#Metoo in Wide Sargasso Sea

This chapter uses the representation of sex acts in Wide Sargasso Sea to help think through the workings of agency, gender and race in contemporary responses to sexual violence in the United States. Even a sexual act that is not represented as rape in the novel nonetheless needs to be read in the context of the long history of rape since slavery and belongs on a continuum of hegemonic sexualized violence. For example, a scene that is ironically represented as what in today’s parlance would be called “date rape” or even reverse discrimination is not, in fact, either but rather speaks to today’s reversal that is taking place in courts across the country: perpetrators filing charges before or at the same time as their victimized partners to trump the latter’s claims of victimization. In light of the impasse reached by anti-rape discourse today, this line of inquiry will work toward the theorization of the necessary imbrication of agency, rape, gender and race.