Talk About [Men's Perpetration of] Sexual Assault [Against Women]
Abstract
Building upon feminist analyses of talk about sexual assault, I use discourse analysis to examine the ways in which speakers construct sexual assault, victims, and perpetrators; describe how sexual assault is and should be prevented; and, set out who is and should be responsible for preventing it. I read from speakers’ talk constructions of women-directed sexual assault “prevention” as a series of unofficial, conduct-circumscribing rules that keep rule-compliant women safe and render or position other women partially or wholly responsible for the sexual assaults that men perpetrate against them. By examining the often subtle and nuanced ways in which women-directed sexual assault avoidance-oriented messages and victim-blaming intersect, I demonstrate how speakers construct women as responsible for men’s perpetration of sexual assault against them. I argue that these constructions are accomplished in speakers’ formulations of sexual assault as a virtually self-perpetuated outcome produced by women who daftly or deliberately breach these conduct-governing rules. Moreover, I maintain that these rules are grounded in hitherto largely unexamined and problematic assumptions about men that in essence task women with compensating for men’s ostensive deficits. I identify and describe seven discursive themes or “interpretative repertoires” that speakers routinely deploy in talk about sexual assault that effaces and/or exculpates perpetrators and implicates and incriminates women. On the whole, in this work that aims to unsettle the sedimentation of perpetrator-concealing, victim-blaming talk, I identify and describe several rhetorical features in speakers’ talk about sexual assault that absolves men and blames women for the sexual assaults that men perpetrate against them. I conclude by identifying a series of alternative discursive practices and strategies that readers might employ in an effort to speak change in terms of how we talk about men’s perpetration of sexual assault against women.
Description
Keywords
Social Work, Sociology, WomenÕs Studies
Citation
Mikita, K. (2016). Talk About [Men's Perpetration of] Sexual Assault [Against Women] (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27973