MeToo. Meenakshi Gigi Durham

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MeToo - Meenakshi Gigi Durham


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and the silence breaking of survivors of sexual violence, practices that have shaped rape culture in multiple and complex ways. This focus on silence as systemic, especially in the media, contributes new insights into our understanding of rape culture.

      Rape culture, as a concept, has become highly visible in this MeToo moment. It is a hotly contested term and idea, which refers basically to “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women,” leading to the acceptance of rape as a normal part of life.3 While this definition addresses the societal dynamics that embed rape in everyday life, it rests on a male–female gender binary that doesn’t capture the diversity and range of experiences of sexual violence. Statistically, perpetrators tend to be cisgender straight men, but sometimes people of other genders initiate sexual violence too, so that rape occurs across categories of race, class, gender, nation, sexual orientation, and other intersectional categories of identity.

      Critics of the concept of rape culture reject it on the premise that the “developed” societies of the global North are relatively rape-free and penalize rape severely by comparison to the societies of the global South. These claims are disputable, both because rape is vastly underreported everywhere and because penalties vary, especially when social vectors such as race, class, and citizenship status are taken into account. As the second-wave feminist scholar Susan Griffin pointed out, “[t]he fact that rape is against the law should not be considered proof that rape is not in fact encouraged as part of our culture.”4 The concept of rape culture as a framework has been validated by the #MeToo hashtag and its aftermath: the millions of tweets and social media discourses swiftly exposed the pervasiveness of sexual violence in most societies. In doing so, they engaged with rape culture in myriad ways, at once recognizing, resisting, and reevaluating the concept from multiple perspectives.

      Survivors’ ability to speak is inflected by race, class, gender, and other intersecting sociocultural factors. The legal scholar Angela Onwuachi-Willig has pointed out that “[t]he recent resurgence of the #MeToo movement reflects the longstanding marginalization and exclusion that women of color experience within the larger feminist movement in US society,”5 despite the fact that women of color have been in the vanguard of legal action and community organizing against sexual violence, and despite their greater vulnerability to both sexual harassment and silencing.

      The reframing of rape as a systemic or structural problem was, even at the time, complicated by issues of race and class that were raised in the writings and speeches of women of color. The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw crystallized these themes in a landmark essay, in which she pointed out that “the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities such as race and class;”8 women of color experience sexual assault in ways that differ from how white women experience it. The neglect of racial and other factors, she argued, was another way of silencing survivors, as it “relegated the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling.”9 Thanks to these theorizations, the intersectionality of race, class, gender, and other identity markers is now an essential component of feminist approaches to rape culture, as well as to all aspects of culture and society.

      Feminist contemplation and theorization of sexual violence has identified a series of prevalent “rape myths,” which are deeply embedded in many contemporary cultures and serve to undermine the credibility and capability of survivors.11 As a consequence of these myths, rape is allowed to flourish as a social norm. A substantial body of feminist scholarship12 has identified the following prevailing rape myths:

       Only “bad girls” get raped (which implies that survivors’ behavior, clothing, sexual history, and attitude invite rape).

       Women enjoy rape (although this myth is largely gendered and not projected onto all survivors, it is nonetheless used in many contexts to rationalize rape).

       Survivors lie about being raped, especially if they have a grudge against the perpetrator.

       Survivors confuse “bad sex” with rape.

       If the survivor was drunk or used other judgment-impairing substances, the act was not rape.

       There is only one definition of rape: it is heterosexual, it involves penile–vaginal penetration, it is perpetrated


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