Work of Rape

Rana M. Jaleel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis. As a member of Writers for the 99%, she coauthored Occupying Wall Street.

“Imaginative and deeply ambitious, The Work of Rape upends conventional thinking. Traversing a vast terrain, Rana M. Jaleel insists we turn from how rape has been problematically framed through various feminist legal efforts so we may reconceptualize its relation to racial and colonial world orderings of life. A brilliant and convincing book.” - Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley “Rana M. Jaleel presents an eye-opening and mesmerizing global account of the contexts, significations, and meanings that rape as a juridical offense and cultural term has undergone from the 1990s to the present. She boldly intervenes into current discussions about rectifying the pervasiveness of societal sexual violence that has been reignited by movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo. One walks away from this book with new clarity about the substantive differences and stakes among women of color, Indigenous, queer, and radical feminist frameworks for understanding sexual violence and for acting against it. This is the book I’ve wanted for these times.” - Chandan Reddy, author of (Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State) "The Work of Rape is a challenging text, but one that asks us to think deeply and seriously about feminist and queer theory, sexual violence, racialization, and the politics of rape." - Sameena Mulla (GLQ) "The Work of Rape provides an insightful examination of the past 40 years of international legal recognition of forms of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) as a type of genocide and torture. ... [Jaleel's] book meaningfully challenges our overemphasis on international feminist efforts as inherently victorious and pushes us to do the much more difficult work of examining the deeper political struggles being articulated through the legal definition and prosecution of rape." - Sarah Nandi (International Feminist Journal of Politics)

• Acknowledgments  viiIntroduction. The Work of Rape  11. The US Sex Wars Meet the Ethnic Wars  492. States of War, Men as State: The Tortured Americas, Genocidal Balkans, and the Sexual State Form  883. My Own Private Genocide: From Ethnic War to the War on Terror  1104. Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of "Welcomeness" on Campus  142Epilogue. Decolonial and Abolitionist Feminisms and the Work of Rape  174Notes  187Bibliography  229Index  255