Construction Of Rape Research Articles

What Support? Foucault, Power, and the Construction of Rape

This paper is concerned with the social and cultural constructions of male rape in voluntary agencies, England. Using sociological, cultural, and post-structural theoretical frameworks, mainly the works of Foucault, I demonstrate the ways in which male rape is constructed and reconstructed in such agencies. Social and power relations, social structures, and time and place shape their discourses, cultures, and constructions pertaining to male rape. This means that constructions of male rape are neither fixed, determined, nor unchanging at any time and place, but rather negotiated and fluid. I theorize the data—which was collected through semi-structured interviews and qualitative questionnaires—including male rape counselors, therapists, and voluntary agency caseworkers. The theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that frame and elucidate the data contribute to sociological understandings of male rape.

(In)actions Speak Louder than Words: Foucault, Governmentality, and the Social Construction of Rape in the Policing Landscape

ABSTRACTThe author examines qualitative data with British police to explore police interactions with male rape victims, and the effects and outcomes of such interactions. Drawing on British police data collected from interviews and questionnaires, the author theorizes the data using sociological and Foucauldian perspectives to increase the understanding of the social construction of male rape in the policing context. From this theoretical framework, it is argued that police encounters with male victims of rape are on the whole negative based on their discursive ideas and knowledges about male rape. From the qualitative data presented and analyzed, themes of power, discourse, culture, values, norms, and beliefs emerge. It is also argued that male rape is culturally constructed as deviant and placed alongside other forms of discourse personified as deviant, such as queerness and mental health, among the police. As a consequence, male rape is symbolizing abnormality for it disrupts some officers’ constructions and discourses on what sexual violence actually entails.

Sexual Violence and Its Discontents

The stories about how sexual violence comes to be constituted as an object of research offer complex commentaries about the operations of public secrecy in the realm of law, kinship, nation, and the state. Rape emerged as an anthropological object of research when anthropologists compared whole cultures to challenge the universalistic assumptions underlying a natural history of rape. Anthropological focus has now shifted to the situated nature of imagination, language, documents, and techniques that craft the silences and speech around rape. Recent anthropological research critiques the social, juridical, and political discourses complicit in the construction of rape as a public secret, offering an important route of engagement with ethnographies that recursively speak of rape as a situated category.

Framing Megan Williams

This study examines mainstream television news coverage of the kidnapping and rape of Megan Williams in late 2007 and coverage of Williams' recantation in 2009. The publicity of this case provides a unique opportunity to scrutinize the under-examined topics of news coverage of white-on-black rape and white female perpetration. Feminist and critical media studies perspectives are called upon to provide an understanding of hegemonic discourses of gendered violence in media discourse. The intersection of race and class with such discourse is examined. Content and discourse analysis methods allow a critical examination of coverage of the Williams' story on four of the most watched television news sources in America. Results reveal disturbing trends in the framing of white-on-black perpetration. Additionally, stark differences in ideological constructions of rape and race are found among the news outlets examined, suggesting that some news sources do more to reproduce raced and gendered discourses of privilege than others.

CONSTRUCTING RAPE: FEMINISM, CHANGE, AND WOMEN'S EVERYDAY UNDERSTANDINGS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT

The cultural and legal meaning of rape has changed dramatically over the past 30 years as the feminist movement has challenged traditional constructions of sexual violence and offered an alternative construction of the meaning of rape. The transformation of rape into a social problem has brought increased attention to the subject in both popular and academic realms. Despite the growing body of research and theory on sexual violence, little inquiry exists into women s everyday constructions of rape and the degree to which such constructions have been influenced by the feminist movement. This article uses a constructionist framework to examine the everyday understandings of rape held by a diverse sample of women. Data gathered through an open-ended survey instrument were analyzed to reveal both interesting similarities and significant differences in the ways women of different ages, races, and personal histories define and interpret the phenomenon of rape. By examining these data, the extent to which the feminist reconstruction of rape has influenced women s everyday assumptions is examined, and the role of differences among women in perceptions of rape is explored. The findings presented in this article have implications for theories of social problems, for feminist discourse, and for the application of research on rape in applied settings.

Constructions of Rape: Two American Musicals

Under the title and Scarlett: Rough Sex or Rape? Feminists Give a Damn, Tom Kuntz revisits a debate between Christina Hoff Sommers and Marilyn Friedman over the filmic representation of rape in Gone With the Wind.' Sommers controversially stated in the Chronicle of Higher Education, referring to Gone With the Wind, that many women continue to enjoy the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs in a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy.2 Friedman countered Sommers by pointing out the tension between the reality of rape as experienced by female victims and romanticized representations that make watching a rape acceptable as entertainment.3 What is at stake for Friedman and Sommers in Gone With the Wind is how the representation of rape encodes a cultural discourse on rape, and how the relationship between represented rape and real rape is negotiated by the female spectator. Though opposed in how they construe women and representation, these arguments hinge on an acceptance of heterosexual rape as a poetic theme as common to literature and art as war.4 This paper addresses

'Lucrece the chaste': The Construction of Rape in Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece"

'Lucrece the chaste': The Construction of Rape in Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece"