What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture

What It Feels Like interrogates an underexamined reason for our failure to abolish rape in the United States: the way we communicate about it. Using affective and feminist materialist approaches to rhetorical criticism, Stephanie Larson examines how discourses about rape and sexual assault rely on strategies of containment, denying the felt experiences of victims and ultimately stalling broader claims for justice.

Investigating anti-pornography debates from the 1980s, Violence Against Women Act advocacy materials, sexual assault forensic kits, public performances, and the #MeToo movement, Larson reveals how our language privileges male perspectives and, more deeply, how it is shaped by systems of power—patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity as well as masculine commitments to “science” or “evidence.” In addition, Larson finds that the culture holds a general mistrust of testimony by women, stereotyping it as “emotional.” But she also gives us hope for change, arguing that women’s testimony—the bodily, material expression of violation—is needed to give voice to victims of sexual violence and to present, accurately, the facts of these crimes. Larson makes a case for visceral rhetorics, theorizing them as powerful forms of communication and persuasion.

Demonstrating the communicative power of bodily feeling, Larson challenges the long-held commitment to detached, distant, rationalized discourses of sexual harassment and rape. Timely and poignant, the book offers a much-needed corrective to our legal and political discourses.