Individuation — Acting on Victimhood

Abstract

This chapter will ostensibly address the issue of access to justice, but rather than do so through reference to data indicating need versus official incidence, or reporting versus attrition, I will be seeking to place this discussion steadfastly outside of any appeals to justice or demand per se — knowing only too well how these issues can be the effective undoing of a Foucauldian analysis. Access to justice as a topic has been covered before — comprehensively and passionately — by many of the authors whose work was addressed in Part I. I will be looking instead at concrete and irrefutable examples of discursive regularity, those ‘practices of violence’ in what Foucault termed ‘dispositifs’.¹ For my analysis, this is the dimension in which the male rape victim as a subject acts and is acted upon.