Feral Feminisms, Issue 8 (Web), guest edited by Nisha Eswaran, Emma McKenna, and Sarah Wahab

Proposals by: 01.04.2017

This past year has marked a historical moment with the phrase “rape culture” featured in headlines across Canada, particularly as Jian Ghomeshi’s high profile sexual assault case received the verdict of acquittal. While some feminist criticisms of this verdict have been made public, and the affective dismay has been felt throughout our diverse communities, there remains an absence of a collective critical feminist intervention into not only the handling of the Ghomeshi trial, but also the concept of rape culture writ large. This issue of Feral Feminisms, “Critical Interventions in Rape Culture,” seeks to explore how feminists can critically intervene in rape culture, and the uneven disciplining of sexual assault by institutional, criminal, judicial, and carceral systems.

In 1988, Canadian feminist scholar Susan Sherwin asserted that “patriarchy, or male domination, is the social norm throughout our culture” and that “such dominance has been further reinforced through the various means by which men control women’s sexuality” (137). Sherwin argues that heterosexual rape is one of these primary “mechanisms to … read more (Web)