The book analyses rape culture through the lens of the ‘Me Too’ era.
Once upon a time a beautiful princess was kissed by a stranger without her consent (while she was unconscious) and then she had to marry him. Sort of creepy right?!
Dr Tracey Nicholls, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Massey University, has recently published a book Dismantling Rape Culture, The Peacebuilding Power of ‘Me Too’.
“The book is about rape culture, the context in which sexual violence takes place and is normalised, and ways that it has been theorised and resisted, most recently through ‘Me Too’ movements,” Dr Nicholls says.
“The book’s key argument is that cultural attitudes and behaviours can be shifted by introducing ‘disrupting narratives’. Each chapter in the book ends with a ‘culture- jammed’ re- telling of a traditional fairy tale.”
The titles of each chapter demonstrate the book’s themes:
- Once upon a time … Rape Culture is Structural Violence
- A beautiful girl met a handsome prince … Toxic Masculinity and Complicit Femininity
- And it was love at first sight … The Spectrum of Problematic Sex
- Until it wasn’t anymore … How ‘Me Too’ Came to Work
- And they all lived better than before … Culture-Jamming Our Way to a Better World
The book analyses rape culture through the lens of the ‘Me Too’ era.
“By combining feminist theory with peace studies and improvisation theory, it advocates for building peace and social justice to transform culture and for ‘culture- jamming’ as a mechanism to dismantle rape culture. I’ve drawn on my background in improvisation studies (theorising improvised jazz practices as a model for building more democratic communities) to argue that rape culture can be ‘culture-jammed’.
“The book pulls together different threads of work I have been doing throughout my academic life and offers a way to understand the value of ‘Me Too’ conversations that is not often heard: that these discourses are fundamentally about gender equality, and that gender equality is best understood as a peace-building project, drawing on feminist peace-studies theorising of peace-building as including robust conditions of social justice,” Dr Nicholls adds.
“It combines my activist work in anti-sexual assault movements with my work in feminist peace studies to show why I think we should understand ‘Me Too’ as a necessary call to reform harmful cultures instead of dismissing it as a passing fad.”
Associate Professor Tracey Nicholls at her book launch, held on Massey's Auckland campus, 17 March 2022.
Dr Nicholls hopes the book will help people see more of the insidious sexual violence such as cat-calls, commodification of women’s bodies, victim-blaming language, and gender policing.
“These all normalise rape culture as a widespread cultural framework in which we are all supposed to understand women as being ‘for men,’ and in which even actual sexual assault victims are encouraged to see what happened to them as ‘not that bad.’
“I also hope it will help readers think more deeply about what counts as genuinely consenting to sex and what counts as sexual assault. I think anyone interested in why societies downplay sexual violence could find insights in it.”
An event to launch Dr Nicholls’ book was held on 17 March in collaboration with the Albany Student Association. An important part of the event was re-telling traditional fairy tales from a feminist lens.
Dismantling Rape Culture is published by Routledge Books under an Open Access agreement, so pdfs of each chapter and the whole book can be downloaded here.
The book was published under an Open Access agreement, so can be downloaded for free.