Susan Brownmiller Research Articles

Sex, Power, and Violence: What Do the Rape Incidents in Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will Actually Show?

Susan Brownmiller's groundbreaking book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, brought much-needed attention to a tremendously understudied crime and exposed many dangerous misconceptions. However, it also inspired a massive debate about whether sexual violence is primarily driven by desires for sex or power, and that argument persists today. For this study, we treated the book's incidents ( N = 245) as data, instead of as a narrative, and systematically analyzed them. Overall, our findings suggest many perpetrators identified by Brownmiller may have been sexually frustrated, and multiple aspects of their behavior indicate they were seeking sexual relief. At the same time, many also seemed to be seeking increased sexual power to fulfill their desires, and a small subset may have specifically sought revenge against women. Together, these results suggest a potential middle ground exists amidst a polarized debate between scholars with adversarial perspectives.

A call for psycho-affective change: Fanon, feminism, and white negrophobic femininity

Frantz Fanon’s analysis of white negrophobic women’s masochistic sexuality and sexual fantasies in Black Skin, White Masks, is, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, among his most contentious work for feminists. Susan Brownmiller, in her 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, charges Fanon not only with hating women but also with being personally confused and anguished, on account of this portion of the text. In this essay, I examine Fanon’s approach to theorizing white female negrophobia in light of his sociogenic project and the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition with which he was working; I also take a close look at his potentially most problematic remarks, from a feminist angle. I argue against Brownmiller's interpretation of Fanon as condoning rape or expressing personal attitudes through these lines, maintaining instead that he is ultimately calling for psycho-affective change.

“The Goddess is Alive. Magic is Afoot.”

This article analyzes the influence of radical and cultural feminist ideas on the writings produced by Zsuzsanna Emese Mokcsay (b. 1940), a seminal Pagan activist who spearheaded the development of the Dianic Witchcraft tradition during the 1970s and 1980s. An examination of Budapest's writings reveals the ideological background of Dianic Wicca, found in the specific aspects in the works of radical and cultural feminist thinkers such Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, Robin Morgan, Susan Griffin, and Susan Brownmiller, which suited Budapest's lesbian-separatists leanings. The article thus sheds light on the politics of Goddess Spirituality during its formative years that have made modern Paganism what it is today. This is particularly important in light of the challenges to Dianic Wicca (and Goddess Spirituality in general) in recent decades, as third-wave feminism and transgender rights highlight a generational gap between veteran and younger Dianic women.

Consent to Sex: The Limits of Feminist Discourse and the Need for More Diverse Input

This essay invites the reader to revisit feminist writings that have influenced conceptions of consent to heterosexual sex. A bold declaration by feminist scholar Joan C. William can help to center the debate: “[M]y goal is not to deliver the truth but to inspire social change.” After considering the “heartbalm” regime-- an early and largely failed effort at sex regulation—the essay examines some famous assertions of women’s sexual vulnerability issued to justify new, heavy regulation: the fundamentality of rape (Susan Brownmiller), “dominance feminism” (Catharine MacKinnon), and related claims of women’s lack of agency (Robin West). These are set against rejoinders that whatever their power deficits in other areas, women are more powerful in the sexual realm than portrayed by the critics, and that real consent is both possible and more common than claimed. This will bring us to an evaluation of affirmative consent as a tool for determining consent. The essay goes on to emphasize the absence of reliable data on assault. While not denying the importance of confronting sexual assault on campus and elsewhere, this discussion notes the huge gap between the 1 in 5 sexual assault statistic famously cited by President Obama and the percentages recorded in the so-called university Clery reports. The author argues that the uncertainty of all these data, which bear heavily on notions of consent, militates against stereotyping college men as brutes, an argument buttressed by the report of four Harvard women law professors detailing what they consider shockingly unfair treatment of men in campus assault investigations. The final part of my critique focuses on the #MeToo-related demand (Deborah Tuerkheimer) that women should simply be believed in he said/she said cases. Analogizing rape to robbery—with no mention of their fundamental difference or concern about due process rights of men—this demand is premised on the idea that no one questions the actual occurrence of a claimed robbery. Drawing on such lines of argument, at least one highly placed academic asserts that defendants should not be believed because they, unlike their accusers, have a motive for concealing the truth. Evidence against such blanket belief from the trenches is provided by an experienced sexual assault investigator and former law school dean (Joan Howarth), who underscores the significant sexual ambivalence and confusion she found in many women complainants. The uncertainties exposed here argue strongly for carefully individualized treatment of consent, as opposed to mass social generalizations, in college sexual assault disputes. In closing, the author laments a characteristic that turns up in much feminist consent discourse: a tone of hostility and self-righteousness that allows virtually no room for male disagreement. The author suggests that this tone and this male absence tend to stunt and distort the understanding of campus sexual dynamics in legal academic scholarship.

Online Interpersonal Victimization as a Mechanism of Social Control of Women: An Empirical Examination.

Cyber space is an ever-expanding mode of perpetrating sexualized violence toward women. This article empirically examines the applicability of Susan Brownmiller's adaptation of the theory of social control to online interpersonal victimization (OIV) against women. Multiple regression analysis identified predictors of behaviors indicative of social control among a Canadian sample. Findings suggest that the theory of social control, which has been applied to violence against women in physical space, is applicable to OIV. This study also provides insights into the separate and compound effects of physical space and cyber space victimizations on women and identifies implications for improving methods and building theories for addressing violence against women in cyber space.

A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault

464 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse A Distorting Mirror: Educational Trajectory After College Sexual Assault This article focuses on the broad and specific impacts of college sexual assault on student-survivors’ academic performance, academic trajectory, and their sense of self in relation to the university community. We frame this study with, and relate our findings to, the historic and theoretical literatures that provide the context for this essay, including the large and burgeoning literature on the sexual assault of women college students and recent studies analyzing the role of fraternities in sexual assault, students’ fears and perceptions about college assault, bystander intervention training, and survivors’ grade-point averages after assault.1 Our study also builds on the history of feminist resistance to rape, feminist writings about rape, and campus activism against rape, with the 1. Cortney Franklin, Leana Allen Bouffard, and Travis C. Pratt, “Sexual Assault on the College Campus: Fraternity Affiliation, Male Peer Support, and Low Self-Control,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 39, no. 11 (2012): 1457– 80; Christine A. Gidycz, John R. McNamara, and Katie M. Edwards, “Women ’s Risk Perception and Sexual Victimization: A Review of the Literature,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 11, no. 5 (2006): 441–56; Jennifer Katz and Jessica Moore, “Bystander Education Training for Campus Sexual Assault Prevention: An Initial Meta-Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 6 (2013): 1054–67; Douglas W. Pryor and Marion R. Hughes, “Fear of Rape among College Women: A Social Psychological Analysis,” Violence and Victims 28, no. 3 (2013): 443–65; Carol E. Jordan, Jessica L. Combs, and Gregory T. Smith, “An Exploration of Sexual Victimization and Academic Performance among College Women,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 15, no. 3 (2014): 191–200. Claire Raymond and Sarah Corse 465 goal of shedding light on one aspect of the problem. Groundbreaking (and in some cases controversial) works analyzing the cultures of rape, such as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and Peggy Sanday’s “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape” (in which Sanday creates the concept of the rape-producing culture—a concept that is central to our argument in this essay), found immediate reception with feminist activists of the 1970s and early 1980s.2 Mary Koss’s work regarding the scope of rape in college settings is also foundational to our study of campus rape.3 Susan Estrich, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminist theorists in the mid-1980s developed critical apparatuses to shift the understanding of rape, providing a feminist framework wherein rape is interpreted as violence committed against a woman—in opposition to the patriarchal argument that rape is caused by a woman’s actions or is the product of her distortion of events after the fact.4 Angela Davis and bell hooks were deeply influential in framing understandings of the racial and racist aspects of feminist discussions of rape, while legal scholar Sarah Deer has more recently broadened understandings of the racialized discourse of rape, and Lisa Wade has written on twenty-first century hookup culture and the ways that this social landscape promulgates rates of maleon -female rape that are significantly higher on college campuses than in the general population.5 2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4 (1981): 5–27; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). 3. Mary P. Koss, Christine A. Gidycz, and Nadine Wisniewski, “The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 55, no. 2 (1987): 162–70. 4. Susan Estrich, Real Rape: How the Legal System Victimizes Women Who Say No (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Duncan Chappell, Robley Geis, and Gilbert Geis, eds., Forcible Rape: The Crime, the Victim and the Offender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 5. Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist,” in her Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 172–201; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End...

"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...

It Is Not Enough to Speak: Toward a Coalitional Consciousness in the Young Adult Rape Novel

It Is Not Enough to Speak:Toward a Coalitional Consciousness in the Young Adult Rape Novel Angela E. Hubler (bio) “Let me tell you about it” (198). This line, in which Melinda, the protagonist of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999), responds to the observation of her aptly named art teacher, Mr. Freeman, that she has “been through a lot,” concludes the novel and its narrative trajectory, tracing Melinda’s recovery from the trauma of rape as a movement from passive silence to active speech (198). In breaking her silence about the rape, Melinda, and thus the novel, utilizes what Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray identify as “the principal tactic adopted by the survivors’ movement” (261). This enormously popular novel must then be credited with propagating a feminist perspective on rape that young readers might not otherwise access. However, Alcoff and Gray’s warning that “survivor discourse has paradoxically appeared to have empowering effects even while it has in some cases unwittingly facilitated the recuperation of dominant discourses” applies not only to Speak but also to the majority of young adult rape novels (263).1 Survivor speech, Alcoff and Gray argue, is liable to be “co-opted” (261) when it employs a confessional mode that focuses on the “survivor’s ‘inner’ self and feelings … rather than … a discussion of links to the ‘exterior’ and ways to transform it” (280).2 It is clear that Anderson and the authors of other young adult rape novels are motivated by the feminist insistence that women tell the truth about their lives by making public tabooed issues like sexual assault. However, the feminist effort to politicize what has historically been understood as private can be undermined by formal features of the novels. While Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the novel is particularly effective in representing competing perspectives on social reality, the first-person narration utilized by Speak and by many other young adult rape novels frequently results in a univocal, individual, and psychological focus that aligns, ironically, with postfeminist rejections of feminism in favor of neoliberal individualism (263). Tanya Serisier traces the “epistemological primacy” of personal stories of rape in feminist discourse to Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, which Serisier says is commonly understood as the “founding text of feminist anti-rape theory” (89, 88). Serisier identifies a problem with this theory that is [End Page 114] also pertinent to the YA rape novel: the feminist storytelling that has emerged “has been complicit in erasing crucial differences around race, class, and sexuality, and has acted to prevent other stories from being told” (89). This essay seeks out those other stories, which have—at least to some extent—been told, but accorded lesser critical attention. A number of young adult rape novels depict sexual violence in more adequate and complex ways, including representations of the significance of difference, and avoid the co-option that Alcoff and Gray identify. In Sandra Scoppetone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike (1978), Alice Childress’s Those Other People (1989), and Erika Tamar’s Fair Game (1993), multiple firstperson narrators offer a more complete perspective on social reality than, for example, Melinda does. Narrators who are black, poor, gay, or intellectually disabled articulate the experiences and insights of disadvantaged social groups and offer a privileged epistemological perspective on social reality, representing the ways in which gender interacts with other social institutions to structure violence. Other narrators articulate the hegemonic perspectives on gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality that normalize violence. As Sarah Day argues, “multivoiced narration … highlights questions of power by constructing complex networks of character relationships that demonstrate the challenges that adolescents face while navigating various institutional and social hierarchies” (66). In doing so, these novels both represent competing understanding of rape and offer a systemic analysis of the social conditions that underlie gender-based oppression, including rape. In addition to mapping the structural conditions leading to rape, Those Other People and Jacqueline Woodson’s I Hadn’t Meant to Tell you This (1994), two of the few novels that highlight the significance of race, suggest the kind of interracial coalitions that must be formed to end violence against women and girls. Speak Elaine O’Quinn’s analysis of...

Book Review: The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, by Lynn Povich

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace. Lynn Povich. New York: Public Affairs, 2012. 249 pp. $25.99 hbk.It was June 1965, and new Vassar graduate Lynn Povich was packing her bags for Paris. She had landed a job in Newsweek's Paris bureau when bureau chief Joel Blocker's secretary suddenly quit. Fortunately, the modern European history major had spent the evenings of her last semester learning shorthand at a community college. As Povich writes in The Good Girls Revolt, Thank God for Stenoscript.The author's narrative takes readers from that first job-a mix of secretary, photo researcher, occasional reporter, and telex operator-to 1975 when she became the newsmagazine's first woman senior editor. It is a coming-of-age story of how a group of good not raised to rock the system got so angry that they did-and in so doing, they dragged the male-dominated Newsweek into an era when sexual discrimi- nation in the workplace was illegal.Newsweek's girls on March 16, 1970, became the first women in the media to sue for discrimination. The case was also the first female class action suit, and the group's lawyer, the young activist Eleanor Holmes Norton, thought their complaints clearly fit under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Two months later, ninety-six women at Time Inc. filed a sex discrimination complaint against Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. In the next few years, women sued their employers at Reader's Digest, the Washington Post, and Associated Press, among others.But in the mid-sixties, women at Newsweek were not breaking down barriers; they were sorting the mail. The newsmagazine hired only girls, as they were known, with college degrees to deliver the mail, and their diplomas came from places like Brown, Smith, and Wellesley. The next job up, clippers, was also female-only. Clippers, wearing smocks to protect their dresses from ink stains, tore out articles and distrib- uted them to various editorial departments.If they worked hard, they moved up a rung to the job of researcher, whose primary task was fact-checking. From then on, promotions to reporting and writing positions were almost nonexistent. The top echelon of editors, called the Wallendas, remained male-only until Povich joined their ranks. Aspiring writers Ellen Goodman, Nora Ephron, Susan Brownmiller, and Jane Bryant Quinn started at Newsweek in the sixties but left quickly when they realized they had reached a dead end.Despite the lack of job advancement, Newsweek of the sixties was a fun, even wild, place to work, Povich writes. …

Sandra Macpherson Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel FormHarm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form. Sandra Macpherson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. xi+237.

<i>Sandra Macpherson</i> Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form<i>Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form</i>. Sandra Macpherson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pp. xi+237.

Rape and Rape Mythology in the Plays of Sarah Kane

Few contemporary plays have created greater furor than Sarah Kane's Blasted, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in January 1995. (1) The violence was pervasive, the structure seemingly incoherent, the purpose elusive. Critics were almost uniformly hostile. (2) It was, according to one, disgusting feast of filth, while another concluded that not theatre critic that's required, it's psychiatrist. (3) They were barely more enamored of later plays such as Phaedra's Love and Cleansed. Criticism has tended to soften over time. (4) Indeed, the greater danger today, decade after her tragic early death, is that of critical hagiography, with Kane lauded as one of the most original of breed of dynamic in-yer-face or new brutalist dramatists who rose to prominence during the 1990s. (5) One of the characteristics of this genre of drama was peculiarly intense embrace of sex and violence. (6) Violence certainly emerged as defining feature of Kane's writing. (7) And when Kane sought to intensify the violence of her plays she turned repeatedly to rape. (8) The purpose of this essay is to explore Kane's presentation of within the context of the ongoing feminist debate regarding sexual violence and its attendant As we shall see this presentation creates as many tensions as it does affinities. The first part of this essay will revisit rape, and more particularly the enduring force of rape myths. The second will then consider Kane on rape: its presentation in her plays and its consideration in her subsequent interviews. It has been said that Blasted is play of strategic incoherences. (9) The final part of this essay will contemplate Kane and in the context of this apparently perplexing supposition. It will be necessarily interdisciplinary exercise, enjoining growing body of law and literature scholarship which makes the case for the use of literary texts in legal study. Such strategy is commonly recommended for variety of reasons: to impress the linguistic and rhetorical nature of law; to emphasize the historicity of legal text; to nurture more nuanced appreciation of poethicar dimension of law; and above all, perhaps, to stress the illustrative value of the literary text as an informing educative aid. (10) It is to this latter purpose that this essay is primarily written. I. Rape and Myth The crime of represents something of touchstone in feminist legal and political theory. According to Robin Morgan, is the perfected act of male sexuality in patriarchal culture, the ultimate metaphor for domination, violence, subjugation, and possession. (11) Ann Cahill writes in similar vein. Rape is a crime that epitomizes women's oppressed status, one of indisputable violence and loathing. (12) For much of the 1970s and 1980s it was possible to distinguish two alternative and hugely influential positions. The first, associated commonly with Susan Brownmiller, argued that is less about sex, and more about simple violence committed by men against women, a brief expression of physical power, conscious process of intimidation, blunt, ugly sexual invasion with possible lasting effects on all women. (13) The second, favored by many critical legal feminists, followed Catharine MacKinnon in arguing, to the contrary, that is logical extension of heterosexuality. (14) Adopting position that owed much to the influence of Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon argued in her Toward Feminist Theory of the State that the wrong of has proved so difficult to define because the unquestionable starting point has been that is defined as distinct from intercourse, while for women it is difficult to distinguish the two under conditions of male dominance. (15) Accordingly, she famously concluded, If sexuality is central to women's definition and forced sex is central to sexuality, is indigenous, not exceptional, to women's social condition. …

Refusing to be a Man?

As the majority perpetrators of sexual violence, it is plausible to see men as responsible for war rape not only as individuals, but also as collective bystanders, facilitators and beneficiaries. Following recent criticisms of individual legal and moral responsibility for rape as a war crime in international law, this article examines how we might think of war rape as a collective action in moral and explanatory terms. First, it assesses existing moral arguments for the responsibility of men in groups for rape, primarily with reference to the work of Claudia Card, Larry May and Robert Strikwerda. Critiquing elements of these arguments, it explores the difficulties in talking about `men' as a coherent group and in discussing `collectives' themselves. Second, the article draws out the connection between accounts of moral responsibility and accounts of causal responsibility. Drawing on critiques of collective responsibility and the long-standing agency/structure problem, it argues that causal accounts focusing on structure pose a serious challenge to ideas of both individual and collective moral responsibility. The complexities of the relationship between moral and causal claims are illustrated through a discussion of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon's influential perspectives on rape. The seeming paradox of responsibility is emphasised as a problem to be addressed by gender and feminist perspectives that seek to pursue both ethical and explanatory inquiry into the workings of masculinity and the political means for undoing gendered wrongs.

Feminism

Feminism

“Fresh” Thoughts on Studying Sexual Assault

In the 1960s and 1970s, feminists used to talk about having a “click” moment when they realized that some personal experience had political implications—thus the slogan, “The personal is political.” When I started graduate school in the late 1970s, I was drawn to studying sexual assault. I had been a declared feminist since high school as the Women’s Movement even reached the coal region of eastern Pennsylvania! Attending college in New York City, with its myriad opportunities for more exposure to what feminists were up to, made me increasingly aware that violence against women was a greater problem than had been acknowledged up to that point. In light of all the studies that have been conducted since, it is amazing to think how little systematic research existed back then. Under my advisor’s guidance, I started to read everything I could find, a lot of which consisted of Freudian treatises on women’s desire to be raped. But what had the greatest impact on me (besides Susan Brownmiller’s, 1976, classic, Against Our Will) were books containing personal testimonials of women’s rape experiences. In the middle of reading one of these, I had my own “click” moment. Quite suddenly and startlingly, I found myself reliving an encounter from my early teenage years. A boy whom I knew quite well, having attended elementary school with him, offered to walk me home from a dance one summer night. Being well socialized into fearing strangers jumping out of bushes, I gladly went along, especially since said boy was a football player who could undoubtedly protect me from any nasty bush-hiding monsters. Said boy had also been drinking with friends before the dance. At this point I hardly need to finish the story, except for one detail. My mother had briefly mentioned at one point that I should always carry a hat pin with me in case some boy ever got “fresh.” Frankly, I was not really sure what that meant, but I learned pretty quickly that night that “fresh” could mean “attempted rape,” and said boy learned what kind of damage a hat pin could do. Having that “aha” experience in graduate school set the stage for a lot of the research I have undertaken since then, particularly related to alcohol and sexual assault and women’s sexual assault resistance. In this article, I will discuss how my own work in these areas developed with reference to two highly cited papers published in Psychology of Women Quarterly (Norris & Cubbins, 1992; Norris, Nurius, & Dimeff, 1996) as well as my other research, how my work fits into the general body of current research on these topics, and where we might go from here. Please find the original articles at http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/16/2/179 and http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/20/1/123. In particular, I would like to address three dilemmas that feminist researchers face in addressing these topics. These dilemmas focus on three areas: (a) what my colleagues and I termed the “cognitive tightrope” (Norris et al., 1996), (b) contradictory messages that women receive about drinking, and (c) how to avoid victim blaming but still empower women to assertively resist sexual assault.

“This is a most disgusting case”: Imperial Policy, Class and Gender in the “Rangoon Outrage” of 1899

“This is a most disgusting case”: Imperial Policy, Class and Gender in the “Rangoon Outrage” of 1899 Jeremy Neill Introduction On an otherwise unremarkable Easter Sunday, 1899, a middle-aged Burmese woman named Ma Gun was returning from prayer at the Shwedagon Pagoda, on the grounds of the British Army Cantonment in Rangoon. In the cantonment, the newly arrived West Kent Regiment was in quarantine due to a smallpox outbreak in Rangoon. Most of the regiment was finishing their midday meal when a disturbance broke out near “C” company’s barracks, on a wooded hill overlooking one of the main roads leading to the pagoda. Details of what happened were disputed, but facts soon emerged alleging that a number of soldiers from the Regiment waylaid Ma Gun near their barracks and sexually assaulted her in a case that came to be known as the “Rangoon Outrage” in the press and by the British government. This case, and the military’s apparent attempt to cover up what happened, demonstrates that the imperial project was far from monolithic, and that different elements of the British Empire’s mechanisms of control frequently worked at cross-purposes. The masculine code of the soldiers involved trumped the legal and moral structures designed to control their behavior and undermined attempts to rationalize the benefits of colonial rule. Feminist historians describe rape as violence against women for the purpose of social control, and as a way for men to assert their masculine identity. Susan Brownmiller goes as far as to state “From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, 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.”2 Studies of nineteenth century England show endemic sexual violence among the working classes, and that the legal system was increasingly trying to control working class violence, including expanding definitions of rape and more actively prosecuting it.3 The example of the Rangoon Outrage raises a number of questions. To what extent did attitudes in far-flung posts of the Empire reflect legal thinking in the metropole? What level of disconnect was there between working class ideas of sexual access and the legal culture that British soldiers in Rangoon found themselves in at the end of the Victorian era? Ronald Hyam has made the argument that Empire was a sexual playground for the British bourgeoisie, but did this apply to the working classes who made up the common soldiery?4 Did restrictions on prostitution, part of the late Victorian moral project that had a large impact on the military, encourage violence against women? If Empire was a fundamentally masculine project, and rape was a means of establishing male dominance, why was the Raj so concerned with prosecuting this case and punishing those responsible? The answers appear to lie in bourgeois concepts of proper behavior that extended from the slums of industrial cities to far-flung imperial posts. In this case even the bourgeois officers, the “gentlemen” who were supposed to control the working class, seemed actively to protect the soldiers involved in a heinous crime. Colonial masculinity was not monolithic, and this case shows that the masculine code of the military could cross class lines. Shani D’Cruze argues that the Victorian attitude was one less concerned with the rights of women and more concerned with policing public violence: [S]exual aggression in men was “normal, healthy and inevitable” and constituted serious criminal behavior only when it violated another man’s rights of sexual access, or violated class hierarchies or involved sufficient physical injury to make the assault provable regardless of the sexual dimension involved.5 Where does this case fit? In the imperial context, another element is present, the façade of control that the British needed to project to maintain colonial order, a boundary that the soldiers’ behavior in this case clearly violated. After 1860 the Crown engaged in a systematic attempt to bring India more into line with principles of British jurisprudence, which laid the grounds for conflict in a more complex environment that added race to the legal mixture.6 Did the law apply...

Misplaced Bodies: &lt;span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;"&gt;Probing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s&lt;/span&gt; The Body Beautiful

Misplaced BodiesProbing Racial and Gender Signifiers in Ngozi Onwurah’s The Body Beautiful Diana Adesola Mafe (bio) Exalted by poets, painters and sculptors, the female body, often reduced to its isolated parts, has been mankind’s most popular subject for adoration and myth, and also for judgment, ridicule, esthetic alteration and violent abuse. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity1 In her seminal text Femininity, Susan Brownmiller identifies what can simply be termed the mythic proportions of the female body. Idealized, worshiped, ravaged, and reviled—the female body is forever being measured (usually against the unattainable paradigms of a male imagination) and found lacking. The myth of the female body’s inadequacy is crucial to my discussion of Nigerian British director Ngozi Onwurah’s 1991 film, The Body Beautiful. In the spirit of Brownmiller’s claim that “biological femaleness is not enough. Femininity always demands more,”2 I wish to posit Onwurah’s film as a seldom discussed yet highly subversive text where cinematic representations of the (lacking) female body and the racialized performance of femininity are concerned. Neither a documentary nor a fictional film, The Body Beautiful operates as a memoir, merging the memories and imaginations of both the director and her mother to create a twenty-three-minute film of their lives. Onwurah, played by actress Sian Martin, appears in the film as a confident, attractive, and sexual young woman of mixed race. Her mother Madge (who plays herself) is a visibly scarred older white woman who has undergone a mastectomy. The dissimilar female bodies of mother and daughter are constantly juxtaposed, reminding viewers that “how one looks is the chief physical weapon in female-against-female competition.”3 And, bearing out the epigraph of this paper, the young Ngozi, a fashion model, seemingly epitomizes the role of the female body as “subject for adoration” while Madge remains [End Page 37] subject to “judgment, ridicule, [and] esthetic alteration.” But Onwurah, as director, points to the commonality of these raced and gendered bodies, both of which are subject to myths of inadequacy despite their differences. Notably, race cannot be extricated from this discussion of the female body and its idealization. Even the beautiful young Ngozi is rendered lacking because her body is, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “almost . . . but not quite”4 the (white) Western feminine aesthetic. Ngozi’s modeling success thus hinges on her manipulation at the hands of a white male photographer, who urges her to fulfill the stereotypical role of the sexualized “black” woman as he clicks the camera, saying, “Give me sex. Give me passion.” For Madge, a survivor of breast cancer and a mastectomy, the “lack” is literal and symbolic. Although biologically female, she is consistently situated by social discourses (as represented in the film) outside the sphere of femininity. Indeed, I suggest that discursive practices are unable to accommodate either Madge, an aging, arthritic, breastless woman, or Ngozi, an attractive, young, mixed-race woman caught between the myths of white beauty and black sexuality, except through essentialized notions of gender and race. Although excluded from the sphere of “real” femininity, Madge is included in the category of majority white British society. Her visibly raced daughter, on the other hand, while coded as highly attractive and feminine, is very much excluded from that white world and read, in typically Manichean terms, as a black model.5 But despite these respective exclusions and inclusions in vexed categories of identity as a result of their visibly marked bodies, neither of these women is ever adequately “placed,” and therein lies the fallibility of identification, which, as Stuart Hall aptly states, is “never a proper fit.”6 Admittedly, existing scholarship on The Body Beautiful is quick to examine the feminist content and the significance of Madge’s mastectomy, but the pressing subject of Ngozi’s mixedness is either disregarded or conveniently (re)read as black culture. This reading is restrictive not only because “black culture” is inevitably difficult to define, but also because blackness is not pervasive in Onwurah’s film. When the camera shoots a profile of the adolescent Ngozi standing in her bedroom, the visible poster in the background features Jimmy Dean, not Shaft. Since Onwurah clearly...

Mulheres atletas: re-significações da corporalidade feminina

A participação esportiva das mulheres contribui para uma re-significação da corporalidade feminina? Lembrando da idéia de Susan Brownmiller, para quem a feminilidade representa, na sociedade moderna, uma "estética da limitação", e trabalhando com noções de gênero e corporalidade advindas particularmente da produção recente de Susan Bordo e Judith Butler, procuro identificar mudanças nas práticas e representações do corpo feminino que decorrem da atividade esportiva. Analiso depoimentos de atletas brasileiras profissionais, algumas praticantes de um esporte de elite (hipismo) e, outras, de um esporte mais popular (o vôlei). Incorporo também a análise de imagens culturais da atleta, como veiculadas nos meios de comunicação. Evidências de pesquisa de campo mostram que, se, por um lado, as atletas de fato participam da "desconstrução" de certos elementos da mencionada "estética da limitação", por outro, continuam em uma cultura na qual a atividade esportiva das mulheres pode 'comprometer a feminilidade' da atleta.

"He Said, She Said": Rape and Gender Discourse in Early Modern Russia

Does it matter who is speaking when rape is reported or described? Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver argue that it "may be all that matters. Whether in the courts or the media, whether in art or criticism, who gets to tell the story and whose story counts as 'truth' determine the definition of what rape is." 1 Applying social science strategies to modern societies, Colleen Ward has found evidence to confirm that the gender of the reporter is crucial to identifying and punishing rape. Survey data disclosed that, compared to women, "men are more accepting of rape myths, have less supportive attitudes toward rape victims, are more tolerant of rape, have less empathy toward victims, ... and are more blaming and denigrating of sexual assault victims." 2 Echoing an argument made most powerfully by Susan Brownmiller, Ward connected the gender-differentiated understanding of rape to political and social cultural constructions.

Bryony L. Hoskins in Conversation with Susan Brownmiller

Bryony L. Hoskins in Conversation with Susan Brownmiller

Pornographic Manhood and The Scarlet Letter

In Invention of Pornography Lynn Hunt describes the genre as a social creation that is defined collaboratively by those who produce it and those who try stamp it out. Lists of forbidden titles in pre-revolutionary France form a canon, in which erotic books--like Therese Philosophe--are mingled together with a general run of works deemed treasonable and seditious: attacks on the ancien regime routinely accused clerics and great lords of sexual depravity, and some titles offered graphic descriptions of their lewd behavior. (1) A new form of illicit sexual writing emerged in the nineteenth century, however, in keeping with the emerging middle-class pre-occupation with the sacredness of the home: censors now denounced not for sedition, but for indecency. Producers of pornography, likewise actuated by impulses that arose from the new cultural arrangement, generated distinctive smut. Rather than jeering at the vices of decadent aristocrats, the reader of the new porn found himself inveigled into the mingled desire and guilt of sexual aggressors alarmingly like himself. (2) The term pornography entered the English language in 1850, and was quickly applied the new mode of sexual writing. (3) Twentieth-century definitions, like contemporary instances, often retain qualities first observed in the antebellum period. The standard adopted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 specifies material that appeals a prurient interest, implying an itch that gets worse as it is scratched. (4) Reading porn heightens the impulse read porn, so the definition indicates; and this experience carries forward the quality of guilty and obsessive reader involvement that became characteristic of the genre in the early nineteenth century. The emerging genre of pornography, I argue here, discloses and serves the sexual consternations of an emerging genre of manhood; I then turn Hawthorne's depiction of pornographic manhood in The Scarlet Letter. George Lippard's Quaker City provides a classic instance of the new porn. Lorrimer and Mary sit on a sofa in the Rose Chamber of Monk Hall, a gothic castle of lust in downtown Philadelphia. The two figures appear be perfect opposites: Lorrimer is an experienced sexual predator, Mary an innocent maiden. It was the purpose of this libertine, Lippard remarks, to dishonor the stainless girl, before he left her presence. Before day break she would be a polluted thing. (5) Mary in this scenario is evidently a woman, soon be raped by a man, namely Lorrimer. Yet Mary, I propose, is a man in disguise. Feminist discussions of pornography--from Susan Brownmiller Catherine McKinnon--have shown that sexual violence enforces male dominance; I'm pursuing a complementary line of investigation, looking for sources of sexual violence not only in the relations of men with women, but also in the relations of men with each other, and men with themselves. (6) In the feminist consciousness-raising of the mid-sixties women sought freedom from ingrained habits of subservience that had come feel natural and right. Women freed themselves from themselves: they set their personal stories in an historical context and learned understand spontaneous impulses as the outcome of social arrangements. women's movement has drawn inescapable and illuminating connections, wrote Adrienne Rich in 1971,between our sexual lives and our political institutions. (7) Growing boys likewise internalize models of manhood, whose contours present themselves as the shape of reality. Yet we are only beginning understand the political structures and cultural traditions hidden within masculine experience and challenge their logic. Fantasies of sexual violence victimize women, as does sexual violence itself; but this fact alone does not explain the grip of such fantasies upon the emotional lives of men, or the tacit permission law-abiding men chronically extend sexual offenders. …