The Work of Rape

by Rana M. Jaleel

In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it—consent, force, coercion—are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

280 pages, Paperback

Published October 29, 2021

Reviews

[Becca w · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cw: sexualized violence

This book is so good and I have so much to think about. It is unafraid to challenge the common sense of liberal democracy in pursuit of a less violent, less unjust world. Sexualized violence, rape, consent, coercion are not self-evident, universally experienced concepts. Instead they are constantly being shaped by the politics of our world, which therefore means they are forged through capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy. It asks us to imagine a world where harm is recognized not through the prism of individualism but as a collective experience.