Women Prisoners: A Forgotten Population Book

Cahill starts out from the classic conflict between feminist arguments that "rape is essentially violence" (Brownmiller, liberal feminists) vs. "rape is essentially sex" (MacKinnon, Dworkin, radical feminists). Cahill deftly shows that contemporary (continental) feminist insights into sex and the subject as corporeal and intersubjectively constituted makes clear that both positions are untenable. Rape is both sex and violence. While this may have already been clear according to (feminist) conventional wisdom today, this book is nonetheless useful for tracing the implications of this fact, especially for understanding the complex harms of rape (and, crucially, of the latent threat of rape in everyday life). If Cahill's description of women's self-defense as central to resistance is not fully developed, that's because it isn't really what this book is about. She should be lauded for moving toward the question of resistance in her final chapter, rather than criticized for what she doesn't say. (I recommend reading Sharon Marcus "Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words" (1992) on resisting rape if you're interested in women's self-defense... she also doesn't address issues like implications for other cultural notions of femininity and the difficulties of such resistance against acquaintances and family members, but hers is an insightful account from an earlier moment in this conversation.)