New Rape Studies

Shows why the movement against sexual violence needs the humanities—now more than ever.

New Rape Studies advances a new generation of writers who join a long genealogy of feminist thinkers in grounding their critiques of sexual violence in humanistic disciplines such as literary criticism, film studies, and art history. Aesthetic ways of knowing and cultural forms of intervention are increasingly urgent in a political landscape in which the common response to sexual violence has been an appeal to the state, whether carceral solutions advocated by some voices in the #MeToo movement or educational approaches led by national public health organizations. In fourteen essays, contributors draw on humanistic methods and objects to envision a feminist politics that transforms what has come to be called "rape culture"—above all, by re-committing to "culture" itself as the terrain of political contest.