Why are all rapes not grievable?

Abstract

A month after I was raped I am sitting in the waiting room of the Heideveld Thutuleza Care Centre waiting to have an HIV test. On the couch opposite me, there is another womxn.1 She looks about eighteen. She is Black. In her hand she is holding the care package and the information book that I received when I came in a month ago, a few hours after I was raped. The nurse approaches the two of us in the waiting room. She turns to me, ‘Who are you bringing for an appointment?’ I look at her confused. ‘Who is the patient?’ she asks. ‘I am the patient’. ‘Oh’, she says. She looks surprised. In a context in which the bodies of poor black womxn are repeatedly constructed as the sites of sexual violence the nurse is unable to recognise my white, middle-class body as the site of such violence