What Responsibility Looks Like in Student Activism against Rape Culture

• In Event: Sexual Assault Discourse in the Age of Trump

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, feminist activists developed the concept of rape culture, to name the legal, cultural, political and social supports that legitimize sexual violence and downplay its significance as a form of structural violence. At the time, both radical feminists and anti-prison activists were using the term to address the institutionalized nature of sexual violence and its cultures of perpetration. By the mid-2010s, the term broadly circulated on social media, in mainstream news outlets, and in popular culture around key legal cases (such as the 2016 Jian Ghomeshi trial in Canada). On university campuses, feminist queer-identified, sex-positive, and safer sex activists have taken up the term in their efforts to create less violent campus spaces.
This talk analyzes contemporary student activism that uses the term “rape culture” in its advocacy, assessing how activists define, mobilize and transform the concept in their activism around university campuses. Much of the contention at the heart of the term “rape culture” rests in the concepts’ seemingly diffusive model of responsibility for sexual violence. Rather than the “sex bureaucracy” some legal scholars identify around new university policies against sexual assault, the queer-identified, safer sex and anti-rape student activism driving many of these changes calls for structures of accountability to perpetrators responsible and offer survivors needed support. Drawing from examples in activist materials and recent sexual assault policies adopted at Canadian universities, this talk analyzes how responsibility for rape culture is being defined and modeled in the context of the student-driven activism that conceptualized them.

Author

• Carrie Rentschler, McGill U