Author: Former Student

Theory to Praxis: Paper Campaign Exposing the Pervasiveness of Rape Culture on Davidson College’s Campus

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Rape culture is pervasive everywhere and places like Davidson College are by no means exempt from this. Davidson College is not only known for its high academics, but as an environment that highly values trust and honor among its community members. With this in mind, many individuals assume that aspects of rape culture are not prevalent on campus, however, these practices and behaviors not only manifest themselves within the campus’s culture, but occurrences of them and their impacts are often silenced. In turn, keeping people’s stories and experiences quiet or “under the radar” only reinforces rape culture and feeds into upholding it. On Davidson’s campus, there have been a few attempts to bring these stories to light and expose how rape culture is much more prevalent than individuals initially assume. However, many of these efforts were not effective long-term or did not make a large enough impact to change the overall perception of Davidson College’s culture. 

There are many strategies used to fight against the normalization of rape culture everywhere that I believe would be just as successful if implemented on a smaller scale such as the Davidson College campus. For example, one of Aristotle’s epideictic forms of rhetoric, megethos, was and still is utilized as a central part of #MeToo’s movement in the arrangement of a feminist list, exposing a profuse amount of stories shared by survivors. This method, emphasized by Stephanie R. Larson in her book What It Feels Like, is meant to “‘not only to engage viewers, but also to overwhelm them’ … with feelings that encourage a level of belief in victims’ testimonies and a commonplace reality of rape culture” (Larson 138). Just from the sheer number of accounts, this tactic is very useful in the way that it represents how large-scale rape culture is and how many people, particularly women, it negatively effects. To implement this strategy on campus, I propose doing a paper campaign throughout campus displaying anonymous stories related to rape culture from survivors within the Davidson community. Realizing that these papers can be a trigger for some individuals, there would be an additional paper on top of these stores with a content warning. So, while these papers are sharing the stories of survivors and making the magnitude of rape culture’s impacts known, they are also enacting active consent. To fund this project, I want to apply for the Stories Yet To Be Told grant, which specifically focuses on sharing people’s stories and transforming sites into places of engagement. 

By initiating this paper campaign and using the rhetorical tactic of megethos, light can be shed on how rape culture is prevalent everywhere, even on Davidson College’s campus. The high number of papers with different stories on them will hopefully make the magnitude of stories alarmingly clear and expose the extent rape culture impacts those around us. In addition to this, it will also provide an opportunity for survivors to share their stories, even if it is anonymous, giving their stories the power to bring awareness to the community and inspire change. 

Larson, Stephanie L. What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 

Feminist Mix-tape: “Girls in the Hood”

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Since gaining massive popularity and consistently increasing her fanbase over the last few years, Megan Thee Stallion is transforming the genre of rap through the incorporation of feminist ideology within her song lyrics while displaying how the racially charged controlling image of the Jezebel still persists today. Through her explicit lyrics in the majority of her songs, she confidently discusses her sexuality while empowering other women to do the same. Specifically, in her song “Girls in the Hood,” she refuses to appease the fragile male ego by voicing “You’ll never catch me callin’ these [guys] daddy (nope). I ain’t lyin’ ’bout my nut just to make a [guy] happy.” Megan encourages women to demand pleasure from sex while crushing the taboo surrounding the sexuality of women at large. However, her assertive compositions working against misogyny within the music industry is certainly not immune from controversy. Many people apply the controlling image of the Jezebel, a concept discussed by Patricia Hill Collins in her work Controlling Images and Black Women’s Oppression, to Megan Thee Stallion in response to her song lyrics and overall confidence. This controlling image of the Jezebel, stronger than just a stereotype, represents a “whore, or sexually aggressive woman [and] is central in the nexus of elite white male images of Black womanhood because efforts to control Black women’s sexuality lie at the heart of Black women’s oppression” (Collins 271). Labeling Megan as a Jezebel attempts to continue the music industry’s long history of misogyny and racism, as well as counter the massive influence she has over the public through her songs like “Girls in the Hood.” This example of the placement of racially charged controlling images on Black women is an issue womansim, essentially Black feminism, confronts that white feminism usually fails to acknowledge (Duke University). But despite this projection onto Megan and the overall pushback her work receives, she continues to encourage the empowerment of women, especially related to sexuality, and transform the general messages promoted by the music industry. 

*What It Feels Like*: Book Review

Posted on by Former Student

Rape culture is so pervasive in almost every aspect of today’s society, sometimes seemingly impossible to combat, however, in her book What It Feels Like, Stephanie R. Larson examines rape culture from a rhetorical perspective and gives insight on the possible resolutions for its abolishment. As part of this solution, Larson introduces the concept of “visceral rhetorics,” which describes the felt communication that takes place within one’s self as well as the erasure of this perspective, and explains why this conceptual framework is often overlooked when it has the power to uproot rape culture altogether. She deeply analyses how we communicate about rape culture by examining a multitude of different case studies, revealing how much the embodied experience is undermined within this discourse, along with certain types of evidence like personal testimonials and voices such as non-white women. 

In the first chapter, Larson examines pornography and the movements against it in the 1980’s, uncovering how these create a notion of sexual citizenship and risk connected to it, resulting in panic surrounding individuals accused of sexual violence while simultaneously ignoring actual victims. Rape prevention campaigns build off this notion in Chapter 2 to include the bystander, but ultimately highlight how the issues and solutions related to rape currently center around the male perspective. While Chapter 1 and 2 discuss the consequence of women’s bodies being deemed unfit for body politics because of the centralization of men in rape culture, Chapter 3 and 4 take a turn focusing on how women’s bodies are leveraged politically in the response of rape. These two chapters explore how the embodied experience of sexual violence victims is often seen as inferior to other kinds of evidence, particularly though technological tools like rape kits, even though this visceral framework is essential to shape the public’s perception of rape. Lastly in Chapter 5, Larson argues how powerful the feminist implementation of megethos, a central aspect of Aristotle’s epideictic forms of rhetoric, also meaning magnitude, within the #MeToo movement is in order to show the magnitude of rape culture in our society today. Not only did the sheer number of responses reveal the reality of rape culture, it also created collective believability surrounding it. The analysis of these case studies ultimately display Larson’s main point that “discourses about rape culture rely on strategies of containment to assert control over a presumed affective excess of femininity but also that those discourses can be challenged by mobilizing forms of embodiment that stress what it feels like to be raped” (4). 

Stephanie R. Larson, the author of What It Feels Like, is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Melon University in the department of English. Although this is Larson’s first book, she is already very involved in the rhetorical community through presenting at many conferences, her CV demonstrates her engaging in interviews, and continuously publishing new written work pertaining to rape culture, mostly in the form of scholarly articles. Larson predominantly focuses on the topic of rape in all of her work because she views it as a necessity at this point and shares “I do not want to live in a society where people experience violence and then have no way to talk about it or are met with skepticism when they try. I study rape culture because I know it to be a true and pervasive reality” (xiv). This book builds off of past scholar’s work by in feminist rhetoric by not only addressing how women’s voices are being silenced by rape culture, but how rape culture suppresses their bodies as well. 

To come to this conclusion, Larson analyses anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances by survivors, and online social movements (5). By using the methodology of rhetorical analysis, as well as using information from historical archives, she examines this history of rape culture, how rape culture is still present today, the rhetorical strategies used to uphold it, as well as what rhetorical strategies could be useful to abolishing it (7). Each of these sources provide a different angle, strengthening Larson’s overall point of the importance of embodiment and its potential to uproot rape culture when shared and believed. 

In Chapter 1, Larson begins by addressing the case study of the Meese Commission, a commission ordered by Ronald Regan investigating the impacts of pornography, focusing on the historical legacy of the construction of a victim’s subjectivity in contemporary public discourse. Connected to pornography, the distinction of a “proper citizen” through sensation experience was a large aspect intertwined in this inspection and shaped the meaning of what constituted as victimhood (35). This ultimately resulted in victims not fitting into this conceptualization of the “ideal citizen.” Through the main arguments of the letters written to the commission, blame shifted away from the men viewing pornography to the sexuality happening within it, serving as a basis in the decision of what bodies are valuable (41). This eventually led to the definition of rape during the 1980s to stray away from inherently sexually violent behavior to a consequence of male contamination, bringing the focus to the rehabilitation of straight white males and away from the actual experiences of victims (41). The declaration of women’s sexuality as the real threat in rape cases and failure to truly listen to the experiences of victims allowed the histories of misogyny, white supremacy, and violent masculinity to go unrecognized within the overall discussion of rape. 

Larson then brings attention to bystander discourses in Chapter 2 by analyzing the two contemporary rape prevention campaigns “It’s On Us” and “1 is 2 Many”. She heavily critiques “It’s On Us” regarding their history centered around protecting white womanhood and how this is still seen in their discussion of the bystander, along with the promotion of other problematic misconceptions like feeding into the racial stereotype of Black men as the majority of rapists (71). In a similar way, “1 is 2 Many” offers men as the answer to fixing the horrors of rape culture, without considering how “masculinity remains unquestioned while it is leveraged as the solution” (78). By presenting these two examples in regard to the role of the bystander, Larson acknowledges that in attempting to change the logics of rape culture by shifting the responsibility away from women, men are often viewed as the ideal mitigators of rape culture. In turn, this completely disregards the fact that men’s actions created this issue and continue to fuel it today. 

Chapter 3 and 4 shift the focus of this book by looking at how bodies interact with the public and overall discourse of rape in personal, and usually responsive, ways. To begin this transfer in discussion, Larson analyses how rape kits, while beneficial in supplementing testimonials, overshadow the voices and embodied accounts of victims, deeming them less credible (87). Larson identifies three of the largest problems surrounding them, being: situating rape as a problem with violent criminals with no cultural aspect involved, placing far too much emphasis on scientific tools like rape kits which leads the public further away from believing victims, and the control of a rape experience by medical, legislative, and testimonial accounts, going against the value of visceral rhetorics (99, 103, 111). Rape kits ultimately turn the prevalence of rape into a scientific matter with scientific answers, ignoring underlying historical, cultural, and ideological factors, while simultaneously furthering the notion that the body and its boundaries are inferior in regard to rape cases (95).

 However, Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller, both victims of high-profile rape cases, push against this effacing by publicly centering their bodies in a form of protest, highlighted in Chapter 4 (113). In 2016, Miller read a letter she wrote aloud in court that many news outlets published shortly after in which she asks her audience not to just see her perspective, but “to feel her perspective, to feel what her body felt in the aftermath of rape” after describing her embodied experience (122). Sulkowicz released her performance, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, online in 2015, a staged violent raping that forces viewers to see and feel rape, evoking a visceral response from them and giving her audience a better understanding of the embodied responses to situations of rape (128). Not only do these performances help alter the public’s opinion by assessing rape outside of the male perspective, it also brings attention to non-white women and gender nonbinary people who usually get left out of the wider public discourses of rape (114). While Miller’s form of visceral counterpublicity internalizes the use of the body and Solowitz’s externalizes it, they both expose public audiences to this embodied violence and better shape their understanding of how the body should be centralized in the instance of rape.

Following these instances that sparking embodied reactions among the public came the #MeToo movement, ultimately shifting how the world views sexual violence and the discussion surrounding it. In April 2017, Alyssa Milano sent out a tweet encouraging those who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to unite themselves by using #MeToo hashtag (136). The sheer number of responses to this tweet led to the rhetorical form of megethos, or magnitude, that transformed the discussion of rape culture (138). This extensive list of experiences not only engaged viewers, but it overwhelmed them, bringing to light just how common these instances occur. This list employs feminist megethos as a strategy that helps undo problematic, yet normalized, attitudes towards rape, expose the reality of rape culture, and offers another tactic of visceral rhetoric to change the discourse surrounding rape and rape culture at large. 

One of Larson’s greatest strengths throughout her book was her the variation in case studies she used to justify her points. Including sources like anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances by survivors, and online social movements allows for a more holistic understanding of the importance of embodied experiences and the power they have to abolish rape culture. In addition to this, something very commendable throughout Larson’s writing is the alternate wording of complicated concepts and arguments she offers. Continuously, she would make a statement then follow it with phrases like “in other words,” making her arguments very clear and easier to grapple by hearing them in different ways. 

Centering discourse around the male perspective is one of the main issues of rape culture presented throughout the entire book, but one of Larson’s weaknesses is not addressing male victims. By no means should the focus on male victims be prevalent throughout the book since only 9% of rape victims are male, but discussing one example of how the experiences of male victims shape the visceral response of their audience would be useful. Analyzing the contrast between male and female victims would offer another layer into the gendered differences embedded in rape culture.

Larson does an excellent job giving readers a better understanding of the different aspects that contribute to and reinforce rape culture by providing analysis of many distinct case studies. I think her work is an extremely useful and an important addition to feminist rhetoric, especially with this issue being so pervasive in today’s society. The grim and sometimes even disturbing reality of the impacts of rape culture in the sources used by Larson made this work difficult to read at some points, but the main argument providing a solution to help uproot rape culture provided a silver lining throughout the entire book. Although I believe everyone would benefit from reading this book, especially those involved in law, I think it would assist women who have experienced sexual violence the most. Listening to Larson explain the importance of women sharing their stories, feelings, and most importantly embodied experiences after undergoing something so traumatic in a world that constantly invalidates women would be very comforting. Everyone deserves the affirmation that their words are powerful and their feelings are valid, and through What It Feels Like, Larson does just that.  

Larson, Stephanie L. What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 

Audi’s Display of Sexism and Stereotyping

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In 2017, Audi, a German car manufacturer known for its luxury vehicles, released an advertisement to its Chinese market that sparked much controversy around the world. In their attempt to promote used cars to potential customers living in China, the brand not only displayed apparent examples of sexism, but promoted racist stereotypes. This commercial starts off with an Asian heterosexual couple standing at the alter about to get married. Right before their marriage was officially declared, the groom’s mother interrupts the officiant and begins handling the bride roughly, attempting to inspect parts of her body. Only after the bride’s future mother-in-law examines some of her physical aspects, like her eyes, nose, ears, and teeth does she declare the bride fit to marry her son and gives her approval. The terrified bride is seemingly relieved after her future mother gives the couple her consent, until the mother’s focus turns to the bride’s breasts, bring her back to a panicked state. After this blatant objectification, the commercial’s narrator voices “An important decision must be made carefully” as a red Audi Sudan zooms down a highway (Greatdung 0:22-0:23).

YouTube, 17 July 2017

This sexist Audi advertisement centers around the objectification of a woman by not only debasing the bride’s value to just her physical attributes, particularly her facial features, but also by comparing her to something one can buy and own. By insinuating that marrying a living breathing person is an equivalent decision to buying a car, Audi turns the bride into an object that can be materialized and possessed. Not only is the bride objectified by her future mother-in-law, but with the attention shifting to her breasts, she also becomes sexualized. This overt objectification and sexualization of a woman not only advance the harmful ideology of women not being actual people and simply objects for the benefit of men, it can have dangerous consequences that go beyond these beliefs. The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) makes this connection by declaring “The objectification and sexualization of girls in the media are linked to violence against women and girls worldwide” (UNICEF USA 2021). This treatment can also have a multitude of negative consequences on the targeted individual’s mental health that can last throughout a lifetime. With the massive platform stemming from the ability to air advertisements to millions of people, comes much responsibility to further notions of equality rather than ideologies that have the potential to cause an immense amount of harm. 

Not only is objectification based on gender a prominent issue in this ad, but race also plays a problematic role. The stereotype of the “tiger mom,” a term coined by Amy Chua which describes Chinese mothers as strict, controlling, and borderline abusive, is also deployed in this Audi advertisement. One aspect of this stereotype is the fixation Asian mothers have on the physical appearance of their daughters (Chua 2011). In this case, the need for the bride’s soon to be mother-in-law to examine her physical features, deciding whether they meet her standards prior to the couple’s marriage further perpetuates this stereotype. Most Asian mothers do not align with this parenting style and utilize a wide range of other strategies, contrary to popular belief. The bride also remains passive during this offensive interaction, exemplifying to this advertisement’s audience that this is the appropriate reaction in the face of maltreatment, which could be easily internalized by woman and child viewers. By displaying this inaccurate idea of what Chinese mothers usually place high value on, as well as the expectation of women staying passive, not only does Audi promote sexism, but also racist stereotypes.

Connecting these ideas, Audi exhibits how the intersection of both gender and race can work together, producing an even greater amount of discrimination for individuals like the bride in their commercial. On the basis of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, two social categorizations of the bride’s identity, being Asian and a woman, create a somewhat unique distinction of the discrimination she faces in this Audi advertisement. Unfortunately, this situation is not rare and many individuals who share these similarities in their identity experience this prejudice on a day-to-day basis. 

Shortly after this commercial aired, it received mass amount of criticism and backlash from the public. One commenter even voiced “The annoying thing about Audi’s used-car ad, besides its objectification of women, is that it thinks Chinese customers deserve only commercials like this” (Washington Post 2019). Others simply called the advisement sexist and disgusting. Many people initiated plans to boycott this company and convinced those around them to partake in this form of protest. Following this severe condemnation, Audi apologized for its ignorance related to this particular incident, assured the public an internal investigation would take place to avoid a mistake like this in the future, and removed this advertisement from television. Audi’s response to this backlash and quick withdraw of their commercial displays the power the public holds and how each individual’s voice matters when speaking out against discrimination. 

Unfortunately, this type of sexist and racist commercial is not the only one of its kind. These companies must continue to be held responsible for the harmful ideologies their advertisements promote and be hyper aware of the massive audience they have the ability to reach just through the commercials they release. These examples of sexism and racism through promoting stereotypes and targeting certain audiences unfairly in advertising must come to an end in order to create a more egalitarian world. These large-scale brands have the responsibility to advance impactful and beneficial messages to the massive audience they are capable of reaching, instead of carelessly feeding this harmful ideology to the masses. 

Works Cited: 

Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Penguin Books, 2011. 

Greatdung. “Audi Used Car Commercial in China. Full of Sex Discrimination.” YouTube, YouTube, 17 July 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiBva8pEgTc. 

Smith, Jamiee, and Hannah Gould. “Not an Object: On Sexualization and Exploitation of Women and Girls.” UNICEF USA, 11 Jan. 2021, www.unicefusa.org/stories/not-object-sexualization-and-exploitation-women-and-girls/30366. 

Wang, Amy B. “An Audi Commercial in China Compared Women to Used Cars. It Didn’t Go Well.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 18 Apr. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/07/18/an-audi-commercial-in-china-compared-women-to-used-cars-it-didnt-go-well/.