A Call to Arms: The Centrality of Feminist Consciousness‐Raising Speak‐Outs to the Recovery of Rape Survivors

Hypatia ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 730-745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Kelland
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Rape Survivors ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
Canonical Narratives

This article explores the various challenges that survivors of rape and sexual violence face when attempting to construct a narrative of their experience under political and epistemic conditions that are not supportive: including the absence of adequate language with which to understand, articulate, and explain their experiences; narrative disruptions at the personal, interpersonal, and social levels; hermeneutical injustice; and canonical narratives that typically further the harms experienced by survivors. In response, I argue that feminist consciousness‐raising speak‐outs should be revived by contemporary feminists since they are able to do significant work to ameliorate the above‐mentioned challenges and thereby aid in the recovery of rape survivors.

When Feminism Went to Market

2019 ◽  
pp. 418-436
Author(s):  
Rachel R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Women's Work ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Women’S Work ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
Feminist Discourse ◽  
Material Conditions

The comics anthology has long served as a productive format by which creators with a feminist consciousness have made their individual efforts visible and elaborated their networks of other like-minded creators. The material conditions under which comics anthologies with a feminist consciousness are made and received reveal how comics are a unique medium whose reach extends beyond the spaces where we expect to find feminist discourse, such as the feminist bookstore, rally, or consciousness-raising meeting. Looking at how feminist comics anthologies address these material conditions, this chapter considers how Sarah Dyer’s Action Girl Comics anthology in the early 1990s is inflected by Dyer’s history as a grass-roots zine maker and situates itself within the larger comics industry. The chapter then turns to Dyer’s archive at the Sallie Bingham Center to elaborate how her all-girl comics anthology’s mission to saturate the comics marketplace with women’s work actually played out.

Rethinking Rape in the American Cultural and Literary Landscape

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Robin E. Field
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Rape Myths ◽  
Psychological Trauma ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Second Wave

The introduction establishes the urgency of the feminist project of the 1970s to challenge the prevalent rape myths of the twentieth century: rape does not exist; women should simply enjoy sex even when they are forced into the act; and violent sex is pornographic and titillating, but not a crime. Earlier representations of rape in American fiction were not told through the perspective of the victim; instead, an unsympathetic bystander or even the perpetrator recounts the events. Women began portraying rape as rape—as a violent, nonconsensual act—once second-wave feminists challenged rape myths through consciousness-raising sessions, publications, and public activism. The resultant new genre of fiction, the rape novel, prioritizes the survivor and her physical and psychological trauma. The rape novel works to change the culture that allows rape and sexual violence to occur, demonstrating the transformative power of literature to educate, inspire activism, and promote healing.

Consciousness-Raising

2020 ◽  
pp. 232-245
Author(s):  
Tabatha Leggett
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
First Person ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Collective Voice ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines consciousness-raising as a means of challenging oppression. Bringing the #MeToo movement into contact with first-person accounts and criticisms of the radical feminist consciousness-raising groups that formed in New York and Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, it suggests that they remain an essential force to challenge female oppression today. It touches on the various ways that patriarchal structures silence women, how consciousness-raising undercuts this silencing by giving women a collective voice, and how social media can amplify this voice. Finally, it addresses common criticisms of consciousness-raising movements, especially concerning the disproportionate focus on white women’s concerns that they have historically represented and universalized. It touches on Kimberlé Crenhaw’s theory of intersectionality as well as Paulo Friere’s conception of critical consciousness theory to explore the notion of truly inclusive consciousness-raising movements.

#MeToo, the ICTY, and Intersectionality in Postsocialist Global Capitalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-230
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Zenovich ◽  
Leda Cooks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Rape Survivors ◽  
Material Equation ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist Theory ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist

In this essay, we theorize and analyze (some of) the intercultural and intersecting structures that undergird rape and its representation in #MeToo via testimonial examples from rape survivors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). While we recognize the importance of the ICTY’s ruling and of #MeToo, we remain critical of the conditions that necessitated them and that continue to mark women’s bodies as vulnerable. Utilizing both postsocialist and postcolonial feminist theory as a lens, we specifically look to how bodies are articulated both as capital/property and, in the same international judicial frame, vessels for punishment and justice. We focus on how the ICTY defined justice for rape on a mediated international stage, how identities and cultures were situated discursively in the trial, and the implications for thinking through justice for intersectionality in #MeToo. Our claim is that the symbolic and material equation of women/women’s bodies as property is foundational to the operations of capital. With this framework in mind, it may be useful to consider how undoing capital may in turn challenge the normalization of women’s precarity, victimization, and therefore, experiences of sexual violence.

Awareness and Change

Ethical Life ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Webb Keane
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Social Analysis ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Feminist Consciousness ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter discusses the idea of ethical history, looking at situations in which hitherto taken-for-granted aspects of everyday life came to be the focus of attention, such as feminist consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the American feminist movement is the invention and promulgation of the technique of consciousness-raising. Consciousness-raising is interesting for several reasons: it took very seriously the effects of problematizing the habits of everyday life, it succeeded in changing the descriptions and evaluations of actions and persons that were available for many Americans, and it ultimately foundered, in part, on an unresolved tension between subjective experience and objective social analysis. The chapter then argues that processes like this play an important role in the historical transformations of ethical and moral worlds.

“Mythologized for Its Misogyny”

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 185-198
Author(s):  
Carolyn Bronstein ◽  
Jacqueline Lambiase
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Creative Industry ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Advertising Industry ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Feminist Consciousness

Much like other creative professions, the advertising industry and especially its creative departments have been host to a culture of discrimination and sexual harassment, with recent high-profile incidents leading to the formation of Time's Up/Advertising in 2018. These incidents have revived feminist consciousness-raising in new forms and old, inspiring new commitments to fighting sexism in agencies. This essay discusses the origins of Time's Up/Advertising and its initial actions, as well as the challenges the movement will face in its efforts to rid the advertising industry of misogyny. These problems must be solved if advertising aspires to remain a viable creative industry.

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