Recent activist, policy, and government efforts to engage in campus rape prevention education (RPE), culminating in the 2014 White House Task Force recommendations to combat campus sexual assault, prompt a need to examine the concept of "prevention" in the context of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses and their surrounding community service agencies. This article reviews previous research on effective resistance to sexual assault, showing that self-defense is a well-established protective factor in a public health model of sexual assault prevention. The article goes on to show, through an examination of campus rape prevention efforts framed as "primary prevention," that self-defense is routinely excluded. This creates a hidden curriculum that preserves a gender status quo even while it strives for change. The article concludes with recommendations for how administrators, educators, facilitators, funding agencies, and others can incorporate self-defense into campus RPE for a more effective, data-driven set of sexual assault prevention efforts.
This article presents participant-observation research from five female-only sex-toy parties. We situate the sale of sex toys in the context of in-home marketing to women, the explosion of a sex industry, and the emergence of lifestyle and body politics. We explore the significance of sex toys for women as marketed in female-only contexts, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences with Tupperware's marketing of plastic that promises happiness to women. We argue that sex-toy sales follow the exact patterns of Tupperware sales but, since the artifacts sold are for the bedroom rather than the kitchen, foster an even greater sense of intimacy between the women--which has both positive and negative consequences for thinking critically about the commodification of sexuality, bodies, and lifestyles in our capitalist culture. Vibrators and other sex toys constitute the technological route to a self-reflexive body project of female orgasm. We ask to what extent such a body project, achieved primarily through an individualistic, capitalistic consumption model, can offer a critique of normative discourses of heterosexual sex and identity. Is this new plastic purchased at parties liberatory or just another form of containment? In other words, how much Tupperware does a woman really need to buy, before she's been bought?
This paper examines two ways to use visual images while teaching about sexual violence. We first present and critique the conventional approach, which employs images of men doing violence to women. We then discuss our approach, which employs images of women confronting and violently attacking men. We discuss our success in using these images in our rape prevention lectures over the past three years. Our analysis of students' reactions to the presentations reveals that showing images of aggressive women radically destabilizes men's sense of physical power over women. impelling the abuse of women, however" natural "it may appear to be. Whereas many people accuse Dworkin and MacKinnon of "essentialism, "we understand them to be relentless constructionists.
This article presents ethnographic research on women's self-defense training and suggests that women's self-defense culture prompts feminists to refigure our understanding of the body and violence. The body in feminist discourse is often construed as the object of patriarchal violence (actual or symbolic), and violence has been construed as something that is variously oppressive, diminishing, inappropriate, and masculinist. Hence, many feminists have been apathetic to women's self-defense. As a practice that rehearses, and even celebrates women's potential for violence, women's self-defense illustrates how and why feminism can frame the body as both a social construction and as politically significant for theory and activism.
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