2. EXHIBITING THE HYMEN: THE BLANK PAGE BETWEEN LAW AND LITERATURE

Abstract

The feminist critique of rape has been a vast and impressive exercise of interpretative activity: it has gripped existing concepts, practices and discourses and subjected them to reinterpretation and transformation. It has been trenchant, assiduous and generative. It has created new legal definitions of rape and modified the evidentiary requirements that define its borders; it has developed new procedural mechanisms and codes of speech during trials; it has multiplied ethico-political interpretations of sexual violence and excavated previously unauthorised forms of social knowledge. Most specifically, it has created new evaluations of rape in the service of a particular form of life; that is, one which cultivates the capacity of women to maximise their own powers of speech and desire.

Citation

Philadelphoff-Puren, N. (2004), "2. EXHIBITING THE HYMEN: THE BLANK PAGE BETWEEN LAW AND LITERATURE", Kenyon, A. and Rush, P. (Ed.) Aesthetics of Law and Culture: Texts, Images, Screens (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 33-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(04)34002-0