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Resisting linguistic impotence By Ariella Azoulay Tags: Language "Kvod adam vehava: feminism yisraeli, mishpati vehevarati" ("Human Dignity Feminism in Israel: A Socio-Legal Analysis") by Orit Kamir, Carmel Publishing House, 405 pages The new book by legal scholar Orit Kamir continues the process she began in her previous book, "She'ala shel kavod: yisraeliut vekavod ha'adam" ("Israeli Honor and Dignity: Social Norms, Gender Politics and the Law" (Carmel Publishing, 2004, in Hebrew). The current book, as the subtitle succinctly indicates, proposes a legal and social Israeli feminism. In the first part of the book, Kamir develops her theoretical model for "multidimensional feminist" thinking; the second part exemplifies this model in action, in relation to a number of major types of injury to women and their exploitation in modern society in general and in the Israeli context in particular. Murder, rape, pornography and various sorts of harassment (sexual and threatening) are dealt with by means of this model from a new perspective that enables Kamir to develop and nurture a language that is at once radical and structured. How can a book that reveals the failures of both legal discourse and social discourse in dealing with injury perpetrated on women - and undermines the foundations of their working assumptions - succeed in sounding so simple, reasonable and logical, as though it were describing exactly how things are? In the answer to this question can be found the great importance of this book, which is fascinating and required reading for every male and female citizen who wants to partake of a life that is reasonable for everyone in a shared community. Advertisement The radicalism of this book lies above all in the reconceptualization of the types of harm experienced by women - rape, murder and pornography - by means of a language that entirely abandons patriarchal thinking and refuses to accept even its descriptions of reality, as I will demonstrate further along. Kamir shows that legislation concerning rape, even in its most enlightened manifestations in recent years, has yet to be extricated (and apparently, in its current format, cannot be extricated) from patriarchal language, because in it, for the most part accidentally, the boundaries between adultery and rape are blurred. Kamir shows that originally the criminal offense of rape was aimed at enabling women to defend themselves when they were accused of having had forbidden sexual relations - that is, of having sexual relations outside of marriage, which damaged the honor of the men to whom they were married (their husbands), or of those who had custody of them (their fathers). To clear herself of the charge of adultery, a woman had to prove three things: that the sexual relations had occurred without her consent, that the accused had exercised violence and that she had resisted. These, after all, are the three things around which, in one way or another, the criminal charge of rape revolves. "This is a profound Gordian knot," writes Kamir, "which only the blade of the sword can overcome." Instead of the blade of the sword, the author reveals the blade of the language that will enable the reformulation of the offense of rape, with no connection to the logic of adultery. In the women's movements that arose from the 1970s on, such a language was also sought; their activity included establishing forums and encounters with groups clearly identified as dealing with women's issues, and demands for an exclusively female space. The appearance of different typologies of sexually-based injury to women stemmed from the way in which they shared their personal experiences with one another, while discovering that such experiences were in fact part of common patterns of behavior that had developed under certain historical circumstances. The women also discovered that such injury was not part of an inevitable world order and it was possible to work toward eliminating it. Kamir's book could have been considered, and written, only in this context. However, in her search for language that is completely free of patriarchal traces, she discovers that feminist discourse, too, does not offer a completely alternative language for examining rape and it is still bound in a number of ways to the male jargon. Her book, then, is a kind of journey toward the creation of such a language. However, patriarchal infrastructure that pursues the language does not stop at rape - it cannot stop there - because what lies in the balance is how to distinguish rape from consensual sexual relations. Therefore, Kamir argues, we must find a new language to describe such relations as well. Loss of clarity The term "rape," which ostensibly aims to describe a particular situation, does not do so; it loses its clarity from the moment the woman who is raped comes forward to complain and is required to describe the rape and to detail why she is complaining. The impotence of the language is revealed then - and the woman's descriptions remain in the clutches of the social norm that holds that when a woman says "no" to sexual relations, she really means "yes." Kamir offers an initial proposal for distinguishing between the two situations by means of distinguishing Hebrew verbs: lehithaber (to connect) or lehithakekh (to rub up against) to describe consensual sex, and lenakev (to penetrate) to describe rape. This is part of a radical move that demands a fundamental change in the language and the norms that shape the relations between the sexes. Kamir argues that in our local culture the concept of honor plays a key role. The Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom serves her as evidence of the dominance of that concept (the Hebrew word for "dignity" used in the name of the law, kavod, also means "honor") in this culture, which is different from American culture, for example, where the central concept is equality. She devotes considerable space to the analysis of the contribution of honor to the various types of injury to women with which she deals. Honor, she says, is invested in the patriarchal tradition and bears its seal: In Hebrew the word for "human," as in the phrase "human dignity," is adam, the name of the first human being, Adam, and does not connote "Adam and Eve"; the phrase in the basic law refers to the specific honor of the Israeli male. What characterizes this honor is that it must not be touched and must not be questioned, because that is the core of such honor: what a man demands for himself must be granted without unnecessary talk, apart from that concerning honor itself, and if he is hurt, he will defend his honor. In view of the critical thinking of recent decades, feminism included, honor has been identified with deceit, force, vacuity, masculinity, domination, ownership or hierarchy, and can at most become an object of critical research, but certainly not a productive and useful working tool. Nevertheless, since Kamir seeks to get to the heart of this culture and to place her project in the center and reject the margins, she is not deterred by honor. She chooses to deal with it very cautiously, transforming it from an object of critical research into a raw material from which, by drawing its precise outlines, she separates out patriarchal honor and brings it to the fore in order to make it possible to look at honor in a new way - and to derive from it legal, cultural and even feminist tools. Thus, from the moment that despicable honor is bounded and its borders are drawn up, Kamir proposes reformulating and even inventing new concepts of it. The most central of these is what she calls "the specific honor of the individual," upon which the entire project is based. If honor is connected to the deeds and status of an individual, then the individual's "specific honor," like his or her specific weight, "does not require taking any action and does not impose any obligation." With the concept of specific honor, Kamir approaches the issue of rape anew and proposes a framework for discussion, from which the three elements that served and still serve in the discussion of the offense of rape - the woman's non-agreement, the man's violence and the woman's resistance - have been eliminated. She shows that focusing on them assumes that these three elements, which vary depending on the situation, are distinct from the sexual contact as a clearly physical event; because such contact itself does not vary, whether it is rape or consensual relations, it is thus treated as an isolated act, as though it were detached from its context. Rape, the author writes, "is the only violent offense in which the behavior itself in different circumstances (were the woman to agree, were the man not to employ violence or were the woman not to resist) would be desired by the victim." To demonstrate the total absurdity of this, which repeats itself ad nauseum in Israel's legal literature, Kamir uses the analogy of proper sexual relations and rape on the one hand, and boxing and a fistfight on the other: "It seems to me that it would not have occurred to the authors to argue that boxing and fist-fighting are identical in every respect - apart from the single element of agreement on the part of one side, as it is obvious to all that in boxing, rules of behavior apply that are well known to the participants, which ensure fairness, mutual respect and 'a sporting spirit.' Both sides, even though they exchange blows and shed each other's blood, behave as partners who are playing together for their mutual benefit and pleasure. When one of the sides deviates from the agreed-upon rules and hits the other in a way that is suited to street-fighting and not to boxing (for example, 'below the belt'), the deviant behavior is identified immediately and the one who deviates from the rules is punished ... "If we were to isolate the encounter between the fist and the rival's face and define it as 'the relevant behavior,' it would be necessary to say that attack is a violent offense and that under different circumstances, the behavior that gives rise to it is a legitimate sport. However, when we think about boxing and fist-fighting, we do not distinguish the encounter between the fist and the rival's face from the relevant context of bodies moving in front of each other in harmony, in accordance with sporting rules." Similarly, we of course do not assume an identity between a surgeon, who cuts into living flesh, and a murderer, only because they both touch another person's body with a knife. In effect, Kamir demands of all citizens, both men and women, and also of those who frequent the tabernacles of justice, to revive something that has been lost in modernity and nearly eradicated from their capabilities: the courage to pause to consider "the thing itself" which lies in the balance, and not to flee to permanent and preset parameters that shape the attitude toward it, or to creative interpretation, invention or acrobatics that cover up an effort to avoid confronting the thing itself or taking responsibility. "The thing itself" which Kamir is demanding that we look at directly is not a disassociated form of physical contact, but rather rape - a man penetrating a woman - as a situation that occurs between people, in the framework of which the basis for their coexistence as possessors of specific honor that must not be harmed is upset, because the damage is not only to the woman who is raped, but also to the community in which they are partners. In this matter, too, Kamir is not trying to impose a deus ex machina-type of view that only a few special individuals possess. Rather, she carefully seeks out this point of view in the court rulings she reads, gives it prominence and brings it to life even when it is only implicit between the lines. She shows that it is in evidence and usually leaves traces, but is for the most part discarded because the various systems - above all, the legal establishment - usually tend to prefer ready-made parameters that they can depend on in their decisions, and thereby reduce their responsibility vis-a-vis the question of "has it been proven beyond all doubt that the complainant did not agree?" For instance, Kamir provides an example of this way of looking at things from the remarks of former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar, with respect to the rape of the girl from Kibbutz Shomrat - a highly unusual case which reflected uselessness of the parameters established in the law for defining rape: "[The case involved] a series of contacts, in a single night, of a girl of 14 and a half ... all in one sequence, within a few hours ... who is passed the whole time among a group of boys aged 16 and a half ... and agrees, according to the claim, of her own free will, to serial intercourse." Post-critical thinking Kamir's book is part of a way of thinking that I propose to call post-critical. This is thinking that has grown out of the latter phase of critical discourse that has been crystallizing since the end of the 1980s, and has internalized many of its insights, although the motivation for this type of thought does not stop at criticism. It seeks a different framework in which revealing the way various narratives are anchored in power relations and constructed by social forces and interests is only the beginning. In critical thinking, the resistance was the main thing - it had a kind of intellectual daring of someone who sees very clearly and does not remain silent, sometimes coming out alone against everyone and warning that what seems to be taken for granted is nothing but a pattern of socially constructed reality, which must be resisted. Post-critical thinking expresses an understanding that in the critical stance there is a thread of passivity, which is derived from the kind of narrative it creates and which deals almost entirely with describing the ways in which reality is always constructed by others. Post-critical thinking replaces this passivity with an active stance - one that harnesses the critical project for the benefit of a creative project that aims to offer alternatives to existing patterns of thought, speech and action. The daring of standing at the gates and challenging others is replaced by daring of a new, more courageous sort: that of someone who stands in the doorway and takes a risk, by making a proposal that itself could become the object of critical analysis that will reveal its basic assumptions and identify its limitations. In contrast to the critical tradition, the post-critical process also aims at something of which the critical one is leery - to be mainstream, in the center, even establishment; to use inclusive rather than divisive language; to use force in an intelligent way and to take advantage of the opportunity to get dirty in formulating the right way to use it, by means of suggesting a proposal for legislation on offenses like sexual harassment or rape - and above all, to transform the solidarity between women who are controlled and men who control into a basis for criticism. Ariella Azoulay's book "Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy" was published by MIT Press in 2003. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Holocaust education For Dutch instructors, Islamophobia can be a teaching aid for Holocaust studies. 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