Abstract
Pitched to theoreticians and those engaged in public activism, particularly in efforts to translate activism into change in the direction of social (spatial) justice, Dr. Alexandra Fanghanel’s new book, Disrupting Rape Culture: Public Space, Sexuality, and Revolt, seeks to examine the role of publically disruptive bodies in building social (spatial) justice and upending rape culture. Through three extended case studies of pregnancy, public protest, and BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, sadism, masochism, and sadomasochism), Dr. Fanghanel, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Greenwich in London, explores the capacity of transgressive, or seemingly transgressive, practices in public spaces to undo and challenge rape culture. She urges anti-oppressive practitioners to “Become-Trouble” and not to lose hope in the pursuit of change through “slow incremental molecular revolution” (p. 167). These case studies each provide a unique lens on gendered experiences that have the capacity to disturb public spaces, and Fanghanel uses each to explore their potential for creating disruption to oppressive injustice. The examples provided are predominantly from the United States and United Kingdom and can leave the reader wishing for a more explicitly transnational approach to these questions. However, readers seeking to evaluate critically the role, efficacy, and intent of public action intended to dismantle rape culture and build social justice—including the sometimes radical act of simply being one’s whole self in public—will find the three case studies in the book to provide a nuanced picture of the sometimes conflicting forces at play in anti-oppressive work.
Applying a wide range of evidence to the three cases studied, from epidemiological data to social media accounts to autoethnography, Fanghanel identifies a difficult truth, that the problem of rape culture cannot be (solely) overcome through careful policy making or legal reform, but that it instead will require a fundamental change in how bodies engage with and can transform public space. For social work educators, this message serves as an important reminder to consider our roles as, in part, bodies interacting with public spaces, including in the classroom.
As social work educators, we would be well-advised to consider the role of trauma when examining public bodies, an examination that was notably sparse in this work. Dr. Fanghanel makes a strong and compelling argument rejecting the use of victimizing language for survivors of violence. However, this practice of avoiding terms of victimization can be accomplished while simultaneously holding the truth that survivors of violence (including and especially important in the context of this work, survivors of violence against women) do have specific needs in the aftermath of trauma, concerns which often interact and interrupt their experience of public spaces. Indeed, trauma has important implications for each of the three primary examples explored.
It is unfortunate that, with the timing of publication, Dr. Fanghanel missed by only a few months the opportunity to apply her analysis to the context of COVID-19, a pandemic which has opened a whole new set of questions related to bodies in public spaces and the co-creation of anti-oppressive change. With a wide-release publication date of August of 2020, readers will encounter a description of the experience and messages of public embodied-ness that may feel strangely anachronistic. A discussion of the sometimes transgressive nature of being embodied in public space, particularly in close proximity to others, takes on a different flavor in the context of a worldwide pandemic, where the bodies of others are seemingly inherently dangerous and transgressive due to their potential threat as a vector of disease. Nonetheless, interested readers will appreciate the opportunity to consider questions about how and when we engage in protest, and how identity, space, and place shape the meaning of our collective struggle for social (spatial) justice.
