Rape and Representation

Rebecca Solnit has written, "Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place." This course approaches the study of rape and other forms of gender-based violence with particular attention to storytelling, narrative, and the politics of representation. Our focus will be on the representation, politicization and theorization of violence through the interdisciplinary and intersectional lens of social justice feminism, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory. We will explore literary, artistic, legal, and activist efforts to interpret and address violence and, ultimately, to re-imagine and re-build the world otherwise; and we will interrogate the politics of silence and speech and the act of witnessing and testimony in the long history of organizing against sexual violence by a wide variety of actors, including people of color, incarcerated people, gender non-conforming people, enslaved, and undocumented people. Course materials will include fiction, poetry, and memoir, along with readings in law, trauma theory, carceral studies, reproductive health, rights and justice, and media studies.