Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories by Laura J. Shepherd

Author:Laura J. Shepherd [Shepherd, Laura J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Violence in Society, Social Science, Political Science, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9780415517959
Google: YdJwej1-aMQC
Goodreads: 13711610
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Canada similarly avoids the term ‘rape’ and therefore avoids the question of whether such an act is primarily sexual or violent in nature (see Hinch 1988); in both of these cases the act is legally conceived of as both/and.

These shifts in the legal conceptualisation of rape and associated questions of who is considered to be an ‘appropriate’ victim or perpetrator of rape, as well as whether the act in question is a form of sex or violence, mirror and are mirrored by feminist interventions in debates about rape, which are broadly divisible into three categories. The first of these includes those interventions that focus on rape and other forms of sexual violence as violence. Susan Brownmiller, arguably the feminist that feminists think of when beginning to think about rape, wrote in her classic monograph Against Our Will that ‘From prehistoric times to the present … rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear’ (1975: 13, emphasis added). That is, rape is ‘domination through violence, rather than the result of an uncontrollable male desire for sex’ and Brownmiller constructs rape ‘as a form of social control’ (cited in Phipps 2009: 668). For Brownmiller and others, ‘rape is a “political” crime’ (Shorter 1977: 472), a violent act of power and control over resources, where the resources in question coincide with the female body. Monique Plaza follows this logic when she argues that ‘Rape is an oppressive act exercised by a (social) man against a (social) woman … rape is not sexual’ (cited in Cahill 2001: 145, emphasis in original; see also Cahill 2000) but rather, functions as a means of oppression, of control and of (violent) domination.

In his detailed overview of the construction of rape-as-violence, Craig Palmer (1988) notes that this was the dominant perspective on sexual crimes in the 1970s and 1980s:

the mere repetition of the claim in so many works, made it possible by 1980 for a researcher to rightfully claim that “It is now generally accepted by criminologists, psychologists, and other professionals working with rapists and rape victims that rape is not primarily a sexual crime, it is a crime of violence”.

(Warner cited in Palmer 1988: 513, emphasis added)

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