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Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation by Linda Martín Alcoff

by
June-July 2018, no. 402

Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation by Linda Martín Alcoff

Polity, $39.95 pb, 280 pp, 9780745691923

Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation by Linda Martín Alcoff

by
June-July 2018, no. 402

Linda Martín Alcoff ends her book Rape and Resistance with the question of love, as it has been explored in the fiction of Dominican- American writer Junot Díaz. There are no easy moral binaries in Díaz’s writing, she notes. Sex lives are navigated in the midst of intergenerational trauma transferred from mothers who are rape victims to daughters and sons. As Díaz says: ‘in the novel [The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] you see the way the horror of rape closes in on them all. The whole family is in this circuit of rape. And, you know, the point the book keeps making again and again and again is that, in the Dominican Republic, which is to say, in the world that the DR built, if you are a Beli, a Lola, a Yunior – if you are anybody – rape is never going to be far.’ Rape, as a form of colonial violence, ripples out from individuals to affect families, societies, and communities. Masculinity, Díaz argues, becomes ‘a hyperactive retreat from the vulnerability that accompanies real intimacy’. For Alcoff, Díaz represents precisely the kind of thinking she has aimed for in her book – intersectional, community-oriented, and unafraid of ambiguities.

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