Abstract
The issue of sexual violence on university campuses has recently taken on a heightened public presence. Whether it be ongoing discussions related to campus “date rape,” or the sexual malfeasance of university employees such as the football coach Joe Sandusky at Penn State or US gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar at Michigan State University, sexual violence associated with colleges and universities seems to be a prominent issue in our public discourse. In Beyond the rapist: Title IX and sexual violence on US campuses, Kate Lockwood Harris addresses this issue. Adopting what she refers to as a “feminist new materialist” method, her main goals seem to be to get society to “look beyond” the rapist to see how the university (and other organizations) itself sustains and facilitates sexual violence. Harris is not proposing that we let the perpetrator of rape off the hook, rather she is arguing that punishing individual acts of violence is not enough, in that it does not address the broader/deeper systemic organizational factors that aid and abet these individual acts. Harris, a professor of communication, is keen to explain how “sexual violence communicates,” and how universities—and by extension other organizations—participate in violent processes.
Beyond the rapist is a relatively short book, about 175 pages, organized into five chapters. The first chapter is entitled “Why ‘beyond the rapist’” and here, Harris explains her interest in studying sexual violence on campus, and why a “feminist new materialism” (FNM—my truncation) method can be helpful. Basically, she argues that this method avoids some of the pitfalls of methods that are either too representational, meaning that they fetishize the material world to the neglect of the symbolic and discursive, and also of extreme postmodern approaches that seem to argue that “language is everything,” thus making it impossible to make truth-claims about material realities. And Harris makes it clear that as a feminist, she believes in a material world characterized by dominant and subordinate groups, and wants to change that. The description of this FNM method is further elaborated in the next chapter, “Organization’s relation to violence.” Harris dives deeper into the problems of deeply representational and deeply discursive methods, positioning FNM as a kind of third-way that resolves the material/discursive dualism that has occupied critical social theory for over 30 years now, and then begins to apply this method to the problem of sexual violence in universities specifically and organizations more generally.
It is in Chapter three that Harris seeks to leverage the FNM approach to analyze sexual violence on campuses. She draws on an analogy to quantum physics to argue that there is no “independent reality” of rape, nor is rape entirely “discursively constituted.” Rather, the materiality of rape and the “words” used about rape are inherently intertwined, much as in physics, the act of observation helps constitute what is being observed, and vice versa, a process called “diffraction.” Harris’s point seems to be that anti-rape activists should spend less time trying to improve the ways that universities “count” incidences of rape, and more on how sexual violence is communicated via organizational processes. This is key to getting all of us, but especially decision-makers, to look “beyond” the rapist to how rape and sexual violence is inherent in organizations as systems.
And, as explained in Chapter four, “Agency organizes Violence,” Harris argues that gender and race are key dimensions to how violence is communicated in organizations. I found this section of the book particularly challenging. On one hand, some of the points resonated with me. For example, there is an interesting discussion of the import of talk and speech about rape. Harris notes that from a Title IX point of view, the purpose of a victim talking about an incident of sexual violence is to initiate a formal process of inquiry that results in university findings and actions taken against the perpetrator. But, Harris notes that victims talk about sexual violence for many reasons unrelated to initiating formal inquiries—it can be cathartic or comforting to do so, to receive emotional support, among other things. But to Title IX administrators, such talk doesn’t “count,” it is meaningless, and unless a perpetrator is named, no action need be taken. And at the organizational level, Harris makes a convincing argument that when organizations talk about preventing sexual violence but then do not take actions to do so, rather than this talk being viewed as “ineffectual,” it should be viewed as being quite effective—at promoting and sustaining the ongoing organization of violence, because such talk acts as a smokescreen that allows violence to perpetuate itself.
What doesn’t work so well for me here is the strained attempt to color these communication processes with gendered and racial overtones. For example, Harris claims that the assumption built in to Title IX that women want to talk about sexual violence solely for the purpose of reporting the abuse to the authorities is a “gendered … masculinist” assumption. That missed me, as did another assertion that PRU (the anonymous acronym for the university she studied) had an “ongoing commitment to whiteness.” This latter claim seems linked to her finding that the Title IX machinery only responds to incidences of violence that are “named,” that is, when a victim names their attacker, but not when “systemic” acts of violence occur. But I was simply unable to sort that connection out.
In the final chapter, “Rethinking communication and agency,” Harris makes her case for extrapolating beyond the university setting. She begins by summarizing her findings, including the key one that violence “communicates” in different ways, such that its impact cannot be captured merely by quantitative counting of cases and incidences. Also, the false assumption that only human beings have agency means that systemic forces of violence go unchallenged. While I found these points, among some others, to be well-taken, in the end, Harris comes up with advice for universities and other organizations seeking to reduce sexual violence that are rather pedestrian: for example, when universities publish the results of their annual reports on sexual violence, indicating whether such incidences have increased or decreased, they should be contextualized by the findings of research on the national prevalence of sexual violence. As for researchers, we should not only develop quantitative counting accounts of sexual violence, but also use other modalities of communication, such as dance, music, and qualitative inquiries. Also, university responders such as staff and faculty should receive training in the trauma of sexual violence and its influences on how victims experience and communicate about it. All of this sounds useful to me, but I didn’t see how one needed to use a feminist new materialist approach to arrive at them.
That said, overall, I found this book to be an interesting read. The social theorist in me appreciated how Harris was able to leverage sophisticated critical theory to make her points, without resorting to opaque language. I did not have to wade through accounts of Rhizomes and Bodies Without Organs here, always a relief. She’s clearly conversant in both “realist” and “discursive” theory but is able to keep things grounded in more pedestrian language for those of us who aren’t. Also, the organizational studies scholar in me learned some new things about the prevalence of sexual violence in organizations and how the myriad ways it silences and “speaks” is probably impacting organizational behavior in ways I haven’t appreciated. That’s also possibly a product of my privilege as a White male who hasn’t experienced sexual violence at work. On the other hand, I felt that too many pages were expended cheerleading for the “feminist new materialist” philosophy to little apparent payoff. There were times when I felt like I was transported back to circa 1993 and graduate student debates about deconstructing versus reifying dualisms and representations. To me, the book could have made its points about sexual violence in (around, of) organizations without much of this. But, in the end, I devoured this book in about 3 hours, it held my interest throughout, so I can recommend it, more so to students and researchers interested in studying sexual violence on campus, but perhaps less so to administrators running university anti-violence and Title IX compliance programs. They could get by with reading the final chapter in which the aforementioned recommendations about changing practices and processes are made.