This isn't the happiest post, but I've never pretended to be focused on the purely joyful. In response to a lot of feminist criticism I've read this week for Gender and Interpretations I wrote the following. I felt like it deserved to be shared as I do think it applies to all, not just women.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the subject of rape would arise. In a gender and interpretation class how can it be avoided? I am incredibly uncomfortable with this topic, though; I think because it is so much more difficult to think through than any other.
Why is it so difficult to think about? Rich does it with unwavering honesty, and Gubar looks at it head on. Both seem to discuss the way that rape happens not only to women's bodies by men, but also to a woman's existence--it is that difference that throws me. When I was young the sure way to make me lose my temper was to deny me control. My brother would on occasion lord his power over me because he was older and stronger. This didn't arise (at least not consciously) from a need to play out his male dominance over my female self but none-the-less, when he would take my food/toy/seat just because he could, I would fly into a berserker rage. More recently while playing poker I was too quick of wit and the man whom my tongue had flayed felt insulted (and he was right to feel so since I did insult him). In response he called me fat. I found myself thinking on both of these occurrences as I read Rich and Gubar.
I bring them up because in both cases my power, my self is taken from me. As a child, at some level, I was particularly sensitive to the denial of my self possession. As an adult what bothered me about being called fat had nothing to do with it being true (duh) or him finding me attractive (don't care) but with the knowledge that nothing I said, no matter how smart, witty, or funny, would make him understand. He would never realize how in that moment he had shown his own powerlessness against (fear of) me, by attempting to take my power from me. He had already been outsmarted and in response had gone to that age-old marker of status--physical appearance. Because I am fat my glibness was inconsequential--somehow my body trumps my actions.
It is in thinking of the origins of the word rape--rapere, to take--and realizing how, in that moment my humanity had been taken from me that my difficulty with this topic arises. I wasn't funny or smart or even mean. I was just a fat girl. Rich says that "rape is the ultimate outward and physical act of coercion and depersonalization practiced on women by men" (110) and it wasn't until I read her words on the war and Gubar's words about the blank page that I realized how many different ways a rape can happen outside of sexual force. It is difficult to respond to this subject in any way but an honest one. Perhaps that ties back into what we read earlier about the need for honesty; perhaps that is my own response to the feeling of being powerless. If I can name it then I can resume some measure of power over myself and my body.
I had planned on being humorous and entertaining in my response. How many jokes can be (and have been) made about "the redemptive female whose mission is to 'save' the man, humanize him, forgive him when he cannot forgive himself" (114)? I myself have a top ten list titled "Top Ten Men Who Might Kill Me While I Sleep." This female role has almost become a cliché; something that has taken away the danger and urgency of female awareness of the problem and replaced it with staid acceptance and, even, expectation. And that is perhaps the greatest rape of all--not just of the female psyche but of every psyche that accepts the role placed on it. The expectation that you will be used as an object; the expectation that you will be judged as an object. The expectation that you will be adored and discarded as an object. This expectation is our acceptance of the taking, the rape, of our humanity--by accepting it as commonplace we are as silent as Philomela and Lavinia, but perhaps our silence is more horrific because it is of our own making.
I don't know if this is what anyone is looking for in a response--I'm not sharing it because I'm looking for some sort of catharsis, but because I don't know of a way to discuss this topic or these readings except to talk about them, to talk about me and my experiences. I could summarize what I've read but that seems like false academia. I could relate how the theory of rape is at work in Ovid or Shakespeare, but that doesn't seem to get at the crux of the issue being discussed. I suppose I am attempting to examine the theory as brought forth in our readings as rape being something more than simply sexual (if there is anything simple about it) and specifically how these rapes in literature are metaphorically playing out in the power structures surrounding us. That is the problem I am attempting to name and discuss.

But how to do you name and discuss an activity that simultaneously denies your humanity as it defines it?