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Within research on sexual violence, womxn who have been raped are positioned as "vulnerable" participants, while researchers tend to occupy positions of "invulnerability". Drawing on vulnerable moments from a research project which explored womxn's experiences of rape in South Africa, this paper proposes a (more) vulnerable engagement with narratives of rape. Through attending to how vulnerability is implicated in issues of silence and agency, shame, and my own failures to witness the experiences of my participants with care, I explore the epistemic and ethical possibilities of an affective approach to researching rape. This approach asks us, as researchers, to attend to the moments during our research in which we are affected, moved and disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author uses her experience as a starting point from which to think about rape, and in particular the ways in which those who have ‘survived' sexual violence are able to make sense of their experiences within the contemporary context. Topics include rape is stated to be ‘outrageous' in its transgression of the limits of respectable sexuality, and Black women's subjectivity is constituted by their ‘blackness'.

Redi Thlabi's book Khwezi: The Remarkable Story of Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, published in September 2017, recalled national attention to the 2006 Jacob Zuma rape trial, a deep scar on the body of our democracy. Thlabi's book demonstrates the cost incurred by a womxn who accused a powerful man of rape. During the trail Zuma's lawyer, Advocate Kemp, repeatedly implied that Kuzwayo was sexually promiscuous and therefore 'unrapeable'. This idea - that the rapes of certain womxn do not count as harm - shapes the way in which South African society responds (or fails to respond) to contemporary instances of sexual violence in significant ways. This article aims to interrogate the notion of 'un/rapeability' and, in particular, to situate it in relation to the colonisation of land, as well as the intersecting racialised and gendered formations of coloniality. A central process of colonising the land of South Africa was the establishment of racialised and gendered dynamics of control: the conquering of both 'black' and 'white' womxn. While white womxn were possessed as reproducers of race, black womxn were possessed as not-womxn. These racialised, gendered constructions have produced complexly disparate notions of respectability and harm, in relation to which only certain womxn, at particular historical moments and under certain circumstances, are able to claim status as 'legitimate' victims/survivors of rape. In elucidating the uneven nature of the contemporary landscape of sexual violence, this article aims to trouble the notion that some womxn are 'unrapeable' and therefore unharmed by the sexual violations enacted upon them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]