Content area
Full Text
La vulnérabilité des femmes et leur inaccessibilité sexuelle sont associées dans des versions normatives culturelles de la féminité hétérosexuelle blanche et sont hautement valorisées dans la culture nord-américaine. Des survivantes de violence sexuelle qui incarnent ces valeurs sont mieux protégées par le système judiciaire. Cet article critique la relation entre cette féminité blanche hégémonique construite socialement, la féminité de "l'Autre" et le concept légal de la "non-victime" crée par cette dynamique chez les femmes discriminées et victimisées par la violence sexuelle.
Popular rhetoric on sexual violence reflects both the devastating impact it has on the lives of women and girls as well as the publics accorded trust in "die severity of the potential consequences . . . meted out by the criminal justice system" in response to reported sexual crimes (Vopni 110). Indeed, women and girls experiencing sexual violence often go to the police "with the assumption that they [will] be believed" (Vopni 1 1 0) and protected from further victimization, and that the perpetrator will be held accountable for his actions. In reality the evaluation of a woman's experience of sexual violence, disclosure, and admission into uncontested "victim" status is not static. Socially-situated constructs of femininity - as well as the gendered constructs of die sexual "advance" as opposed to sexual assault, "appropriate" sexual behavior, and the "good" victim - shape our notions of guilt and blamelessness. These in turn trickle down into social policy and legal systems. Consequently, legal understandings of sexual violence against women are less universal and instead are more dependent upon a woman's ability to meet the requirements of hegemonic femininity.
This essay contends that dominant femininity, its associated tenets and characteristics and "the typically White upper-middle class women who can achieve [it]," are "conspicuously valued within mainstream American culture"; they are therefore more successfully protected in justice systems (Cole and Zuker 1). Further, this paper will critically examine the symbiotic relationship between socially-constructed hegemonic (White) femininity, Other-identified (racialized) femininities, and the legally conceptualized and sanctioned non-victim - the constructed "terrorist, deviant or other form of miscreant" - that this dynamic creates of racialized women who experience sexual violence (Doe 80).
White, Aboriginal, African-Canadian, female. What is die relevance of such categories in a criminal prosecution? What is the...