"No Means No..."
We're getting to the intense but strongly relevant part of my Rhetorics of Gender Activism course. Last week the focus was rape. When I first started designing the class, I knew I could get away with avoiding certain topics because there's no way to cover everything, but I also knew that this was an opportunity to talk about some things that we should but don't.

Da Man joined us last Tuesday to go over the legal definitions. We had a great discussion about how laws differ in various states. One of the big things I wanted to convey to my students is that we think we know what rape is, and we generally do, but there are debates and there are material effects in how these words are defined. We talked about the importuning law in Ohio that allowed a man to be arrested for hitting on a man but not a woman. We talked about the UConn incident from last semester where three men ejaculated on a woman's face as she slept in a dorm room and why they could not be arrested for a sex crime because of how the laws were written (ironically, the next day, a news article appeared saying that the gap in the law the allowed the men not to be arrested had been closed).

They asked some good questions and raised some good points. On Thursday, we talked about the Duke rape case and the news about the DNA evidence this week, about the rape of transgender prisoners, about why we as a culture love to joke about men being raped in prison. We talked about the first chapter of Alice Sebold's Lucky where she describes her rape in intricate detail; this was optional reading because I thought it was too intense to require, but most of them said they felt compelled to read the whole thing. We talked about the infamous University of Maryland action where all male students were labeled as "potential rapists" and women as "potential victims" and the extent of its effectiveness. We talked about our own campus and the extent to which rape is or is not taken seriously.

I made it very clear on the first day of class that we were going to talk about this later in the semester (as well as hate crimes, prostitution, and pornography). One student told me this week that she almost thought of dropping the class, but she didn't. They have to choose one of these ideas and write a short definition essay about some aspect of it, and this student is talking about writing about rape.

I like how we handled the topic this week. I've talked about it in other classes in other ways, and students do seem to appreciate the chance to have it taken seriously. They recognize the value, and some said this week that people seem not able or ready to acknowledge rape, especially date rape. I'm sure some dreaded coming to class this week; I was uneasy, too. But in the end, I felt like we talked about something that mattered. I usually think that, but this week, I knew it.
- posted by Nels @ 9:43 PM | | | Link |