Transitions

“Transition” as a concept holds within it the notions of both connection and new beginnings. A transition is a movement from one state of being to the next. As I write this, the editorial team and I are preparing the first issue under my editorship. We are in a state of transition from one editor to the next, from one issue to the next. Yet “transition,” for all its connotations of movement, connection, and beginnings, does not ensure progress. What “transition” does signal is opportunity, and it is with this in mind that this first issue is on the theme of “Theorizing Rape through Time, Place and Relations.” So, while we are in the throes of transition, the goal of this inaugural issue from the new editorial team is to encourage transition; to bring movement and new beginnings to the ways in which feminist scholars theorize about rape as it has occurred throughout history, in all social contexts, brought about by social relations.

I had initially planned to begin this introduction to the symposium with a list of “ripped from the headline” stories of rape: stories of campuses, refugee camps, battlefields, nursing homes, and day care centers. But the stories are coming in a flood with too many to categorize, each eclipsing the last. I wish I could say that this endeavor grew out of a single horrifying story of rape. Instead, the need for it became more and more obvious as the subject of rape continues to infuse our cultural consciousness day after day, week after week, year after year. The idea came to fruition though in a conversation with my colleague Nancy Whittier, who followed up by sending me Carine Mardorossian’s 2002 Signs article, “Toward a New Feminist Theory of Rape.” In it, Mardorossian writes, “The kind of theoretical and genealogical scrutiny that other aspects of women’s lives (the body, gender performativity, eating disorders, transgender politics, etc.) have occasioned is remarkably absent from studies of sexual violence. Rape has become academia’s undertheorized and apparently untheorizable issue” (p. 743). Instead, she argues, “we should examine what the category encompasses in different spaces and times and investigate its relation to other areas of women’s lives in the public sphere” (p. 746). I see Gender & Society as a particularly appropriate place to take up this challenge. The journal has been at the cutting edge of feminist scholarship. Indeed, some of the most frequently cited and downloaded articles in its history pertain to rape—for example, Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert Hummer’s “Fraternities and Gang Rape on Campus” (1989), and a recent article, “Normalizing Sexual Violence” by Heather Hlavka (2014), which has more than 26,000 downloads.

To address Mardossian’s call, I have asked several different gender scholars to provide “think” pieces on how we can move forward with theorizing rape from the vantage point of the areas they study. Those areas of study include war and conflict, civil society and government, social movements, institutions such as colleges and prisons, and adolescence and young adulthood. What these scholars have returned with is what I call “a menu of provocations,” offering an array of ideas, critiques, and directions. I did not specifically ask for certain themes, yet they emerged, along with conversations between the essays. You will find that authors of one essay cite authors of another, intertwining and building on ideas of gender, context, and intersectionality. To illustrate these connections, I have arranged them to first consider the issues of rape, rapists, and context and then to investigate what social change efforts and social movements can do. However, I begin this issue with a letter written by the group Black Women’s Blueprint to the organizers of the 2011 Toronto SlutWalk. The 2011 Toronto SlutWalk arose after a comment by a police officer to a student group that one way to avoid rape was to not dress like “a slut.” The outcry by students led to a “slut walk” that protested blaming the victim as well as slut shaming and sexual profiling, and it sparked protests around the world (see Reger 2014, 2015). Black Women’s Blueprint, while supporting collective action against rape, reminded the white organizers that history matters, and rape is a weapon of oppression and dominance that affects women differently. The women of Black Women’s Blueprint offer a powerful opening statement on the importance of time, place, and relations in understanding rape. Drawing on bell hooks (1994), I see this letter as reminding us of the importance of democratic participation in the act of theorizing.

Prisons, colleges, and nations in conflict are the first contexts addressed in the essays. Transgender women in prison in the twenty-first century is the focus of Valerie Jenness and Sarah Fernstermaker’s essay “Forty Years after Brownmiller: Prisons for Men, Transgender Inmates and the Rape of the Feminine.” They bring their ongoing research on transgender women in prisons to the conversation, noting that the rape of transgender women in all-male prisons is—at the core—the rape of the feminine. In her essay “The Rape Prone Culture of Academic Contexts: Fraternities and Athletics,” Pat Martin, author of some of the most enduring work on rape and institutional settings, takes a look at college campuses and finds a discouraging picture of an institutional context that continues to facilitate rape and protect rapists. A reminder of how rape has been used as a selective weapon against groups of people is exemplified by Nicola Henry’s essay, “Theorizing Wartime Rape: Deconstructing Gender, Sexuality and Violence,” which urges us to bring both the collective and the individual into the conversation about rape in war and to use an intersectional perspective to understand the dynamics.

With the slut walks in mind, I arranged the next essays to address social movements and social change. Michael Messner in “Bad Men, Good Men, Bystanders: Who Is the Rapist?” traces the role of men and the definition of the rapist in anti-rape work and urges activists to return to feminist visions and definitions. CJ Pascoe and Jocelyn Hollander, in “Good Guys Don’t Rape: Gender, Domination and Mobilizing Rape,” situate their essay in the same institutional contexts as Martin and offer the idea of “mobilizing masculinity” as a way to theorize how gender norms can change and still hold on to very old notions at the same time. Poulami Roychowdhury’s essay, “Over the Law: Rape and the Seduction of Popular Politics,” adds a cautionary note to the urge to pressure governments for change. She focuses on the weak state of India and how collective action can work both for feminist groups and against them as the tide of public opinion changes. Nancy Whittier brings the U.S. women’s movement into the conversation in her essay, “Where Are the Children? Theorizing the Missing Piece in Gendered Sexual Violence.” She looks at the child sexual abuse movement and argues that an intersectional approach that includes age is needed to more comprehensively theorize rape.

One of my goals in this issue is that as you read these essays, you engage in the dialogue of ideas and find yourself thinking, “Why didn’t they consider (fill in the blank)?” And then you will write, research and theorize to fill those holes. My hope is that this “menu of provocations” does exactly that—that these essays provoke you into both personal and intellectual conversations, and that we continue as a community of scholars and activists to tease out how rape as a gendered dynamic is a weapon of oppression encompassing the individual, supported in the institutional, and executed universally.