Text

theses

ETD doctoral

This dissertation examines African American women’s anti-rape activism and
advocacy from 1974 to 1994, as the feminist movement against sexual violence grew
increasingly intertwined with the U.S. carceral state. By 1980, nearly 500 feminist rape
crisis centers were in operation across the United States. These centers were staffed by
women of all races who were determined to end the callous treatment of rape victims by
the criminal justice system and, eventually, eradicate rape altogether. In the same period,
policymakers who were fighting the federal “War on Crime” designated a series of
agencies and acts to support feminist anti-rape activity, such as the Law Enforcement
Assistance Administration, the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape,
the Victims of Crime Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. These entities
promoted the carceral tactics of policing, prosecution, and punishment as the only viable
means of controlling rape, and they expected the anti-rape organizers they subsidized to
embrace them. Yet Black women anti-rape organizers knew from experience that law
enforcement entities that were openly hostile towards Black bodies could not be entrusted
with the protection of Black women and girls. Utilizing the archival records of feminist
rape crisis centers, publications from government agencies that subsidized anti-rape
work, state-funded research on sexual violence, and oral history interviews with
individual organizers, Controlling Rape argues that in the decades that followed the Civil
Rights Movement, Black women in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and
Atlanta adapted the longstanding historical tradition of publicly testifying against sexual
violence. They adapted in response to the reemergence of organized Black feminism,
which finally sanctioned discussion of the intraracial rape committed by Black men
against Black women, and the ascendance of the “War on Crime,” which intensely
criminalized Black life. Controlling Rape traces the nuanced, flexible anti-violence praxis
developed by Black women that confronted the abuse they encountered within their
communities without abetting the criminalization of those communities. They subverted
the state’s preferred carceral solutions to gender violence by restructuring white-dominated rape crisis centers, critiquing state-funded scientific research on the
relationship between race and rape, developing progressive curriculum for Black school
children, centering healing and care as modes of justice that did not rest upon
punishment, and resisting legislation that expanded police power over rape. By centering
Black women and girls in their anti-rape activism, Black women organizers contradicted
the assumption shared by conservative policymakers and some feminists that expanding
police power over rape would benefit women of all races and classes. This history is
instructive for contemporary feminists that seek to embrace non-white women while
holding men accountable for abuse without feeding the insatiable monster of mass
incarceration.

ETD_11565

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-y6qz-wm44

The author owns the copyright to this work.