Att återupprätta äran. Språk, subjekt och sexuellt våld i äldre tid

Abstract

This article deals with ontological and epistemological approaches regarding research on sexual violence. Focusing on a rape case from a Swedish court in 1821, the feminist departure is that language, law text and its practices structure the experience and resisting power of the victim as well as the availability of bodily violation. The interpellation of the victim in the law text in the binary concepts of force and consentwere embedded in the historical situated concept honour, which described the women out of the perspective of sexual decency. It is stressed in the article that law text and its practices offered a scope beyond which no rape narratives could be pronounced induding the victims as well as the witnesses and the perpetrators. This scope forced the victim not only to pronounce her experience within a certain structure of power butalso to acknowledge prevailing sexual discourse. The theoretical approach of this study demonstrate that law text and its practices constructs positions were the victim is interpellated as a subject which at the same time is a position from where the victim can speak and be heard.The possibilitiesof resistance, "to talk back", depended on whether the victim was interpellated in a superior position to the perpetrator, for instance a higher class position. One central condusion given by this theoretical approach is that subject positions must be viewed as manifold and decentered.