Examining sexual violence, the authors of this volume take up questions about the relationship between sex, sexuality and violence to better understand the terms on which women’s sexual suffering is perpetuated, thereby undermining their capacity for personhood and autonomy.

The book confronts the anxieties associated with sexuality in the late modern, western world and engages with wider debates on social transformations in late modernity. As such, it provides both an overview of the field of sexuality as well as setting a new agenda for debating the topic.

This Handbook provides the hidden common threads that tie sociological inquiry together and featuring eminent scholars, it separates itself from its predecessors in substance and organization. Rather than rehashing old debates or longingly gazing at the past, this book presents sociologists with new ways of conceptualizing the organization and presentation of sociological theory. At the heart of this Handbook’s vision is the twin goals of making theory a viable enterprise by reconceptualizing how we teach theory and keeping theory closely tied to its empirical applications. Three strategies are offered: (1) Elucidating how classic issues like integration or interaction are interrogated today; (2) Presenting a coherent vision of the social levels of reality that theorists work on such as communities, groups, and the self as well as how the coherence of these levels speaks to the macro-micro link; and, (3) Theorizing the social world rather than celebrating theorists or theories; that is, one can look at how theory is used holistically to understand the constraints the social world places on our lived experience or the dynamics of social change. Hence, in the second decade of the 21st century, it has become clear that sociology is at a crossroads as the number of theorists and amount of theory available is increasingly unmanageable and unknowable by the vast majority of professionals and students. As such, this Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory presents the novice and the expert with the a roadmap for traversing this crossroad and building a more coherent, robust, and cumulative sociology.

Western political theory typically incorporates certain assumptions about sex and gender as natural, unvarying and “pre-political.” This book critically examines these assumptions and shows how recent scholarship undermines the illusion that bodies exist outside politics and beyond the reach of the state. Leading political theorist Mary Hawkesworth’s cutting-edge intersectional account demonstrates how popular conceptions of human nature, public and private, citizenship, liberty, the state, and injustice relegate women, people of color, sexual minorities, and gender-variant people to inferior status despite constitutional guarantees of equality before the law. Hawkesworth argues that traditional political theory has contributed to the perpetuation of pernicious forms of injustice by masking the state’s role in the creation of subordinated and stigmatized subjects. The book draws insights from critical race, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and trans* theory to give a compelling, original, and highly readable introduction to historical and contemporary debates on gender and political theory for students.

This first-ever study of rape in modern American drama examines portrayals of rape, raped women and rapists in 36 plays written between 1970 and 2007, the period during which the feminist movement made rape a matter of public discourse. These dramas reveal much about sexuality and masculine and feminine identity in the United States. The author traces the impact of second-wave feminism, antifeminist backlash, third-wave feminism and postfeminism on the dramatic depiction of rape. The prevalence of commonly accepted rape myths--that women who dress provocatively invite sexual assault, for example--is well documented, along with equally frequent examples which dispute these myths.

In the 1990s, feminist scholars on the politics of rape experienced a sudden surge of interest in their, until then, marginal field. Why was the 1990s the right time for rape to become an international security problem? Furthermore, why suddenly in the 1990s did rape become problematized as an international issue not just by the feminist fringes of protest movements but also by intergovernmental bureaucracies? To explore these questions, Carol Harrington traces the historical change in the politicization of rape as an international problem and explains how early international women's organizations gained expert authority on rape by drawing on abolitionist rhetoric of bodily integrity. She discusses why they abandoned their politicization of rape in the inter-war period and why rape only reappeared as an international security question requiring gender expertise on trauma after the Cold War.

What exactly is rape? And how is it embedded in society? Hilkje Charlotte Hänel offers a philosophical exploration of the often misrepresented concept of rape in everyday life, systematically mapping out and elucidating this atrocious phenomenon. Hänel proposes a theory of rape as a social practice facilitated by ubiquitous sexist ideologies. Arguing for a normative cluster model for the concept of rape, this timely intervention improves our understanding of lived experiences of sexual violence and social relations within sexist ideologies.

The essays in this volume discuss narrative strategies employed by international writers when dealing with rape and sexual violence, whether in fiction, poetry, memoir, or drama. In developing these new feminist readings of rape narratives, the contributors aim to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new dimensions of healing. This book makes a vital contribution to the fields of literary studies and feminism, since while other volumes have focused on retroactive portrayals of rape in literature, to date none has focused entirely on the subversive work that is being done to retheorize sexual violence. Split into four sections, the volume considers sexual violence from a number of different angles. 'Subverting the Story' considers how the characters of the victim and rapist might be subverted in narratives of sexual violence. In 'Metaphors for Resistance,' the essays explore how writers approach the subject of rape obliquely using metaphors to represent their suffering and pain. The controversy of not speaking about sexual violence is the focus of 'The Protest of Silence,' while 'The Question of the Visual' considers the problems of making sexual violence visible in the poetic image, in film and on stage. These four sections cover an impressive range of world writing which includes curriculum staples like Toni Morrison, Sarah Kane, Sandra Cisneros, Yvonne Vera, and Sharon Olds.

Focusing on television media reporting of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath, this book explores how African states directly involved in conflict, western states with geopolitical interests in Africa's Great Lakes region, militia groups, human rights activists and NGOs use gendered media narratives strategically, often engaging in politics of revisionism and denial, to change the behaviour of other actors in the international system. Critically analysing BBC documentary films and news features and drawing on interviews with British, Rwandan and Congolese journalists, filmmakers, political commentators and human rights activists Georgina Holmes argues that documentary films and political discussion programmes are postcolonial contact zones, wherein competing actors perform in an attempt to influence international political decision-making on military and humanitarian intervention and public perceptions of genocide and war. The book breaks new ground in understanding how Rwandan and Congolese women actively engage in producing and shaping international public discourse on genocide and war, despite being depicted as silent, passive victims of conflict. This book is essential reading on the gendered dynamics of media reporting on conflicts and will appeal to anyone with an interest in Feminist Security Studies, Political Communication, Media and Film Studies, African Studies, Genocide Studies and International Relations.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. This book examines the nature, use and scope of online spaces for anti-rape activism, offering a critical commentary on its limitations and potentials.