Redistributing rape.

• Author: Suk, Jeannie
• Position: Response to article by Sharon Dolovich in this isssue, p. 1

What does it mean to be a man? This basic question infuses the theory of Sharon Dolovich's fascinating work in Strategic Segregation in the modern Prison. (1) Her closely textured and deeply focused study of L.A. County Jail's telling measures to address prison rape--namely segregation of gay men and transgender women from the general male prison population--is a crucible for pathbreaking theoretical work on incarceration, and also a meditation on the constitution of gender and violence.

Prison is hell. If there is anything in today's United States that may approximate Hobbes' state of nature, (2) where men live in continual fear and danger of violent death by other men, and security is whatever a man's own strength and invention enables, it must be the modern prison. There, the war of all against all is not mere chaos but, rather, reveals consistent patterns as the stronger inevitably subordinate the weaker. One such undeniable pattern is the central and routine place of rape and its threat in the social system of the prison.

In Dolovich's prison, the phenomenon of prison rape cannot be understood apart from the concept of masculinity. Her theory begins with the basic idea that men are generally anxious about their masculinity and need to find ways of proving their masculinity. (3) Proof of masculinity can come only in relation to that which is feminine. (4) Sexual domination of women is the "method of choice," in contexts where productive means of proving one's masculinity are scarcely available. (5) Prison is a context where such productive means are lacking.

According to Dolovich, being around only men exaggerates the imperative to prove that one is a man. (6) Male prisoners thus attempt to sexually dominate others as a means of proving their own masculinity. (7) Sexual penetration is domination that establishes that one is masculine and that the other is feminine. (8) Men who do not want to be penetrated must be forced or threatened. Rape, then, is a performance of binary and relational gender; sexual domination forces into being the male-female dyad that is essential for the show of masculinity. (9)

Students of feminist theory will recognize the profound influence of Catharine MacKinnon on Dolovich's logic in theorizing the phenomenon of prison rape. The key pure sentences of MacKinnon are quoted in a footnote: "Man fucks woman. Subject verb object." (10) Dolovich writes, "as with intimate relationships in society in general, the defining scripts are gendered: in men's prisons, as in the free world, men dominate women." (11) In this gloss, men dominate women in society in general by fucking them. In a prison that houses men only? The "women" are those who are fucked. To fuck is to be gendered male. To be fucked is to be gendered female.

As Dolovich moves through skillful application of this powerful feminist sexual subordination theory to prisons, one has the impression that the match is perfect. The sexual subordination theory is at its core about men subordinating women, but the theory's reach is not limited to situations consisting of biological men and women. MacKinnon herself has used the theory to explain that male sexual harassment of another male effectively genders the harassed male as one who loses his masculinity, becoming sexually subordinated and therefore female. (12) As MacKinnon wrote in her amicus brief in the Supreme Court in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, a case about male-male sex harassment: "Men who are sexually assaulted are thereby stripped of their social status as men. They are feminized: made to serve the function and play the role customarily assigned to women as men's social inferiors." (13)

Dolovich explains that, as an exclusively male environment, a men's prison generates more than the usual amount of anxiety about masculinity, and that leads to "hypermasculine" behaviors to prove one is a man. (14) The all-male aspect of the prison experience helps explain the prevalence of sexual violence in men's prisons. Making the all-male prison environment an exemplar of the sexual subordination theory allows Dolovich to reveal another gender theory that runs through her article: that of gender as performance. (15) Dolovich's prisoners appear to be Butlerians.16 No biological females present? No matter. The world will be gendered--forcibly arrayed into those who will perform roles of male and female. Marry Catharine MacKinnon with Judith Butler, and what you get is rape that is the performance of sexual subordination as a way of constructing male and female gender. The brutality and violence of prison rape is a form of gender performance.

Gay men and trans women become the most likely "women" in men's prisons for purposes of sexual subordination by prisoners seeking to prove they are "men" in a world where biological women are absent. (17) So what happens when gay men and trans women are segregated from the general population? What changes? The gay men and trans women housed in the segregated unit become relatively free from rape. (18) If the reformist goal is specifically to protect gay men and trans women from sexual violence, the mission is accomplished in L.A. County and could be replicated elsewhere. (19) But, is that the goal--protecting this specific class of people from rape?

The theory Dolovich lays out suggests that she does not intend that her article advocate for the well-being of sexual minorities in particular, but, rather, seeks to understand incarceration more broadly--the dynamics of prison sexual violence in general and what to do about it. (20) Removal of gay men and trans women from the general population protects them. But if we adopt Dolovich's theory of prison rape, the general population, with or without gay men and trans women, remains the kind of place that leads to sexual violence--an all-male environment that provides no means of proving one's masculinity in productive ways, where some men are stronger and others are weaker...