"Reading Rape" examines how American culture talks about sexual
violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape
achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.
Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and
cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum
seduction narratives and "realist" representations of rape in
nineteenth-century novels to "Deliverance, American Psycho," and
contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution
of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the
kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds
that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social,
political, and economic issues.
Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major
force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race,
ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time,
her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore
the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their
function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by
contemporary feminist criticism, "Reading Rape" also challenges
feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part
of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional
albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts.
This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape.
And what we're talking about is often something else entirely:
power, money, social change, difference, and identity.
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