“[W]hen a woman
who is raped goes before the law in order to have the crime against her
prosecuted, she has to comply with the very idea of the reliable narrator and
legitimate subject inscribed in the law. As a result, if the law finds that she
is not a legitimate subject, that what she claims has no value, and the her
speech in general is without value, then she is actually deconstituted as a
subject by the law in question. It is a moment, like any number of moments
within immigration politics, when the demand to comply with the subject can
goes and does lead to the deconstitution of the subject by the law itself.
Does
this mean that we do not turn to the law to prosecute rape? No, and perhaps
here the law is something we cannot not want. And this is particularly true in
those instances where there are no such laws, or where laws are being
instituted that recognize rape as a crime (including marital rape). And yet, in
turning to the law, one runs the risk of becoming broken by the law. And the
struggle then to regain “standing” and “voice” becomes one that cannot be done
alone, requiring as it does collective support, if not a social movement. And
when this happens –and we see the importance of grounding any appeal to the law
within a social movement that sustains a critical relation to law (and the risk
of becoming deconstituted, abjected, precisely through the liberal instruments one needs).”
-Judith Butler, en Dispossession: the
performative in the political.
