Dead to the World: Rape, Unconsciousness, and Social Media

Abstract

A recent popular focus on sexual assault cases involving women who are unconscious—whether because drunk, drugged, anesthetized, in a coma, or asleep—has drawn attention to the role of social media in both exacerbating and gaining redress for the harms of rape while unconscious. This article intersectionally situates cultural anxiety about women’s unconsciousness and sexual assault while offering a phenomenological analysis of its harms. Sexual assault in these situations, and especially rape, exploits and reinforces a victim’s lack of agency and exposes her body in ways that make it especially difficult for her to reconstitute herself as a subject. It damages both her ability to engage with the world in four dimensions (through a temporally persisting body schema) and her ability to retreat from it into anonymity. The way the assault is played back to her after the fact can draw out the experience in a way that forecloses her future, and this is especially true given contemporary communications technologies. Sexual assault of this kind can make the restful anonymity of sleep impossible, leaving only the violent exposure of a two-dimensional life. By providing a richer phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of rape in these circumstances, and by showing its complexity and ubiquity, I hope to undermine the trivialization of this kind of offense and to challenge pervasive attitudes of victim blaming that permeate popular commentary on sexual violence against women who are unconscious or semiconscious.

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