The Changing Definition of Rape in Contemporary Art and Literature

FAIN: FT-278715-21

Michael Thomas Dango
Beloit College (Beloit, WI 53511-5595)

Writing one chapter of a book examining the humanistic frameworks through which rape has been explicated as a social ill.

Many leading works of the 1970s antirape movement, from Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics to Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, were literary criticism. But today, discussions of sexual violence are dominated by the law and public health. What Does Rape Look Like? seeks to reinvigorate humanistic contributions to the antirape movement. I argue that contemporary American art and literature, especially by women and queer people of color, better understands sexual violence than legal and public health discourses. Whereas the law classifies interpersonal crimes and determines individual responsibility for them, and whereas public health surveils a population to model the incidence, causes, and economic burden of violence, an aesthetic discourse asks how a larger cultural context creates rape, how the genres and forms in which the story of rape is told set the boundaries of its intelligibility, and how metaphorical thinking can transform those boundaries.