In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it-consent, force, coercion-are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

About the Author
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.

Reviews
"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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478014508
Author Rana M. Jaleel
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g