Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Pg. 99: Rose Corrigan's "Up Against a Wall"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Up Against a Wall: Rape Reform and the Failure of Success by Rose Corrigan.

About the book, from the publisher:
Rape law reform has long been hailed as one of the most successful projects of second-wave feminism. Yet forty years after the anti-rape movement emerged, legal and medical institutions continue to resist implementing reforms intended to provide more just and compassionate legal and medical responses to victims of sexual violence. In Up Against a Wall, Rose Corrigan draws on interviews with over 150 local rape care advocates in communities across the United States to explore how and why mainstream systems continue to resist feminist reforms.

In a series of richly detailed case studies, the book weaves together scholarship on law and social movements, feminist theory, policy formation and implementation, and criminal justice to show how the innovative legal strategies employed by anti-rape advocates actually undermined some of their central claims. But even as its more radical elements were thwarted, pieces of the rape law reform project were seized upon by conservative policy-makers and used to justify new initiatives that often prioritize the interests and rights of criminal justice actors or medical providers over the needs of victims.
Learn more about Up Against a Wall at the New York University Press website, and visit Rose Corrigan's Sexual Assault & Public Policy Project website.

The Page 99 Test: Up Against a Wall.

--Marshal Zeringue