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Shows why the movement against sexual violence needs the humanities—now more than ever.
New Rape Studies advances a new generation of writers who join a long genealogy of feminist thinkers in grounding their critiques of sexual violence in humanistic disciplines such as literary criticism, film studies, and art history. Aesthetic ways of knowing and cultural forms of intervention are increasingly urgent in a political landscape in which the common response to sexual violence has been an appeal to the state, whether carceral solutions advocated by some voices in the #MeToo movement or educational approaches led by national public health organizations. In fourteen essays, contributors draw on humanistic methods and objects to envision a feminist politics that transforms what has come to be called "rape culture"—above all, by re-committing to "culture" itself as the terrain of political contest.
"This anthology makes an important intervention in anti-rape discourse. On the one hand, the volume reveals the centrality of the humanities to the contemporary social and legal interventions that have almost exclusively come to define anti-rape discourse today. On the other hand, the contributors remind us that the genesis of anti-rape laws resides in the humanities. Despite the 'law and order' rhetoric of the early 1970s, pioneering feminists of the second wave proved 'the pervasiveness of misogyny in culture' not by focusing on gendered oppression per se or on the laws that perpetuated it but by critically analyzing cultural and literary representations. New Rape Studies honors this underplayed history by revealing how it was indeed in readings of literary texts that feminists developed their critical positions and by providing compelling examples of this 'aesthetic discourse' in film and literature." — Carine Mardorossian, author of Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered