WILPF News Alert:
The Issue of Power and Patriarchy: The Strauss-Kahn Affair. 

5 July 2011

It is unusual for WILPF to comment on a particular case, not least because it is always difficult when the only ‘evidence” is that repeated by the media, which is at best only a moderately accurate source. This particular issue is, however, of great significance to women and is not receiving the sort of media attention that it needs. Where have the feminists been in analyzing and adopting a contrary approach to the one that has been presented in this case through the media?

There is need to look at how this case has played out so as to better understand the reality of women’s lives and the power structures which have to be negotiated. There is no doubt that those power structures are intensified in situations where women are displaced, at risk and seek asylum.

WILPF has recently engaged with women refugees brought to Geneva by UNHCR after a lengthy consultation process to identify the major obstacles they face. The article which follows describes a similar pattern of discriminations based on gendered stereotypes ,which enable men in positions of power, whether it be the control of humanitarian aid or the running of the World bank, to use the system to their own advantage.

A report on the consultations with the women refugees is being produced and we are trying to ensure that what they have told the international community here is taken seriously by all agencies and actors who have responsibility to address the violation of rights which has been so graphically been described.

The article has been written by Ratna Kapur, Director Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi and author of “Makeshift Migrants: Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties” (Routledge, 2010). Ratna is a well known and respected academic . Her article should give us all pause for thought.

WILPF needs to get this version, not of events, but of power structures, into the public domain.

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Rapeability and the Politics of Power

The Dominique Stauss-Kahn affair once again triggers concerns over everything that is wrong with the rape law. The near collapse of the case does not attest to Strauss-Kahn’s innocence, nor demolish the chambermaid’s story of the rape. It attests to the fact that rape can be turned into ordinary sex in a nano second and the power of a range of techniques that can bring about such a stunning turn.

This is another Anita Hill moment. The victim, a black, Guinean, poor, Muslim, chambermaid who was granted asylum, is up against a phenomenally rich, white, French, man who at the time was President of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This moment is not about the coercive domination by men over women in the area of sexuality. That tired old script has been left threadbare after diversity politics unmasked how women from different racial, religious, caste and class backgrounds experience rape in many different ways and for many different reasons. This moment is about the deeper politics of power enmeshed in the victim’s narrative. Unearthing the capillaries of power that have worked to transform her rape script into one about a lying whore requires attention.

Asylum law, race, migration, and poverty constitute the structural mechanisms that ultimately forced the prosecution in this case to do a major turn around. As any asylum lawyer knows, the legal processes force an applicant to thoroughly condemn the country from which they are fleeing, and in the process implicitly recognize the superiority and exceptionalism of the country in which they seek asylum. This logic is frequently displaced onto a Third World/First World divide and the assumptions about the “other” that are based on cultural inferiority and most importantly, appalling treatment of their women.

Asylum law thus compels the applicant to narrate her story in a framework where the world is painted in stark shades of black and white. The narrative must be extreme in order to be convincing and qualify for asylum. If the victim in the Strauss-Kahn rape case did indeed lie about her gang rape in Guinea or her mutilation, she did so because she would be believed by those who would be deciding her asylum claim The negative suppositions about Guineans, “African culture,” and black men were already in place and made her story believable. The strategies deployed by the chambermaid to secure asylum were indeed unexceptional. Asylum law is structured to produce the lie that will be believed against racist assumptions about the “Rest” and will ensure approval and the granting of asylum. The lie may not be entirely fictional, but it may well be an exaggeration. And asylum seekers may be nothing more than economic migrants embellishing their stories as safe legal options to migrate are becoming increasingly limited in the context of the elusive and never ending “war on terror.” There is no doubt that countless numbers of people do flee from horrendous circumstances, but this does not detract from the fact that asylum seekers are always already compelled to present their case in terms that will demonize everything in their country of origin. The asylum laws and immigration structures produce these lies.

Once asylum is granted, all ties, including the cultural, religious and familial links in the country of origin are severed. The subject enters into the netherworld of those who are barely legible subjects and an entirely new politics comes into play – the politics of race and class. The network of contacts that exist for those granted asylum partly relies on an alliance with other have-nots - those who have come from a similarly disadvantaged position. Included within this circuit will be low-level criminals and jobless immigrants seeking any kind of casual and irregular labour, as well as a clandestine network that sustain these relationships. If the victim did rely on a clandestine network of individuals who lack high street credentials and with suspect credibility, it is no surprise. These are the host of abject subjects who hover at the borders of legitimacy, and in the process expose the racial and class divides that cleave American society and most affluent societies.

The chambermaid’s life was located in the subterranean pathways of power. Her ability to counter racial and class impediments relied in part on the ability to access the states resources by working through the cracks and crevices in the system. These included, at least so it has been asserted, claiming a friend’s child as her own to secure tax benefits, or exaggerating claims of persecution when making an asylum application. The legal system will always put into question the credibility of such a person, not only because she “lies”, but also because the survival of the existing social and legal structure is partly grounded in the repudiation of such a woman. In other words while her emergence is tethered to an understanding of all that is problematic about the legal system, her erasure is crucial to ensure that the axis of exclusion and inclusion that sustains the rape script in law remains intact. The case then was never about rape. It was about the category of the “rapeable” women, whose stories of rape are barely legible in law or audible in the public space.

The chambermaid’s virtual slide from poor victim to hooker was inevitable and this representation of her has gone viral on the internet. The message it sends out is not that Strauss-Kahn is innocent. The message it sends is that the rape law is based on protecting good women, those who do not deserve to be raped, while throwing all other women into the clutches of men like Strauss-Kahn. The victim is excluded from the normative arrangements against which specific forms of sexual arrangements and interactions are permissible and where only legible subjects are accorded juridical entitlements.

While the victim’s story of the sexual assault has never altered, it is getting lost in the cacophony of a large number of competing claims that want to ensure that the power of an extremely powerful man and his integrity remain intact. While securing a defendants integrity is per se reasonable, the chambermaid entered into the legal arena with her respectability already in tatters. To rape her does not diminish the perpetrators respectability; it only serves to reinforce her rapeability. The defendant wins not by establishing his innocence, but by drawing attention away from the story of the rape and towards sustaining a line that enables some men to rape some women with impunity. Strauss-Kahn is unlikely to be brought to account, not because there are no legal processes in place, but precisely because the legal processes that exist are not designed to protect women like the chambermaid. Such women are always, already “fair game” and in the process the job of the chambermaid, where large numbers of immigrant women work, has suddenly become extremely high-risk employment.

Ratna Kapur, Director Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi and author of “Makeshift Migrants: Gender, Belonging, and Postcolonial Anxieties” (Routledge, 2010)