Building Sexual Misconduct Cases against Powerful Men

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Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men presents a fine-grained analysis of how the rhetorical and social aspects of rape culture and patriarchy lead to a pattern of sexual misconduct. Contributors discuss the causes of the pattern, the obstacles to overcoming it, and potential solutions through a radical feminist lens. Scholars of media, legal, gender, and women's studies will find this volume particularly useful.

Reviews

Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men would be important to both men and women, especially those making policy decisions on a state or national level.

* Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men draws needed attention to one of the gravest, neglected, and most complicated issues of our time. The book features recent cases in which relatively powerless women were pitted against powerful male celebrities, and the university campus was too frequently revealed as a hostile environment indifferent to sexual assault victims. Sensitizing readers to the complexity of sexual misconduct cases, the authors of these chapters raise our consciousness of the many advantages held by perpetrators as they seek to cover up their crimes, shame and silence victims, and evoke familiar tropes of the feminist killjoy and spiteful political assassinations. In this #Me Too moment, The Weinstein, Cosby, Kavanaugh, and Franken cases pulsate through our everyday consciousness. This book helps us understand how and why. -- Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida
Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men is an unabashedly feminist and academic collection of individual research articles which, taken on their own, seek to answer important and interesting research questions in tandem with the #MeToo movement; and taken together, explore multiple facets of the rape culture that still permeates everyday life. The running meta-narratives of perpetrator entitlement exposed in this volume empower celebrities, politicians, and athletes to engage in asymmetrical warfare with sexual assault survivors. Naming and understanding these dynamics are empowering. This timely and contemporary collection shows exactly how survivors of sexual assault and misconduct are typically the weaker parties in these battles, how they frequently absorb the costs, and how they often prevail, in spite of their weaker position, in the shifting landscape of media opinion and courts of law. -- Carol Rambo, University of Memphis
This is a very important book about the American patriarchal rape culture, sexual misconduct, and the seemingly infinite ways in which powerful men continue to be protected. The knowledgeable and critical voices in this collection use qualitative inquiry to honor the experience and injustice of sexual oppression and to highlight the challenges and promises of the uphill battle in building cases against powerful men in a culture that was designed to protect powerful men. As a collection, this book is a powerful, timely, and much needed book for social justice. -- Marcelo Diversi, Washington State University, Vancouver

Author Bio

Nicole Allaire is lecturer in the Department of English at Iowa State University.



Shing-Ling S. Chen is professor of mass communication in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.



Zhoujun Joyce Chen is professor emeritus in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.