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This chapter explores how rape culture, as a concept, is used to mobilize efforts to reduce campus sexual violence. While rape culture is not simple, institutional responses assume it is. This insight is informed by complexity theory. Rape culture is a complex context that does not respond well to solutions that assume static, cause–effect relationships. The chapter describes a Canadian project that used narrative methods to solicit stories about rape culture from students and invited them to code their own stories and how they would characterize aspects of their experiences. The chapter explores how students make meaning of and understand rape culture in contrast to dominant narratives in research and advocacy. Additionally it explores the students’ stories’ themes to illustrate limitations inherent in current efforts to transform campus rape culture.

This chapter examines the ‘rape culture’ paradigm that has become state policy in the United States. For at least the last decade, the idea of a ‘rape culture’ has dominated consideration of sexual assault. On college campuses, and in prosecutors’ offices and police departments, the idea that rape is a central feature of male power has become the orthodoxy. The focus here is on how this radical belief has flourished since the passage of the US Violence against Women Act of 1994. It considers the relationship of the belief to larger disciplinary cultures, sexual regimes, due process rights, and perceptions of men. Although especially overt in the United States, there are echoes of such state feminism and the suppression of supposed rape culture in other common law countries.

This chapter builds on themes established in previous chapters by examining these potentialities in relation to the creation of war machines and establishment of a praxis (Freire, 1968). I return to a consideration of how the guerrilla war machine works in relation to State apparatus which produces codes in public space which, for instance, privilege certain types of body over others. I consider how we might create a war machine and imagine how this might foster the sort of molecular revolution which alters what dominant systems of exclusion, marginalization and commodification might do.Mobilising some politics of ‘making the familiar strange’ (Brecht, 1996 [1964/1935]), of critical exteriority (Kristeva, 1981; Lorde, 1984), and of disinvestment from power (Freire, 2017 [1970/1986]), it does offer some ways in which to conceive of different ‘Becomings-’ and alternative imaginations of social, spatial, gendered justice.

Critical Anthropocene analyses, including those naming the era the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene, neglect to analyze the gendered-sexual domination, or rapism, that founds the era. The origins of the Anthropocene extend back some seven thousand years to the establishment of patriarchal systems, based in ruling men establishing control over women’s sexual and reproductive powers. That model of domination then extended into the enslavement of others, ownership of land, and establishment of social hierarchies. These patterns mark the founding of the United States through the European rapist genocide of Indigenous peoples and theft of land, as well as the rapism at the core of chattel slavery. These enactments of motherfucking enabled a world-wide cotton industry, which in turn made possible the global and rapacious capitalist system that is most responsible for the Anthropocene. Gendered sex and violence infuse ecocidal activities, past and present, including plowing, drilling, nuking, and fracking—which all double as slang terms for fucking.

Chapter 7 explores how teen girls are using social media to engage with institutionalized and systematic forms of sexism, sexual objectification, and harassment constitutive of not only what can be termed rape culture but also lad culture in secondary schools in the UK, US, and Canada. The chapter draws on interview data with 27 teenage girls including individual Skype interviews with 11 teen girls in Canada, US, UK, and Ireland and in-person focus groups with 16 girls from a London secondary school feminist club. We show how platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and group chats provide different affordances and vernaculars for girls to challenge rape culture collectively and individually. We focus on the minutia of moments such as when girls challenge a rape joke on Facebook, collectively operate a feminist Twitter account, or negotiate instances of trolling, offering unique insight into the nuances of using social media as teen feminist activists attending school.

In recent years, BDSM communities and sexual practices have received increasing attention in academic circles and in popular discourse. Part one explores what happens at the threshold of kinky subculture and its penetration into the mainstream, within contemporary legal, cultural, and commercial discourses. Part Two explores the penetration of the disobedient body within the kink community and interrogates how ‘the community’ responds to trouble or disruption. In this part, I draw on interview data with men and women in the US and the UK who talked about how for instance, community is forged, consent violations are dealt with, undesirable behaviour of members of the community are negotiated, and how sexualised relations emerge.This chapter explores the ways in which social and spatial (in)justice through disavowal, exclusion, and the promotion of rape culture prevail in these encounters. Yet it is also hopeful and considers how some interventions might become transformative and how molecular revolutions might emerge.

Following the thematic foundations set out in Laurie Halse Anderson’s germinal YA rape novel, Speak—when, how, and whom to tell about the rape; the ways in which the survivor reacts to the rape, including self-harm; the ways in which the survivor is both shamed and blamed; and ways to understand the rapist—this chapter analyzes a body of recently published novels about acquaintance rape.The scenarios in these novels work to offer readers alternate discourses about culpability and shame, detail options for survivors, and give readers access to voices too often silenced, helping them toward understanding the social codes that lead to and the circumstances that arise from acquaintance rape. At the same time, this chapter make clear, these texts often reify rape culture and undermine the progress they are working toward.

In this chapter, we begin by making a case for the ubiquitous ways rape culture, harassment, and sexual violence continue to be a part of many girls’ and women’s everyday lives, despite the ways in which feminists have challenged these issues for over half a century. This chapter then goes on to outline the various ways girls and women have begun to harness new technologies to challenge these practices. Importantly, the chapter also introduces the scholarly foundation for this book, focusing specifically on the contemporary social and cultural context in which our case studies operate. The interdisciplinary nature of this study means we engage with key concepts from the fields of digital media studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, sociology, and education studies. The concepts or terms that we explore and define here include rape culture, lad culture, hashtag feminism, and mediated abuse.

This chapter shows how feminists are using not only Twitter but a diverse interconnected range of social media platforms to engage in their digital activism. Drawing on a survey of 46 self-defined Twitter feminists, and a subsample of email, Skype, and in-person interviews with 21 of these respondents we explore how participants challenge rape culture and engage in feminist activism creating social media counter-publics. Twitter affords feminists connectivity, speed, immediacy, and global reach to share and debate: important pedagogical processes for raising awareness and visibility around issues such as rape culture. Despite the widely understood benefits of social media, participants recounted challenges of participating in digital activism on Twitter, including instances of hostile anti-feminism and episodes of sexually aggressive trolling. We outline participants’ emergent strategies for coping with technologically mediated misogyny and illuminate the significant role Twitter is playing in activating networked feminism.

This chapter focuses on women’s use of the Twitter hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported. Using the hashtag, hundreds of girls and women shared the reasons they didn’t report incidents of sexual assault by partners, family members, friends, and acquaintances. We explore how this feminist hashtag developed in response to the public allegations of sexual violence made about then-popular Canadian CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, and ultimately moved across the media landscape, producing a robust public discussion about sexual violence and rape culture. Drawing on thematic analysis of #BeenRapedNeverReported tweets and interviews with eight women who contributed to the hashtag, we analyze the “affective solidarity” produced along this hashtag and the ways it created new lived possibilities for feminist identification, experience, organizing, and resistance. We contextualize this analysis within a larger Canadian media culture to position the hashtag as both a discursive and affective intervention into hegemonic public discourse about rape culture and sexual violence.

Ending gender-based violence (GBV) on campus requires sustained efforts to transform the rape culture that is embedded in college and university systems. While partnership with student activists is crucial, structural change necessitates partnerships among college and university employees, particularly between staff who direct campus survivor advocacy and GBV prevention programs and their faculty allies. This chapter draws on accounts of members of the Campus Advocacy and Prevention Professionals Association across the United States and Canada about their partnerships with faculty. Key themes emerged: navigating bureaucracy, negotiating roles and responsibilities, destabilizing power and privilege dynamics, confronting institutionalized oppressions, and going beyond programming to catalyze systems change through meaningful (and often uncomfortable) partnership and dialogue. Recommendations to transform rape culture through new and existing partnerships on program evaluation, curriculum infusion, survivor support, and campus-wide task forces are discussed.

The introduction lays out the framework for why we doubt what women say about their lives; defines the figure of the tainted witness as who a woman can become, not who she is; places the figure of the woman witness and the practices of testimony (legal and literary) in the context of raced and gendered histories of doubt; theorizes the presence of a testimonial network through which bodies, persons, and words moves as a circulatory system in which histories of slavery and colonialism are lodged and which incubates sexism and racism; analyzes how these pre-existing judgments lay in wait for any particular woman’s testimony in order to smear her; defines scandal as the substitution of the witness’s terms for hostile ones that are then repeated as if truth and are recycled through global media; and defines the “adequate witness” as one who provides a “holding environment” (following Winnicott) for testimony.

Changes in attitudes, values, and beliefs about the many manifestations of violence against women are a necessary complement to globalizing rights standards, law enforcement, public policy, and grassroots empowerment. In Chapter 10, we will analyze the requisites and results of campaigns for norm change in women’s agency, masculine identities, and sexual self-determination. Communication campaigns aim to reshape community consciousness of gender regimes in South Africa, India, and Brazil. Global programs adopted by local movements promote women’s agency and empowerment to resist violence in India and Pakistan. Both global programs and transnational coalitions work to engage men and transform violent masculinities in India, South Africa, and Brazil. Finally, we will trace a variety of civil society cultural initiatives asserting sexual self-determination in Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine, and China.

This chapter explores Suzanne Lacy's educational and socio-political background during the heyday of the radical politics in the 1970s. Lacy was female and white; she used these characteristics of herself to explore the issues surrounding feminism, as well as its oft-neglected connections to the civil rights movement. Lacy realized that the majority of women's narratives were not being heard, because the current feminist movement had neglected to address the issues of poor women and women of color. These issues were especially evident in her critiques of rape and the rape culture, in which women's issues were trivialized and controlled under patriarchal power structures. Notably, in two of Lacy's conceptual pieces, Rape Is and Ablution, we see the expanding scope of her personal investigations on sexual and domestic violence—investigations which would eventually access a broader multiracial and cross-cultural arena.

This chapter examines the possibilities for crafting student responses to gender based violence (GBV) in UK universities. Drawing upon the findings of the ‘Stand Together’ action research project at the University of Lincoln (UOL), it explores the possibilities and complexity of challenging gendered attitudes, behaviours and the broader cultural norms underpinning GBV in two sites where gender norms and everyday forms of GBV are re-inscribed, negotiated and resisted — social media and the night-time economy (NTE). The chapter first provides an overview of how the BI model at UOL was developed before discussing the research methods used. It then considers students' experiences of online ‘lad culture’; responses to objectification, sexism and rape culture on social media; students' experiences of sexual harassment in the NTE; and responses to sexual harassment in the NTE. The chapter concludes by outlining some of the key challenges and potential of prevention education in a university context.

Chapter 3 presents results from a qualitative content analysis and thematic textual analysis drawn from four case studies: Hollaback!, Everyday Sexism, Who Needs Feminism?, and #BeenRapedNeverReported. The chapter presents one of the first attempts to analyze these popular feminist campaigns by answering the question of what kinds of experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture the public are sharing on feminist digital platforms. We begin here to develop a key argument that digital feminist activism is far more complex and nuanced than one might initially expect, and is used in a multitude of ways, for many purposes, drawing on a range of different conventions or vernacular practices. Taking a cue from critical technology studies, we attend to emerging vernacular practices that we argue have been shaped by platform architecture, affordances, and conventions, which work to simultaneously encourage and discourage certain narratives from certain groups of people.

While great progress has been made in regards to sexual violence and accountability, Martha C. Nussbaum argues that the culture of celebrity remains a significant hurdle. In this chapter, Nussbaum traces the historical evolution and progress of the law and social norms concerning sexual violence. Identifying the obstacles and complexities that have faced those fighting for justice, she shows how working women, feminist lawyers, and recently the #MeToo movement have pushed forward the frontier of accountability. While history provides reason for hope, a recalcitrant problem remains: lack of accountability for celebrities and sports stars. Given the big money and structures of power behind the culture of celebrity, Nussbaum argues that the public must rise up and express outrage in order to bring about change.

In this chapter, Bianca Crewe and Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e. a criminal court. Crewe and Ichikawa attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for “knows” ascriptions.