Representations Of Sexual Violence Research Articles

Whiteness Makes the Laughs Possible: A Sitcom’s Representations of Sexual Violence

The award winning, Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–2019) broke new ground in representations of sexual violence. Recalibrating the energies of the sitcom to address issues of trauma, memory and witnessing, Unbreakable has helped craft a new esthetic of the genre. The four-season series replicates key features of the historical captivity narrative and the contemporaneous #MeToo movement. Ignoring the slave narrative of captivity and dispossession allows the series to sidestep the racialized dimensions of sexual assault. The narrative’s resolute focus on white survivors permits the series to mobilize trauma for comedic effect.

INTERNET HUMOUR AND THE NORMALISATION OF RAPE CULTURE

This paper investigates the discursive construction of sexual violence in humorous Internet memes. Feminist digital media scholars have taken an increased interest in the ways in which Internet communication and content reproduces notions of gender norms as well as creating misogynist, racist, homophobic and transphobic content. However, little research has investigated the role humour plays in this discourse – especially how it is presented in Internet memes. Using #MeToo as a case study, the paper investigates the role of humour in memes that focus on sexual violence. Investigating how gender and sexuality are discursively constructed in memes, the paper focuses on how this plays into the representation of sexual violence. The paper asks: what can Internet scholars learn by taking Internet humour seriously? The key findings of this paper is the discursive construction of sexual violence and the role humour plays in this. A himpathetic (Manne 2018) logic runs through most of the memes which centralises men’s experiences and provides disproportionate sympathy with male perpetrators and widely disregards the experiences of female victims. Humour is used to signal inclusion and exclusion as the platforms become spaces for indicating and reaffirming heteronormativity and homosociality. The work done by humour discursively excludes women, sexual minorities and people of colour. This exclusion extends to victim/survivors who often become the butt of the joke and are used as a prop to create a humorous meme.

The reflective process of the perpetrator: representations of rape in novels of C.N. Adichie and V.T. Nguyen

ABSTRACT This article examines a new iteration of the representation of rape that is centered on the perspective of the perpetrator of sexual violence. By outlining advances in feminist discourses, critical men’s studies, and literary criticism, this article situates the current development within a tradition of theory and representations of sexual violence, which is followed by the author’s reading of rape in The Sympathizer (2015) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Narrated as men who slide into passivity in the build-up to rape, the protagonists of these novels are at the same time not condoned and learn to accept their guilt, shame, and responsibility. These representations follow established literary conventions of repression and silence, but then move beyond the unspoken to a constant articulation of the meaning of rape for the perpetrator. Following calls for contextually sensitive approaches to the study of violent men, this article explores how both novels narrate the perpetrator’s circumstances, choices, reflection, and growing awareness of the implications of rape. The meanings of rape for perpetrators, as represented in fiction, and their potential to create narratives with which to combat sexual violence are discussed.

"Thus Do All Women": Comedy, Sentimentality, Ambiguity, and a Così fan tutte for the #MeToo Era

"Thus Do All Women"Comedy, Sentimentality, Ambiguity, and a Così fan tutte for the #MeToo Era Camille Rogers (bio) Content warning: sexual assault and coercion, attempted suicide Misogyny and Ambiguity in Così fan tutte In 2018 actor Molly Ringwald published an essay in response to the #MeToo movement in which she reevaluated the ethical implications of classic 1980s films such as The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Sixteen Candles.1 While understandably reluctant to condemn movies that were not only formative to her career but also exciting at the time because "no one in Hollywood was writing about the minutiae of high school, and certainly not from a female point of view," she acknowledges that in hindsight, many of the interactions between male and female characters were highly problematic, depicting sexual harassment and, in some cases, assault. She describes a famous scene from Sixteen Candles, which today feels profoundly disturbing: The dreamboat, Jake, essentially trades his drunk girlfriend, Caroline, to the Geek, to satisfy the latter's sexual urges, in return for Samantha's underwear. The Geek takes Polaroids with Caroline to have proof of his conquest; when she wakes up in the morning with someone she doesn't know, he asks her if she "enjoyed it." (Neither of them seems to remember much.) Caroline shakes her head in wonderment and says, [End Page 45] "You know, I have this weird feeling I did." She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought, because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn't. And yet, despite many problematic elements, through interactions with fans Ringwald has found that these movies were powerful for many teenagers at the time, including those in marginalized positions. She writes: "How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? … Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past … so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go." Such a powerful statement could be made about many genres of art, but I find it particularly relevant to opera, which concentrates much more heavily on historical works than most other entertainment industries. Over the last few years, the opera world has been rocked by its own #MeToo scandals, and coverage of the movement has reached mainstream media outlets.2 This in turn has led to increased scrutiny of the physical and sexual violence often enacted against female characters onstage.3 With a wider conversation about gender-based harassment and violence in opera emerging, scholars are now questioning more broadly what can—and should—be done with operas that contain themes of sexual violence. In a 2018 colloquy on sexual assault in opera, Suzanne G. Cusick and Monica A. Hershberger suggest that "when we stage, perform, or teach that repertory without explicitly engaging its imbrication with sexual and gender violence, we risk unwittingly sustaining a part of its tradition that we now find morally repugnant."4 Bonnie Gordon argues that teaching opera in a more ethical way can have a profound effect on students, potentially encouraging them to be more critical not only of historical texts but of modern media as well.5 Further, Micaela Baranello comments on the possibility of staging these depictions of sexual assault with more care, in particular attempting as much as possible to situate them in their original context. At the same time, Baranello cautions against productions emphasizing the more brutal aspects of sexual violence to "trade on women's bodies for symbolic currency."6 With this increased awareness of gender-based violence, many centuries-old [End Page 46] operas are now being reevaluated, some for the first time. As far back as 2000 scholars such as Liane Curtis highlighted how the brilliance of Mozart's music could distract from the blatant misogyny and gender-based violence of Don Giovanni.7 However, more recent scholarship has gone beyond the score to focus on the agency of directors to affect audiences' perceptions of well-known operas. For example, in her 2021 dissertation "Regarding Rape: Representations of Sexual Violence on...

Amusing Abusers and Humourless Survivors: Analysing the Role of Comedy in Media Representations of Sexual Violence

This article reflects on the importance of comedy when considering media engagements with sexual abuse themes. This approach is informed by how closely the study of humour is rooted in the analysis of power relations, with comic theorists, both historical and contemporary, grounding the work.The comic figures of both the child sex (CS) abuser and the sexual violence survivor are first identified, before exploring what exactly about these tropes evoke laughter, and what this means for wider conceptions of interpersonal abuse and victimology.
 In analysing examples of CS abuser themed British and American comedy, animated adult comedies such as Family Guy (1999-present) and Monkey Dust (2003-2005) are considered in the context of early 2000s anxieties towards the suburban dirty old man and online child safety. In the case of the sexual violence survivor, Saturday Night Live’s 1993 ‘Is It Date Rape?’ sketch is considered within the context of 1990s anxieties regarding feminist campus politics, and is paralleled to the mid-2010s media panic surrounding British and American university students and trigger warnings through examples including The Simpson’s 2017 ‘Caper Chase’ episode and early to mid-2010s online academic polemics on the humourless feminist, such as Mark Fisher’s ‘Exiting The Vampire Castle’ (2013) and Jack Halberstam’s ‘You are Triggering Me!’ (2014). The article concludes by considering the changing consensuses for sexual violence themed humour in the Me Too era through the 2018 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present) ‘Times Up For The Gang.’

The politics of sexual violence in the Kachin conflict in Myanmar

ABSTRACT Conflict-related sexual violence has been the focus of significant international activism and policy attention. International legal norms and frameworks have evolved to recognize it as a war crime, and a representation of sexual violence as a “weapon of war” is now widely endorsed. This article examines how international norms about conflict-related sexual violence are adopted and utilized in multiple ways in the armed conflict in Kachin state in northern Myanmar. Throughout decades of civil war, international norms on sexual violence have constituted key resources for international advocacy and awareness raising by local women’s rights activists. Further, activists have drawn on international norms to effect changes in gendered relations of power within their own communities. However, international norms on sexual violence in conflict have also been effectively used as tools for ethno-nationalist identity politics, rallying support behind the armed insurgency and mobilizing women’s unpaid labor in the service of war. Thus, international norms on conflict-related sexual violence have simultaneously opened up space for women’s empowerment and political agency and reproduced gendered forms of insecurity and marginalization. Exploring these contradictions and complexities, this analysis generates novel insights into the politics of international norms in contexts of armed conflict.

Representations of Sexual Violence in Performance

Representations of Sexual Violence in Performance

The Film Kids 25 Years On: A Qualitative Study of Rape Culture and Representations of Sexual Violence in Skateboarding

This article examines the 1995 fictional feature film Kids, which locates its story in skateboarding culture. The film reached its 25th anniversary in 2020; it is directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine, both recognizable figures in skateboarding, and it featured a cast of youth from the New York skateboarding scene. The research analyses narrative content that depicts sexual coercion and rape. Contemporary social and feminist theories of sexual violence, rape culture and media on the film inform the analysis. The discussion points to how the characters that the boys play embody forms of hegemonic masculinity, pointing to the social and cultural dimensions of male power and how sexual violence can be an element of that. The article also presents an occasion to reflect on such issues in skateboarding culture more widely, with emerging insights that can be useful to studies of other male-dominated youth cultures, lifestyle sports and subcultures.

(Mis)Representations of sexual violence: the Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford testimonies

ABSTRACTMedia’s negative representations of sexual violence have evolved over time in western culture. This study examines news coverage surrounding the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. I focus on how women in the news industry articulate sexual violence in relation to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and the counter-testimony of Brett Kavanaugh. This analysis reveals that news media presents a hegemonic narrative that reinforces gendered stereotypes and a counter-hegemonic narrative that reveals the limitations of the dominant position that holds victims accountable. This study argues that oppressive articulations of sexual violence pervade media discourses, and that a re-articulation is necessary for social transformation.

Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance.

This essay examines two Portuguese novels about colonialism and its legacies: António Lobo Antunes's Fado Alexandrino (1983) and Aida Gomes's Os Pretos de Pousaflores (The Blacks from Pousaflores) (2011). Fado Alexandrino perpetuates the use of Black women's raped bodies as a plot device to represent colonial violence, while Gomes's narrative empowers racialized victims of sexual abuse and challenges dominant public memories of the Colonial War. A close reading of these novels, contextualized against the background of scholarly debates about the representation of sexual violence, exposes both the perils and potential of cultural works to preserve the memory of rape in armed conflict.

‘The Nirbhaya who lived’

This article examines representations of sexual violence in Femina, an Englishlanguage women’s lifestyle magazine aimed at middle-class Indian women. A story of rape, written from the perspective of the victim, a lower-caste Indian woman is analysed using feminist critical discourse analysis. The analytical interest here rests on tensions within the magazine, vis-à-vis Femina purportedly aims to empower all women, yet in its mediation of rape, this is achieved through a process of othering. The voices of the magazine’s text producers and the rape victim storyteller are compared to reveal conflicting differences and shifting ideologies in their framing of events. Through intertextual reference, the magazine distinguishes between endemic or ‘simple’ and ‘real’ rape cases in terms of caste-based inequalities claiming that endemic rape cases do not attract media attention because of the victim’s low social and economic status. This presents an issue since Femina appeals to high income, independent middle- class women to come to the rescue of lower-caste women, thus reinforcing a power dynamic between them.

An analysis of a high-profile rape trial: the case of UK footballer Ched Evans

This article uses a month’s worth of media coverage around the retrial for rape of Ched Evans, a Welsh footballer. Using guidelines published by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) for reporting on violence against women, 204 articles were analysed, and coverage was found, overall, to be victim blaming in its approach, and damaging in its representation of sexual violence. While previous research has highlighted this (see, for example, Soothill and Walby, 1991), this article contributes to the existing literature and knowledge in this area by examining the coverage of a high-profile case, theorised to have more of an impact and pervasiveness in the lives of women who have experienced sexual violence, and by using specific guidelines available to journalists for reporting on violence against women.

Writing Rape, Troping History: Story, Plot, and Ethical Reading in Julia Franck's Die Mittagsfrau (2007)

This article examines the rhetorical function of sexual violence in Julia Franck's novel Die Mittagsfrau (2007), which unflinchingly relates the degradations to which the protagonist is subjected from infancy: sexual exploitation by her sister, psychological abuse at the hands of her mother, sexual harassment by a family friend, abuse by her eventual husband, marginalization as a “Mischling” in the Third Reich, and gang rape by Soviet soldiers. Franck extensively and graphically describes individual episodes of sexual harassment within chapters that span several years. This narrative excess warrants a “hysterical reading,” so to speak: an approach that magnifies textual details in order to demonstrate the link between representations of sexual violence and wider patterns of structural and symbolic violence. The gaps and tensions that emerge as the narrative shifts between the mimetic and tropological levels provide the basis for a broader exploration of the ethics of reading and the ethics of representing sexual violence more generally.

Women, torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

ABSTRACTIn the years since the fall of the civil–military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, considerable attention has been paid to first-person testimonies of human rights victims. A great number of these have been by women who narrated sexual political violence. However, while there has been work done on the relation between terror, trauma, and spectacle in postdictatorial television shows, rarely has this also included a gendered perspective. In this article we seek to open this area of discussion by evaluating the manner in which women’s televised testimonies of political sexual violence have been constructed on late night talk shows in Chile, using recent history and memory theory, as well as feminist theory on the representation of sexual violence in mass media.

‘For God’s sake, cover yourself’: sexual violence, disrupted histories, and the gendered politics of patriotism in Watchmen

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the representation of sexual violence in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. The comic book was published between 1986 and 1987 by DC Comics – and later collected into one volume in 1987 – and is set in an alternative reality, conceptually converging with points in history spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. Watchmen hinges, on a number of levels, on the (alleged) rape of Silk Spectre by the Comedian in the early 1940s, an event shown as a flashback within the narrative. Although forming a short part of the comic book, and taking up a minimal number of frames, the episode of sexual violence is proposed in Watchmen as the conceptual fulcrum on which much of the narrative pivots, as well as the conceptual dynamics between the vigilante characters and their identification with the ‘United States’ as an entity. In my analysis, I connect sexual violence to notions of disrupted memory, collective historical narrative, (un)patriotism, and the ‘nation’ as a gendered entity. Ultimately, this paper uncovers how Watchmen exposes the well-known dichotomous metaphor of ‘women/nation’ as conflicted and warped. The politics of nationalism and patriotism are conflated with the aesthetics of gender representation, and the violated body as a contested social, cultural, and historical space.

"Who are you doing this for?" Narrating Sexual Violence in Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue

"Who are you doing this for?" Narrating Sexual Violence in Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue Robyn Dennison (bio) Rape Rhetoric: Victims and Survivors In her 1975 book Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller writes, "Women are trained to be rape victims…To talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman's special victim status. We hear the whispers when we are children: girls get raped" (309; italics in original). Brownmiller, along with other feminist anti-rape critics of the 1970s, played an important role in exposing the high incidence of sexual violence against women in Western societies, which until then had been drastically under-recognized (Gavey 59). These feminist critics challenged victim-blaming rhetoric—which suggested that women subjected to sexual violence somehow deserved or invited the attack—and used the "language of victimization" to emphasize instead the powerlessness of victims and to acknowledge the harm that sexual violence inflicts on one's life and identity (59). While this move was an attempt to ensure that the responsibility for sexual violence lay solely on the shoulders of perpetrators, it had the unintended effect of preemptively constituting all women as victims (Mardorossian 752).1 As victim rhetoric became ubiquitous in discussions of sexual violence, the notion of victimhood became increasingly characterized by passivity, harm, and an inability to defend or assert oneself. Being labeled a victim denoted the compromising of one's identity and the infliction of irreparable damage, leaving one less of the person who s/he was before the rape or assault (Lamb, "Constructing" 109). This set of associations, in turn, led to a rejection in the 1990s of the term "victim" and its subsequent replacement with "survivor" in an effort to evoke agency and resistance as opposed to violation (119; see also Projansky 9). However, in her edited collection New Versions of Victims, psychologist Sharon Lamb argues in "Constructing the Victim" that this backlash against victim rhetoric denies the legitimacy of feelings of powerlessness, humiliation, and/or shame that sexual violence can cause. Rather than replacing the term "victim," [End Page 308] Lamb critiques the pathologizing of victims in social, psychological, and legal discourses, and how this practice reinforces the association of victimization with weakness, passivity, or hysteria (120). There is thus a tension between two opposing subject positions: the rape Victim versus the rape Survivor (Spry 27). The way in which Victims are pathologized and required to suffer long-lasting harm denies them agency (Lamb, "Constructing" 109), while a Survivor is required to have actively fought against the assault/s, regardless of the circumstances (119).2 Many texts that represent sexual violence against women reproduce this Victim/Survivor dichotomy, and dominant among these texts is the narrative of recovery, in which the Victim—through various acts of empowerment and disclosure—becomes a Survivor. While such narratives of healing may be uplifting, their prevalence in fiction about sexual violence invites critique. In this article I consider the representation of sexual violence in some contemporary Western adolescent novels, positing that many adhere to a Victim-to-Survivor narrative in which a damaged, powerless Victim must recuperate a sense of self through the healing journey of the narrative and emerge at its end an empowered Survivor, having resolved the harm inflicted upon her. While I discuss Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak (1999) and Louisa Luna's Brave New Girl (2001) as two examples of the Victim-to-Survivor narrative, my primary focus is on Australian author Kirsty Eagar's Raw Blue (2009) as a text that resists this trend. Specifically, I examine the use of first-person/present-tense (FPPT) narration and the relationship constructed between narrator and reader in this narrative style to demonstrate how Raw Blue challenges the Victim/Survivor dichotomy. While my argument is underpinned by narratological analysis of FPPT narration in Raw Blue, it is not FPPT alone that I suggest resists normative narrative tropes. Rather, I posit that Raw Blue's unique resistance to such tropes is embedded in its use of FPPT narration. My approach, I hope, makes a case for further narratological analysis in adolescent literary scholarship, without suggesting that we uncouple narrative style from content and its attendant...

Assault on the small screen: representations of sexual violence on prime-time television dramas

Assault on the small screen: representations of sexual violence on prime-time television dramas

Rape and reconciliation: a comparison of Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water and Emma Ruby-Sachs’ The Water Man’s Daughter

To address the pressing issue of sexual violence against women in South Africa, and work toward a process of justice and cultural transformation, the implications of representations of sexual violence in post-Apartheid narratives must be considered. Karen Jayes’ For the Mercy of Water (2012), and Emma Ruby-Sachs’ The Water Man’s Daughter (2011) are two novels that center on the issue of water privatization in post-Apartheid South Africa while simultaneously depicting the trauma of male–female rape. Despite their similarities, however, the texts’ thematic concerns with rape and reconciliation work in very different ways. Employing Wendy Hesford’s concept of “rape scripts,” this paper argues that For the Mercy of Water, in questioning and rewriting prevailing patriarchal rape scripts, serves as a conscientious and responsible narrative that addresses the issue of rape while envisioning possibilities for social transformation, while The Water Man’s Daughter dangerously partakes in these scripts’ material and ideological reproductions.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (review)

Reviewed by: An Untamed State by Roxane Gay Régine Michelle Jean-Charles An Untamed State. By Roxane Gay. New York: Black Cat, 2014. ISBN 0802122515. 368 pp. $16. Roxane Gay’s first novel, An Untamed State, contains many of the typical themes found in contemporary literature by Haitian Americans living in the diaspora. She explores the myth of return, the fraught relationship between generations navigating the cultural shifts from homeland to hostland, cross-cultural marriage, and the gaping chasm between the rich and the poor in Haiti. The novel’s first sentence frames it within the fairytale genre, suggesting an attention to form that will be maintained throughout: “Once upon a time in a far-off land … I was kidnapped by a gang of fearless yet terrified young men with so much impossible hope beating inside their bodies it burned their very skin and strengthened their will right through their bones” (1). The fairy tale that is simultaneously elaborated and deconstructed is about Mireille Duval Jameson, whose supposedly perfect life is irrevocably altered after she is kidnapped by gunmen. Held for thirteen days, she is beaten, tortured, and repeatedly raped. Despite the many other themes present throughout, the novel functions primarily as a rape narrative that describes Mireille’s captivity and her stumbling attempts to put her life back together in the aftermath. In my work on representations of sexual violence, I have argued for analyzing the rape victim/survivor narrative as a genre unto itself that privileges the perspective of the survivor and refuses to use rape as a symbol for something else.1 These narratives often do little to render the violence of rape manageable for the reader. They devote careful attention to the intricacies of rape trauma syndrome—what the survivor experiences before, during, and after the rape. Ultimately these narratives refuse to simplify the healing process (which is never straightforward and almost always incomplete) for the victim/survivor of rape. An Untamed State deploys many of these strategies. As an example of the brutal force of rape that is unrelenting, Gay’s novel exemplifies the expository act of writing sexual violence. Most notably, the first two hundred pages present the details of the kidnapping. The violence is described in unremitting detail that makes the reader want to turn away while also causing us to be drawn more deeply into the atmosphere of the novel. The kidnapping that sets the plot into motion occurs on an idyllic day in Port-au-Prince just as Mireille, her American husband Michael, and their infant son exit the high gates of the lavish Duval family home en route to the beach. Mireille is snatched from the car and brought to an [End Page 203] obscure location where she is held for thirteen days. This length of time is due to the fact that her father refuses to pay the $1,000,000 ransom, fearful that the kidnappers will come back for more after he pays. The first part of the novel seems to mirror the days of captivity, gang rape, physical violence, and torture that Mireille is forced to endure; the scenes of violence describing Mireille’s ordeal are graphically relayed. Mireille is raped, gang-raped, burned, and beaten. She attempts to escape and is dragged back. An Untamed State is about the actual kidnapping itself, but even more about its aftermath: Mireille’s physical, psychological, and emotional brokenness (which she refers to as her death), the irreparable damage done to her relationship with her parents, her inability to return to the life she had before, and the calamitous results in her marriage. She suffers from telltale signs of rape trauma syndrome in the form of triggers, intense feelings of shame, disassociation, and sexual “acting out.” We are taken through the different phases of her emotional, physical, and mental states. At first Mireille fights for her life, repeating her father’s mantra to herself: “There is nothing I cannot get through if I try hard enough” (34). She threatens her captors: “My husband is going to kill you. He is going to tear you apart with his bare hands” (39–40). She fights. “I fought him and he laughed...

Making an Impact?: Feminist Pedagogy and Rape Culture on University Campuses

Shortly before St Patrick's Day 2012, an incident occurred in Guelph that made me question the effectiveness, value, and impact of our teaching about sexual violence. It was yet another example of the endemic problem of rape culture being perpetuated on university campuses, a problem that is acute across the country from St Mary's and UBC, where frosh week pro-rape chants were defended as being traditional to the University of Ottawa, where the student union president Anne-Marie Roy was the subject of sexually assaultive email exchange among her colleagues. Indeed, the recent allegations against Jian Ghomeshi, who gained a Women's Studies minor at York University in the early 1990s, all too clearly raise the spectre that liberatory, feminist pedagogy encourages ventriloquism as often as transformation. Pedagogy on the representation of sexual violence is inherently a tightrope walk. On the one hand, one has to approach the topic without reinforcing the patriarchal systems that make rape possible, such as fear, and, on the other hand, one has to avoid eliding the lived experience of a large portion of our student population. Fear doesn't allow students to bear witness to the fact that the way that we see rape working in a given text is largely influenced by our own culture's expectations and beliefs regarding this particular gender relation, and, at the same time, ignoring the anxieties that attend the topic risks trivializing the experience of students who have been assaulted. I teach Shakespeare and my research focus is the representation of the rapist on the Renaissance London stage, so I inevitably end up talking in my classes about the myriad ways in which expectations of sexual entitlement within a patriarchal culture work to dehumanize the individual, constructing gender in a toxic manner that is predicated upon violence. It is not just that Jonson, Middleton, and Shakespeare are dead voices, speaking a dead language, about a dead culture, but that the things they said can be used both to reinforce rape culture and to dismantle it today. That is, studying these authors and the representations of sexual violence within their works gives students the opportunity to see how sexism in that literature can be used to perpetuate a system where masculine sexual violence is sometimes overlooked, sometimes condoned, but always present. These texts can be read as both resistive of and complicit in hegemonic patriarchy, and if we want to upset the patriarchy we have to recognize how in our own critical readings we have the power to either problematize or reinforce the type of predatory masculinity we find on the Renaissance stage. These classes are always the most emotionally draining for everyone involved. I cite my own position as one who benefits from, yet works to subvert, patriarchal privilege as a way to encourage students to interrogate their own relationship to patriarchal violence. The recognition of privilege, trauma, and the mechanics of gender-based violence can be transformative for certain students, who--at least within the confines of the academic setting--come to acknowledge themselves as participants in the systematic dehumanization of others and themselves. However, in order to create a classroom that is genuinely liberatory, we must speak to those who do not recognize that the system of gender relations to which they subscribe perpetuates a culture of violence and hatred. Behind the gowns of the academy, students, faculty, and administration can try to hide their sexist biases, yet when rape culture erupts in the real world as it were, we really have to question what kind of effect--if any--such liberatory pedagogy has. Is it possible that the same student who insists in an essay that the rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus was horrific would then go out and sing a song about raping and mutilating a woman for sheer erotic pleasure? Well, maybe. The story goes like this . …