This is Rape Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.2.2017.3612

Keywords:

rape culture, universities

Abstract

“This is Rape Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen” uses the affordances offeredby multi-perspectival short fiction and thick description to re-centre attention on first-personexperience and the “taken-for-granted” complexities of everyday life that are at the heart of rape culture. It attempts to highlight the “everydayness” of rape culture which makes rape almost invisible within a normalised milieu of predatory sexual behaviour. In this, it draws on sociological theories of the practices of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1947/1991; de Certeau, 1974/1984; Felski, 1999), in which commonplace situations, mundane routines, and normal behaviours — that are usually taken for granted — are focalised. My story takes place on a college campus in North America, and involves a pivotal conversation between a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman that draws attention to the different ways in which rape is visible or invisible depending on characters’ (and readers’) positioning in relation to hegemonic social norms.

Author Biography

Victoria Kuttainen, James Cook University

Dr Victoria Kuttainen is the Colin and Margaret Roderick Scholar of Comparative Literature and Senior Lecturer in English and Writing in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University. A graduate of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, in 2003 she moved to Australia with her young family to complete a PhD at the University of Queensland, where she was a member of the Postcolonial Research Group. Her scholarly publications include, among others, Unsettling Stories (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) and The Transported Imagination (Cambria, forthcoming 2018), which she has co-authored with Susann Liebeich and Sarah Galletly. An avid scholar and reader, and a passionate storyteller, Victoria is keen to experiment around ways to engage audiences of mixed demographics with complex ideas and to seek forms of communication that break free from some of the constraints of traditional scholarly publishing and potentially polarising intellectual debate.

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Published

2017-12-15

How to Cite

Kuttainen, V. (2017). This is Rape Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen. ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics, 16(2). https://doi.org/10.25120/etropic.16.2.2017.3612

Issue

Vol. 16 No. 2 (2017): Special Issue: Bold Women Write Back

Section

Stories

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