mechanisms other than purely economic ones. They became more independent of the political doctrines of the parties in the sense that, to a larger extent than previously, they challenged men’s views regarding women, including within the labor movement. The French class-struggle feminists showed bravery in challenging their male comrades and advocated the use of the “bourgeois” legal system in rape cases. Nevertheless, neither the French class-struggle feminists nor the Norwegian Women’s Front publicly confronted men on the basis of sex, because they were deeply concerned about not creating divisions in the working class. For them, class conflicts were more important than gender conflicts, and it was important to recruit men in the fight for women’s liberation .

Radical feminists were not reluctant to confront individual men, as they believed that these men were the beneficiaries of patriarchal exploitation. The French revolutionary feminists were more productive than the Norwegian New Feminists in the area of theory development. According to the French revolutionary feminists, rape was a “class crime” that men as a class perpetrated against women as a class in order to keep them down. Rape was understood as the foundation of patriarchal exploitation, that is, men’s control over women’s bodies and sexuality was viewed as the basis for all other structures of women’s oppression, whether they be the nuclear family, religion, prostitution, the military, or the educational system. Thus, the fight against rape was fundamental. The French revolutionary feminists’ analysis of rape gained worldwide attention in connection with the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Brussels in 1976, during which they dominated the session on rape. The tribunal was a breakthrough in the fight against violence against women and led to its becoming an important issue in the transnational women’s movement. In the aftermath of the event, crisis centers for abused and raped women were established in several countries, including Norway, and a number of books and articles were written about rape and other forms of sexual violence. In addition, an international petition was circulated against clitoridectomy.167 The fact that women from so many countries met to discuss women’s problems implied that they learned from each other, and that ideas and forms of action were being spread across borders. The analyses of violence against women were thus increasingly transnational.

The revolutionary feminist analyses of rape were radical, though Annie Cohen’s appeal for the arming of women to defend themselves against rape was still an exception. In addition to advocating that women act in solidarity with each other, the solutions were first and foremost proposed within the framework of the law. The most prominent strategy was that women who had been raped were encouraged to report to the police and pursue the case right up to the Assize Court. This was an approach that all of the different factions of the MLF eventually agreed upon.

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