vivian shaw

A geography of Safety: women, hybridity, and violence in Jana Leo’s ‘Rape New York’

Is there a geography of safety? Are safe spaces territorial, areas of protection drawn by the boundaries of privacy, the shapes of our homes, in the walkable comfort of “good” neighborhoods and company? Does the body govern its own cartography—with safety locating yet another intersection of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality?

I’m taking inspiration for these questions from Jana Leo’s Rape New York, a memoir about the author’s rape in her Harlem apartment in 2001 and the imprints of this trauma on her personal, social, and intellectual relationship with New York City. To mention, as well, the legal consequences Leo endured through criminal and civil cases against her assailant and her landlord. (Leo’s landlord was eventually outed by NYC media outlets as one of the city’s most notorious slumlords).

The book has a svelte, unassuming appearance—in length almost as brief as Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, white cover ominously modest. Leo’s talent enables the book to be short—an efficiency of prose balancing the conceptual density of her narrative. No wonder, reviewers have suggested that Rape New York is a hybrid text—a seemingly rare union of autobiography with academia, the sensory with the political. Surely, Leo’s memoir does embody a certain contradiction of form. But as I interpret it, the text’s hybridity articulates itself not as an aberration, but rather, as recognition of the lived contradictions of human biography, particularly for women and marginalized individuals and communities. In other words, Leo’s work is not a marriage of the private and political—it is a rejection of this splitting, an interrogation into the power-interests motivating this geographic binary.

Leo makes some powerful observations about the home, property, urban development, mass incarceration, and capitalist ideology. Of the most salient of Leo’s points is her argument that gentrification self-generates and accelerates through a geography of crime—“[t]he more sophisticated and perverse approach is to simultaneously clamp down on street crime while forcing it into specific buildings targeted for speculation” (41). Real estate developers are then able to purchase these buildings cheaply and profit greatly from their redevelopment.

Even more fascinating is domestophobia, a central concept of Leo’s academic research and one irrevocably altered by her assault. Domestophobia predicates on “two ideas: one, that the idea of ‘home’ is a myth, in practice it is more like a prison; two, the house is literally a site for violence against women” (83). Narrating her research in the aftermath of her rape:

As I looked at the statistics, it became clear how the myths associated with rape and the home were intertwined. The idea that rape happens at night, in dark alleys, in alien locations, is false. It is a myth that nourishes the image of the house as a safe place, offering comfort and suppressing the threat of rape from the mind. This mythology serves a masculine interest, with its lust for the free availability of women within the sanctuary of their home.

After being held hostage in my apartment and raped, I didn’t feel at home anywhere or with anybody. I didn’t feel safe at home or anywhere. I found myself disappearing into nonplaces: computer rooms, libraries and coffee shops, or friends’ studios (49-50).

Which returns us to the question of safety. More than simply rejecting the analytical limits and fallacies of spaces partitioned as “safe” and “unsafe,” Leo suggests that such mythic geography is of particular danger to women who are structurally vulnerable both inside and outside the home. The notion that white, middle class, heteronormative citizens purchase the power to detect and choose safety is core to neoliberalism: safety-as-commodity. Such a belief is key toward rendering separate and invisible those economies of exploitation so interlocked with Western, neoliberal projects. Thus, when the New York Times nonchalantly claims that, “only a minority of men feel entitled to have their way to dominate others, to humiliate them if provoked,” it dually-articulates violence: as a vision—some exceptional stroke of character and power—and its antonym, a blindness. We see here mainstream media dislocating the disturbingly high number of victims of violence and abuse who live at all strata of the socioeconomy.

It’s worth noting that feminists of color have long traversed the meeting grounds of violence, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. The ability to project violence, exploitation, and danger as some remote phenomenon, to ignore its presence and foundational status, and to expect it in some singular type of form is a blind privilege. Thus, this literature has often found shelter in an aesthetics of hybridity–I am thinking particularly of Audre Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The question—where can women and marginalized peoples live safely and survive?—acknowledges the geopolitical interests and institutions structuring violence and the necessity for activist praxis. But what both Lorde and Leo’s texts also demonstrate is the importance of aesthetics and the personal as some kind of proper home—a space to rearticulate the nuance of experience and to suffer safely, a liberatory geography reclaiming humanity and joy.

[NOTE: I picked up Jana Leo’s Rape New York while attending Bluestockings’ book launch of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities, another great text and related to my discussion in this essay.]