Abstract
This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).
Subject
Cultural Studies,Gender Studies
Reference101 articles.
1. Illegible Violence: The Rape and Sexual Abuse of Male Slaves;Aidoo,2018
2. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880–1922
3. On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism;Bailey;Feminist Media Studies,2018
Cited by
6 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Eighteenth-Century Proud Boys; or, Why Sir Charles Grandison is (a) No Wanker;Eighteenth-Century Fiction;2024-04-01
2. What Does Rape Look Like?;Explorations in Renaissance Culture;2023-08-17
3. The Rhetoric of Rape Through the Lens of Commonwealth V. Berkowitz;International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique;2023-08-02
4. Rape;Victorian Literature and Culture;2023
5. What Pornography Knows;2022-10-21