Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media
Cressida Heyes
Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality
and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science
University of Alberta, Canada
Recent sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious — whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep — have drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. Sexual assault in these situations, and especially rape, exploits and reinforces a victim’s lack of agency and exposes her body in ways that make it especially difficult for her to reconstitute herself as a subject. It damages both her ability to engage with the world in four dimensions (through a temporally persisting body schema), and her ability to retreat from it into anonymity. The way the assault is played back to her after the fact can draw out the experience in a way that forecloses her future, and this is especially true given contemporary communications technologies. Sexual assault of this kind can make the restful anonymity of sleep impossible, leaving only the violent exposure of a two-dimensional life. By providing a richer phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of rape in these circumstances, and by showing its complexity and ubiquity, Heyes hopes to undermine the trivialization of this kind of offense, as well as challenge pervasive attitudes of victim-blaming that permeate popular commentary on sexual violence against women who are unconscious or semi-conscious.
Cressida Heyes is the author of Self-Transformations: Defining Women through Feminist Practice (Cornell University Press 2000) and Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (Oxford University Press 2007), as well as the editor of The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy (Cornell 2003), and Critical Concepts: Gender and Philosophy (Routledge 2011). She co-edited Cosmetic Surgery: A Feminist Primer (Ashgate 2009) with Meredith Jones, with whom she is currently co-authoring a book on the feminist politics of sleep.