Dismantling Rape Culture: The Peacebuilding Power of ‘Me Too’

221 Pages·2021·19.205 MB·English

by  Tracey Nicholls

Dismantling Rape Culture

This book analyses rape culture through the lens of the ‘me too’ era. Drawing
feminist theory into conversation with peace studies and improvisation theory, it
advocates for peace-b uilding opportunities to transform culture and for the impro-
visatory resources of ‘culture- jamming’ as a mechanism to dismantle rape culture.
The book’s key argument is that cultural attitudes and behaviours can be shifted
through the introduction of disrupting narratives, so each chapter ends with a
‘culture- jammed’ re- telling of a traditional fairy tale. Chapter 1 traces an overlap
of feminist theory and peace studies, arguing that rape culture is most fruitfully
understood through the concept of ‘structural violence.’ Chapter 2 investigates the
gender scripts that rape culture produces, considering a female counterpart to the
concept of ‘toxic masculinity’: ‘complicit femininity.’ Chapter 3 offers analysis of
non-c onsensual sex and a history of consent education, culminating in an argument
that we need to move beyond consent to conceptualise a robust ‘respectful mutu-
ality.’ Chapter 4’s history of sexual harassment in the workplace and the rise of
#metoo argues that its global manifestations are a powerful peace- building initiative.
Chapter 5 situates ‘me too’ within a culture-j amming history, using improvisation
theory to show how this movement’s potential can shape cultural reconstruction.
This is a provocative and interventionist addition to feminist theory scholarship
and is suitable for researchers and students in women’s and gender studies, feminist
theory, sociology and peace studies.
Tracey Nicholls lectures in Politics and International Relations at Massey University
in Aotearoa New Zealand. Previously she taught peace studies and gender studies
at Soka University (Japan), and philosophy at Lewis University (United States). Her
doctoral work, in philosophy at McGill University (Canada), introduced her to
questions of political and ethical significance of improvised music that shaped her
research programme. Her first monograph developed an ethics of improvisation,
translating practices of improvising musicians into strategies for building more
democratic political communities. Her engagement with anti- rape activism has
focused on student- led consent- education efforts. These strands of work inform
this book’s exploration of improvised resistance (‘culture- jamming’) as a response
to rape culture, presenting ‘me too’ as a social movement with peace- building
possibilities.
Interdisciplinary Research in Gender

Cultural Reflections of Medusa
The Shadow in the Glass
Jennifer Hedgecock
Representations of Working- Class Masculinities in Post- War British
Culture
The Left Behind
Matthew Crowley
Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers
Switching Desire and Identity
Lesley Graydon
Kathy Acker
Punk Writer
Margaret Henderson
Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction
Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists
Elaine Wood
Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face
Paul Morrison
Representing Abortion
Edited by Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Dismantling Rape Culture
The Peacebuilding Power of ‘Me Too’
Tracey Nicholls
www.routledge.com/ Interdisciplinary- Research- in- Gender/ book- series/ IRG
Dismantling Rape Culture

The Peacebuilding Power of ‘Me Too’
Tracey Nicholls
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Tracey Nicholls
The right of Tracey Nicholls to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com,
has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non
Commercial-N o Derivatives 4.0 license
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Nicholls, Tracey, author.
Title: Dismantling rape culture : the peacebuilding power of
‘Me too’ / Tracey Nicholls.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. |
Series: Interdisciplinary research in gender | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020032303 (print) |
LCCN 2020032304 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367546304 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003124290 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000287721 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781000287745 (epub) | ISBN 9781000287738 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism. | Rape–Prevention. | Sexual harassment of women.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .N53 2021 (print) |
LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | DDC 305.42–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032303
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032304
ISBN: 978- 0-3 67- 54630- 4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1-0 03- 12429- 0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: interpreting cultural fairy tales 1

Living a dream 1
Why we believe our own story- telling 5
How we can tell better stories 10
1 Once upon a time . . .: rape culture is structural violence 26

What rape culture is: the prince’s battlefield 26
What structural violence is: the ivory tower view of
the battlefield 38
Why we fail to see the violence: the princess’s rose- coloured
glasses 46
Coda: culture- jamming Cinderella’s structural violence 52
2 A beautiful girl met a handsome prince . . .: toxic
masculinity and complicit femininity 67

How to be a man: Prince Charming 67
How to be a woman: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel 76
On not being a princess: Little Red Riding Hood, and other
paths through the woods 85
Coda: culture- jamming Snow White’s gender roles 93
3 And it was love at first sight . . .: the spectrum of
problematic sex 104

‘Real’ rape and really bad dates: as she slept, he leaned
forward to kiss her 104
Coercion and harassment: ‘You must come and see me next
Sunday; I have already invited guests . . .’ 118
A stage theory of saying yes: the princess’s choices 126
Coda: culture-j amming consent violations in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ 132
vi Contents
4 Until it wasn’t anymore . . .: how ‘Me Too’ came to work 141

Women speaking out: who are we hearing? 141
Women being believed: from whispers to whistle-b lowing 149
Global changes in conversations: a world without
princes and princesses 154
Coda: culture- jamming the exploitation of women in
‘Rumpelstiltskin’ 163
5 And they all lived better than before . . .:
culture- jamming our way to a better world 174

We have always been doing this: tales from the past 174
We need to do more of this: tales for the future 181
Coda: Walt Disney, meet Sara Ahmed 191
Index 203
Acknowledgements

This book was conceived in upheaval and written in various shades of anger,
despair, and determination. I was about halfway through a major transi-
tion in my life when ‘me too’ emerged into public awareness, and it became
clear to me that I would have to write this book as a process of moving on
to think about other things. I had been living and teaching in the United
States (in the Chicago area) for almost ten years when I realised that I was
no longer willing to sacrifice where I wanted to live in order to do what
I wanted to do. I had previously been prioritising my career— building it,
in fact— around my American job, and slowly putting to rest my hopes that
I would get a Canadian job offer and be able to return ‘home,’ to the country
where I grew up and where, thanks to Canadian taxpayers, I had managed
to navigate my way through a university education that no one (least of
all, me) ever expected I would have. Even as I was putting away my hopes
of a Canadian job, I was making trips back and forth between the United
States and New Zealand, and growing increasingly attached to the nieces
and nephew I had there. As a child, I had grown up in a family where I had
an aunt who lived overseas and was really only just a name to me. Unwilling
to occupy that role in their lives, I decided early in 2015 that I was going to
leave North America and return (‘return’?) to New Zealand.
Then we all lived through 2016. It’s hard for me to describe to people
outside the US how terrifying it was to wake up in the country that had just
elected Donald Trump President of the United States. It was terrifying for a
lot of people who already had a lot less security, a lot less insulating priv-
ilege, than I had. In my case, fear was compounded by a crushing sense that
all of the scholarship I was building my career on, work that was a genuine
labour of love, had been refuted by that election. All of my belief that social
progress was happening—t hat, in Martin Luther King’s words, the moral
arc of the universe was bending towards justice—w as shattered. Everything
I had written about democracy, justice, the transcendent power of music
seemed wrong, silly, poorly conceived.
As I white-k nuckled my way through 2017, working on figuring out what
parts of my academic life I could take with me in this transition out of
what I had been trained to think of as the centre of the academic world,
viii Acknowledgements
I found myself in a serendipitous cultural moment (one of many in my
teaching career). In the last four months of that year, I was teaching a course
centred around themes of sex and power in Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality just as the New York Times and New Yorker ‘me too’ reporting
on Harvey Weinstein was appearing. I remember drawing it in to class-
room conversations, but I also remember it being enormous and really hard
to process. The more I paid attention to it, the worse it got. Because I am
one of those academics who needs to write in order to understand what
I think, it became more and more obvious as I grappled with revelations in
industry after industry that I was going to have to write something. This is
that something.
The preliminary planning and early writing of this book happened over
2018 and 2019, when I was living in Japan and teaching peace studies
and gender studies in a flagship English- language programme. While I was
there, I had the enormous good fortune to be part of a community of female
scholars, faculty, and students who gave me encouragement and inspiration.
Special thanks are due to Chloë Garcia for her companionship in the pubs
of Hachioji before she flew back to our shared alma mater, McGill; and to
my fellow faculty women at Soka University, notably, Anne Mette Fisker-
Nielsen, Johanna Zulueta, and Maria Guajardo. And all my love and grati-
tude goes to the first group of graduate students I supervised, the ‘Fabulous
Six’ (Ankita, Enn Li, Kit, Monica, Raissa, and Swati): you gave me the
particular joy of working with young women who are learning that their
thoughts and ideas deserve to be taken seriously as academic scholarship.
Revisions to early chapters, and the last two chapters in their entirety,
were written after I relocated from Japan to Aotearoa New Zealand. I am
grateful to Massey University and the Politics and International Relations
programme in the School of People, Environment and Planning for giving
me an academic home in the country I have always wanted to return to.
It took almost 45 years to make that happen, and I have been so grateful
that my COVID- 19 lockdown experience was shared with Aotearoa New
Zealand’s team of 5 million. You have inspired so much of what I have to
say in the later parts of this book about creativity, ingenuity, and the power
of community. A random offhand comment at a philosophy conference a
decade ago helped me realise that the Latin root of the word ‘community’
(munis/ muneris) positions it as a gift that we give to and share with each
other. It is easy to idealise the power of community. It is easy to sneer at it.
What is less easy is to sit with the full awareness of how much one owes
to people one may never meet, but nevertheless depends on for everyday
well- being.
Cataloguing influences for one’s work is also never easy. So many of
the items I list in chapter bibliographies are works that have shaped my
academic thinking, and merely listing them is such a pallid tribute to the
ideas and writers I have grown to love. But there is one text, one writer,
I need to acknowledge as a much more personal debt. I read Sara Ahmed’s
Acknowledgements ix
book, Living a Feminist Life, for the first time during the savage grief that
followed my mother’s death, and it was both comfort and inspiration.
Ahmed’s characterisation of feminism as a way we can put ourselves back
together resonated with me, and I clung to it. I feel the writing of this book,
Dismantling Rape Culture, as a process throughout which I have indeed
been leaning on feminism as I have been putting myself back together, after
that grief, in a new life. I’m not at all sure I could have gotten there without
Living a Feminist Life.
And, as odd and out of place as it may seem to fellow obsessive readers of
acknowledgements sections (I’ve never seen anybody do this before), I really
want to acknowledge the debt I owe to the taxpayers of Canada, without
whom the banks of Canada would never have been willing to loan me the
money to educate myself into this extraordinarily privileged life I am living.
I love teaching, and I love my scholarship. They feel deeply constitutive of
my personhood and I do each of them always in the knowledge and grati-
tude that I have this precious gift because I had the good fortune to live in
a society that still had some commitment to the ideals of community invest-
ment. Individual Canadians may or may not agree that my education was
money well-s pent, but I am proud to be a recipient and representative of
that social generosity.
On a more personal level, I am so grateful for the enduring friendship
I share with Karen Trimble Alliaume, Kari Coleman, Cristina Perissinotto,
and Chloë Taylor. All of you have coloured and contoured the thoughts in
this book, even if you don’t recognise them, even if you don’t agree with
them. Thank you for your assessment that, as Karen once so diplomatically
put the point, the benefits of being my friend outweigh the disadvantages.
And thank you to my sister Michelle, and my bracket, Julie, who don’t care
about academia at all and who don’t follow the things that make me crazy
excited, but love me enough to always know, at least in broad brushstrokes,
what I’m working on at any given point.
There is no dedication appended to this book; that is a careful and inten-
tional decision. I tried out a few instantiations, but in the end, the only thing
that felt right was to take what I think of a ‘Woody Guthrie’ approach (he
encourages people to do whatever they want with his classic song, ‘This Land
is Your Land’; all he wanted to do was write it and sing it). In that spirit,
this book is for whoever wants it, whoever resonates to its title or cover
and wonders if it might help them answer (or ask) some of their questions.
I hope the book rewards readers’ efforts.
That said, although it isn’t written exclusively for anyone, I did write the
book with my nieces and nephews in the forefront of my mind. Every word
is infused with the hope that Ruba, Rose, and Lila; Finn, Amy, and Bella;
Audrey; and Nic experience a world that is better than the one I grew up in,
and with the hope that when they reach the point that they, like me, can look
back at the patterns of their lives, they will see as much progress towards
ending sexual violence as I have seen. It is also, in memoriam, for Stephen,