In The Work of Rape Rana M. Jaleel argues that the redefinition of sexual violence within international law as a war crime, crime against humanity, and genocide owes a disturbing and unacknowledged debt to power and knowledge achieved from racial, imperial, and settler colonial domination. Prioritizing critiques of racial capitalism from women of color, Indigenous, queer, trans, and Global South perspectives, Jaleel reorients how violence is socially defined and distributed through legal definitions of rape. From Cold War conflicts in Latin America, the 1990s ethnic wars in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and the War on Terror to ongoing debates about sexual assault on college campuses, Jaleel considers how legal and social iterations of rape and the terms that define it—consent, force, coercion—are unstable indexes and abstractions of social difference that mediate racial and colonial positionalities. Jaleel traces how post-Cold War orders of global security and governance simultaneously transform the meaning of sexualized violence, extend US empire, and disavow legacies of enslavement, Indigenous dispossession, and racialized violence within the United States.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Rana M. Jaleel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis. As a member of Writers for the 99%, she coauthored Occupying Wall Street.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. The Work of Rape  1
1. The US Sex Wars Meet the Ethnic Wars  49
2. States of War, Men as State: The Tortured Americas, Genocidal Balkans, and the Sexual State Form  88
3. My Own Private Genocide: From Ethnic War to the War on Terror  110
4. Two Title IXs: Empire and the Transnational Production of "Welcomeness" on Campus  142
Epilogue. Decolonial and Abolitionist Feminisms and the Work of Rape  174
Notes  187
Bibliography  229
Index  255