Beyond the Rapist

In the United States, approximately one in five women experiences rape during college, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) students experience sexual violence at higher rates than their peers. Given this context, many colleges are working to better prevent and address these assaults. This book takes up this social problem—how organizations talk about and respond to sexual violence—and considers it in proximity to a persistent theoretical dilemma in the academic field of organizational communication: How are organization and violence related, and what does that relationship have to do with communication? Guided by feminist new materialist and intersectional theories, the book examines one public U.S. university known for responding well to sexual violence. It focuses on the processes and policies that require most faculty and administrators, along with student–employees, to report sexual violence to designated campus offices, per federal laws Title IX, the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act. Unfortunately, the university’s interventions in sexual violence reinforce other violent systems. The book illustrates the negative consequences of considering communication to be either separate from the physical world or indistinguishable from it. It also details problems with the notion that only individuals enact violence. Through its focus on two core ideas—communication and agency—the book encourages scholars to avoid wholly constructivist or realist arguments, and it shows the importance of questions about power and difference in organizational scholarship on posthumanism and materiality. The book concludes with suggestions for how U.S. universities can look “beyond the rapist” to generate more robust interventions in sexual violence.