A Genealogy of “Rape Culture”: Knowing and Governing Sexual Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2015, the Ontario government cited "rape culture" as the driving force behind provincial legislation requiring universities to count incidences of sexual violence through bolstered reporting mechanisms.The term is often described as a relic of 1970s radical feminism, and the contemporary reemergence of the phrase rape culture in social, political, and legal discourses marks a need to examine how understandings of sexual violence continue to be framed as part of a wider cultural problem.Using Michel Foucault's genealogical method and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's ideas of rhizomes and assemblages, I map the empirical, affective, and sociolegal dimensions of a rape culture paradigm.In doing so, I ask: What are the social and historic conditions that give rise to the rape culture paradigm?What are epistemological frameworks that galvanize the social ontology of rape culture?In what ways is the concept deployed and how does it shape efforts to regulate and criminalize sexual and gender-based violence?Beginning with an examination of radical feminist activism in the US and Canada from the late 1960s onwards, I consider how the idea of rape culture expands traditional definitions of corporeal harm to include cultural forms of gendered violence.The making of the rape culture concept rests in mapping pathology beyond individual rapists and theorizing the attitudes towards rapeand acts of sexual assault-as cultural pathology.This relies upon challenging traditional psy knowledges related to rapists and deviancy in favour of highlighting the normality and ubiquity of rapists.Contemporary calls to combat rape culture have centred on the regulation of sexual violence on university campuses.This project also considers the specific discursive technologies used to construct the "rape campus."It argues that recent political and legal responses to rape culture on university campuses is folded into existing carceral and punitive assemblages that seek to criminalize sexual violence.Thus, this dissertation contributes to a historicization of the rape culture concept, its deployment, and how it shapes understandings of sexual violence theory and governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".