Rape and Representation

Rape and Representation PDF Author: Lynn A. Higgins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231514712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppélia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Rape and Representation

Rape and Representation PDF Author: Lynn A. Higgins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231514712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book

Book Description
Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppélia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Beyond Blurred Lines

Beyond Blurred Lines PDF Author: Nickie D. Phillips
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442246286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
From its origins in academic discourse in the 1970s to our collective imagination today, the concept of “rape culture” has resonated in a variety of spheres, including television, gaming, comic book culture, and college campuses. Beyond Blurred Lines traces ways that sexual violence is collectively processed, mediated, negotiated, and contested by exploring public reactions to high-profile incidents and rape narratives in popular culture. The concept of rape culture was initially embraced in popular media – mass media, social media, and popular culture – and contributed to a social understanding of sexual violence that mirrored feminist concerns about the persistence of rape myths and victim-blaming. However, it was later challenged by skeptics who framed the concept as a moral panic. Nickie D. Phillips documents how the conversation shifted from substantiating claims of a rape culture toward growing scrutiny of the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. This, in turn, renewed attention toward false allegations, and away from how college enforcement policies fail victims to how they endanger accused young men. Ultimately, she successfully lends insight into how the debates around rape culture, including microaggressions, gendered harassment and so-called political correctness, inform our collective imaginations and shape our attitudes toward criminal justice and policy responses to sexual violence.

Reading Rape

Reading Rape PDF Author: Sabine Sielke
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140082494X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Reading Rape examines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations. Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels to Deliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues. Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism, Reading Rape also challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts. This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.

Conflict Bodies

Conflict Bodies PDF Author: Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814252932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the relationship between rape and narratives of violence in francophone literature and culture.

What It Feels Like

What It Feels Like PDF Author: Stephanie R. Larson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091703
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Winner of the 2022 Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine (ARSTM) Book Award Winner of the 2022 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader claims for justice. Investigating anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances, and the #MeToo movement, Larson reveals how our language privileges male perspectives and, more deeply, how it is shaped by systems of power—patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and heteronormativity. Interrogating how these systems work to propagate masculine commitments to “science” and “hard evidence,” Larson finds that US culture holds a general mistrust of testimony by women, stereotyping it as “emotional.” But she also gives us hope for change, arguing that testimonies grounded in the bodily, material expression of violation are necessary for giving voice to victims of sexual violence and presenting, accurately, the scale of these crimes. Larson makes a case for visceral rhetorics, theorizing them as powerful forms of communication and persuasion. Demonstrating the communicative power of bodily feeling, Larson challenges the long-held commitment to detached, distant, rationalized discourses of sexual harassment and rape. Timely and poignant, the book offers a much-needed corrective to our legal and political discourses.

Representing Rape

Representing Rape PDF Author: Susan Ehrlich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134627653
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Representing Rape is the first feminist analysis of the language of sexual assault trials from the perspective of linguists. Susan Ehrlich argues that language is central to all legal settings - specifically sexual harassment and acquaintance rape hearings where linguistic descriptions of the events are often the only type of evidence available. Language does not simply reflect but helps to construct the character of the people and events under investigation. The book is based around a case study of the trial of a male student accused of two instances of sexual assault in two different settings: a university tribunal and a criminal trial. This case is situated within international studies on rape trials and is relevant to the legal systems of the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. She shows how culturally-dominant notions about rape percolate through the talk of sexual assault cases in a variety of settings and ultimately shape their outcome. Ehrlich hopes that to understand rape trials in this way is to recognize their capacity for change. By highlighting the underlying preconceptions and prejudices in the language of courtrooms today, this important book paves the way towards a fairer judicial system for the future.

Writing the Survivor

Writing the Survivor PDF Author: Robin E. Field
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1942954840
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the survivors of violence and abuse, rather than the perpetrators. The rape novel arose during the women’s liberation movement as women writers collectively challenged the traditional erasure of female subjectivity and agency found in earlier representations of sexual violence in American fiction. The rape novel not only foregrounds survivors and their stories in a textual centering that affirms their dignity and self-worth, but also develops new narratological strategies for portraying violent, disturbing subject matter. In bringing together many key women’s texts of the last decades of the 20th century, the rape novel demonstrates the centrality of sexual assault to women’s fiction of this era. The rape novels of the 21st century continue the political activism inherent in the genre—educating readers, offering community to survivors, and encouraging social activism—as the stories of male survivors are increasingly told. A radical reconsideration of late twentieth-century American novels, Writing the Survivor underscores the importance of women’s activism upon the novel’s form and content and reveals the portrayal of rape as rape to be an interethnic imperative.

Rape on the Contemporary Stage

Rape on the Contemporary Stage PDF Author: Lisa Fitzpatrick
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319708457
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This book investigates the representation of rape in British and Irish theatre since the second wave of the Women’s Movement. Mainly focusing on the period from the 1990s to the present, it identifies key feminist debates on rape and gender, and introduces a set of ideas about the function of rape as a form of embodied, gendered violence to the analysis of dramaturgical and performance strategies used in a range of important and/or controversial works. The chapters explore the dramatic representation of consent; feminist performance strategies that interrogate common attitudes to rape and rape survivors; the use of rape as an allegory for political oppression; the relationships of vulnerability, eroticism and affect in the understanding and representation of sexual violence; and recent work that engages with anti-rape activism to present women’s personal experiences on stage.

Sex and Violence

Sex and Violence PDF Author: Penelope Harvey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134933428
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Women, Power, and Rape Culture

Women, Power, and Rape Culture PDF Author: Bonnie Stabile
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440876983
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Focusing on how rape, sexual assault, and harassment relate to underrepresentation of women in public authority, this book provides an insightful exploration of the policy context that impedes women's advancement to positions of power. The election of Donald Trump precipitated one of the largest outpourings of political protest on a single day in U.S. history with the 2017 March for Women. The emboldened #MeToo and #TimesUp movements reacted not only to the historical injustice of sexual offenses perpetrated upon women, but women's associated underrepresentation in positions of power and public authority. Women, Power, and Rape Culture examines the principal events, actors, and paradigms in the politics of rape, sexual assault, and harassment since Trump's election. Unlike other studies, it connects these traumatic events to women's underrepresentation in the public sphere. Chapters consider the power of presidential speech, judges, and Congress to create structural barriers to women's representation as well as the stultifying effects of weak college and university responses to sexual violence. Disparities in women's representation in positions of public authority are considered in light of the disproportionate burden imposed on women by a culture that discounts the prevalence of rape and harassment and by the policies that inadequately address them, allowing them to perpetuate.