Description
Book SynopsisRana M. Jaleel links international law's redefinition of mass rape as a crime against humanity to the expansion of US imperialism and its effacement of racialized violence and dispossession.
Trade Review“Imaginative and deeply ambitious,
The Work of Rape upends conventional thinking. Traversing a vast terrain, Rana M. Jaleel insists we turn from how rape has been problematically framed through various feminist legal efforts so we may reconceptualize its relation to racial and colonial world orderings of life. A brilliant and convincing book.” -- Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley
“Rana M. Jaleel presents an eye-opening and mesmerizing global account of the contexts, significations, and meanings that rape as a juridical offense and cultural term has undergone from the 1990s to the present. She boldly intervenes into current discussions about rectifying the pervasiveness of societal sexual violence that has been reignited by movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo. One walks away from this book with new clarity about the substantive differences and stakes among women of color, Indigenous, queer, and radical feminist frameworks for understanding sexual violence and for acting against it. This is
the book I’ve wanted for these times.” -- Chandan Reddy, author of * Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State *
"
The Work of Rape is a challenging text, but one that asks us to think deeply and seriously about feminist and queer theory, sexual violence, racialization, and the politics of rape." -- Sameena Mulla * GLQ *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction. The Work of Rape 1
1. The US Sex Wars Meet the Ethnic Wars 49
2. States of War, Men as State: The Tortured Americas, Genocidal Balkans, and the Sexual State Form 88
3. My Own Private Genocide: From Ethnic War to the War on Terror 110
4. Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of "Welcomeness" on Campus 142
Epilogue. Decolonial and Abolitionist Feminisms and the Work of Rape 174
Notes 187
Bibliography 229
Index 255
