The etymology of ‘rape’ is a quote from Argentine-Brazilian anthropologist Rita Laura Segato in her interview with Victor M. Uribe-Uran, published in Hemisphere: A Magazine of the Americas, Vol. 22 (2013).
This sequence features the findings of Bontok-Igorot anthropologist Dr. June Prill-Brett, who concluded that rape did not exist in Bontoc before its militarisation and exposure to capitalist plunder.
With permission from the author, Comfort Sequence features a reconfigured quote from So Mayer’s essay ‘Floccinaucinihilipilification’ from the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (Harper Perennial 2018). The excerpt from So Mayer’s essay reads:
Rape and colonialism are not commensurate, but they are kin. When we talk about sexual violence as feminists, we are–we have to be–talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of hetero-patriarchal capitalism. It is what that ugly polysyllabic euphemism for state power does.
The beginning of Comfort Sequence uses paraphrased and patch-worked information from Filipino news outlets: