Before the twenty-first century, there was little legal precedent for the prosecution of sexual violence as a war crime. Now, international tribunals have the potential to help make sense of ...political violence against both men and women; they have the power to uphold victims' claims and to convict the leaders and choreographers of systematic atrocity. However, by privileging certain accounts of violence over others, tribunals more often confirm outmoded gender norms, consigning women to permanent rape victim status. InSex and International Tribunals, Chiseche Salome Mibenge identifies the cultural assumptions behind the legal profession's claims to impartiality and universality. Focusing on the postwar tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Mibenge mines the transcripts of local and supranational criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions in order to identify and closely examine legal definitions of forced marriage, sexual enslavement, and the conscription of children that overlook the gendered experiences of armed conflict beyond the mass rape of women and girls. In many cases, a single rape conviction constitutes sufficient proof that gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into the prosecution of war crimes. Drawing on anthropological research in African conflicts, and feminist theory, Mibenge challenges legal narratives that reinscribe essentialized notions of gender in the conduct and resolution of violent conflict and uncovers the suppressed testimonies of men and women who are unwilling or unable to recite the legal scripts that would elevate them to the status of victimhood recognized by an international and humanitarian audience. At a moment when international intervention in conflicts is increasingly an option,Sex and International Tribunalspoints the way to a more nuanced and just response from courts.
Rape law reform has long been hailed as one of the most successful projects of second-wave feminism. Yet forty years after the anti-rape movement emerged, legal and medical institutions continue to ...resist implementing reforms intended to provide more just and compassionate legal and medical responses to victims of sexual violence. In Up Against a Wall, Rose Corrigan draws on interviews with over 150 local rape care advocates in communities across the United States to explore how and why mainstream systems continue to resist feminist reforms.In a series of richly detailed case studies, the book weaves together scholarship on law and social movements, feminist theory, policy formation and implementation, and criminal justice to show how the innovative legal strategies employed by anti-rape advocates actually undermined some of their central claims. But even as its more radical elements were thwarted, pieces of the rape law reform project were seized upon by conservative policy-makers and used to justify new initiatives that often prioritize the interests and rights of criminal justice actors or medical providers over the needs of victims.
The most-performed operas today were written at least a hundred years ago and carry some outdated and deeply problematic ideas. When performed uncritically, the misogyny, racism, and other ideologies ...present in many of these works clash with modern sensibilities. In Rape at the Opera, Margaret Cormier argues that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage. Where some directors explicitly respond to contemporary dialogues about sexual violence, others utilize sexual violence as a surefire way to titillate, to shock, and to generate press for a new production. Drawing on archival footage as well as attendance at live events, Cormier analyzes productions of canonic operas from German, Italian, and French traditions from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, including Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don Giovanni, La forza del destino, Un ballo in maschera, Salome, and Turandot. In doing so, Cormier highlights the dynamism of twenty-first-century opera performance practice with regard to sexual violence, establishes methods to evaluate representations of sexual violence on the opera stage, and reframes the primary responsibility of opera critics and creators as being not to opera composers and librettists but to the public.
In Akira Kurasawa's classic 1950 film Rashômon, three participants testify to a tribunal about a rape/murder. The rape itself has been elided into the crime of murder in most of the literature-a ...symptom of patriarchal frames, both Eastern and Western, and both within the film and in the scholarship. Two characters represent female archetypes: the woman Masako is-even in the same tellings-a lady and a seductress; the Medium who channels the testimony of the samurai-a crone figure, androgynous, powerful, and terrifying. Music is at its most manipulative in relationship to these two characters, functioning like narrative magic: a glamor that conceals beneath an appealing surface, or an incantation that summons a ghost. Fumio Hayasaka's score borrows heavily from an exoticist Franco-Russian depiction of Spanishness from the dance repertoire of the 1910-20s, emphasizing the startling physicality of the two women that may challenge the tale's misogyny. The unmarked male gaze is perhaps irreparably shattered to modern viewers, particularly in an era sensitized by scandals of powerful men abusing their power over women.
While sexual violence has been present and prevalent on campus for decades, the work of recent college student activists has made it an issue of major societal and institutional concern. This book ...makes an important contribution to and provides a foundation for better contextualizing and understanding sexual violence. Each chapter in this edited volume focuses on populations that are not often centered in the discourse of campus sexual violence and accounts for individuals' intersecting identities and how they interlock with larger systems of domination. Challenging dominant ideologies concerning assumptions of white women as the only victims-survivors, the racialization of aggressors, and the deleterious rape myths present in both research and practice, this book draws attention to the complexities of sexual violence on the college campus by highlighting populations that are frequently invisible in research, reporting, and practice. The book places sexual violence on campus in a historical context, centering the experiences of populations relegated to the margins, and highlighting the relationship between racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of domination to sexual violence. The final chapters of the book explore how critical models of intervention and prevention and a critical analysis of existing institutional policies may be implemented across college campuses to better address sexual violence for multiple populations and identities in higher education. This book will expand educators' understanding of sexual violence to inform more effective policies, procedures, practice, and research that reaches beyond preventing sexual violence and addresses the dominant systems from which sexual violence stems, in an attempt to eradicate, not just prevent, the act and the issue.
A 2014 report issued by the White House Council on Women and Girls included the alarming statistic that one in five female college students in the United States experience some form of campus sexual ...assault. Despite more than fifty years of anti-rape activism and over two decades of federal legislation regarding campus sexual violence, sexual assault on American college and university campuses remains prevalent, under-reported, and poorly understood. A principle reason for this lack of understanding is that the voices of women who have experienced campus sexual assault have been largely absent from academic discourse about the issue. In Campus Sexual Assault , Lauren J. Germain focuses attention on the post–sexual assault experiences of twenty-six college women. She reframes conversations about sexual violence and student agency on American college campuses by drawing insight directly from the stories of how survivors responded individually to attacks, as well as how and why peers, family members, and school, medical, and civil authorities were (or were not) engaged in addressing the crimes. Germain weaves together women’s narratives to show the women not as victims per se, but as individuals with the power to overcome these traumatic experiences. Aimed at students, parents, faculty members, university leaders, service providers, and lawmakers, Campus Sexual Assault seeks to put an end to the silence around sexual trauma by giving voice to those closest to it and providing tools for others to hear with—and to act on.
In recent years, members of legal, law enforcement, media and academic circles have portrayed rape as a special kind of crime distinct from other forms of violence. InFraming the Rape Victim,Carine ...M. Mardorossian argues that this differential treatment of rape has exacerbated the ghettoizing of sexual violence along gendered lines and has repeatedly led to women's being accused of triggering, if not causing, rape through immodest behavior, comportment, passivity, or weakness.Contesting the notion that rape is the result of deviant behaviors of victims or perpetrators, Mardorossian argues that rape saturates our culture and defines masculinity's relation to femininity, both of which are structural positions rather than biologically derived ones. Using diverse examples throughout, Mardorossian draws from Hollywood film and popular culture to contemporary women's fiction and hospitalized birth emphasizing that the position of dominant masculinity can be occupied by men, women, or institutions, while structural femininity is a position that may define and subordinate men, minorities, and other marginalized groups just as effectively as it does women. Highlighting the legacies of the politically correct debates of the 1990s and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the book illustrates how the framing of the term "victim" has played a fundamental role in constructing notions of agency that valorize autonomy and support exclusionary, especially masculine, models of American selfhood.The gendering of rape, including by well-meaning, sometimes feminist, voices that claim to have victims' best interests at heart, ultimately obscures its true role in our culture. Both a critical analysis and a call to action,Framing the Rape Victimshows that rape is not a special interest issue that pertains just to women but a pervasive one that affects our society as a whole.
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