How to Discipline a Woman's Body: Sensation, Rape Culture, and U.S. Public

While activists and allies have long sought redress for crimes of sexual violence, arguments about rape and sexual assault frequently stall in the legal realm. Many of those arguments adopt frameworks that seek to assign blame and responsibility, and, in the process, problematically elide the affective presence of a raped, violated body when defining rape. However, matters of the visceral always overspill efforts to frame rape primarily in linguistic and legal terms, and "How to Discipline a Woman's Body" attends to this problem by bringing together recent work in feminist rhetorical, sensation and affect, and publics studies. Taking public deliberation over rape culture as its focus, the dissertation traces the material and embodied force of rape culture in order to better account for the affective dimensions that accumulate, circulate, and regulate public debates. It gathers an array of rhetorical actions and objects to show how women's bodies shape the political maintenance of the public sphere and the social and political claims that organize and contest that public sphere. The dissertation intervenes in current feminist rhetorical theory and recent scholarship on affect, arguing that assumptions about sensation and the law obscure an unequal distribution of risk for rape and carry over into the way we talk about, investigate, and adjudicate rape.;Chapter one, "Deliberating Sexual Violence in Affective Publics," introduces how the visceral, sensuous, and private associations of women's bodies undergird a widely acknowledged silencing of women's voices in U.S. publics. In particular, this chapter examines how the proliferation of rape culture in the United States functions through affective ecologies---what Sara Ahmed has identified as the generative power of bodies and emotion---disseminating cultural attitudes that privilege certain bodies in the political maintenance of the public sphere. In outlining the shaping influence rape culture has held in U.S. public discourse, this chapter investigates how women's perspectives have been elided from public conversations about rape due to anxiety over the fleshy, corporeal nature of women's bodies.;The next four chapters move from considering how institutional discourses construct the problems and solutions of rape specifically through male centric lenses to how women's bodies are leveraged politically to respond to sexual violence. Chapter two, "Sensing the Nation," draws from the archives of Park Elliott Dietz, analyzing citizen letters sent to the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography from 1985--86 to investigate the relationship between sexual citizenship and the national imaginary. Through the lens of Judith Butler's theory of grievable bodies, this chapter examines how letter writers imagined raped bodies out of the pornography debate and instead focused on what seeing naked women's bodies does to the health of the nation. This case study demonstrates how a question of pornography began with the issue of sexual violence and proceeded through concerns of normative sexual activities in the nation state, revealing the moral and political judgments that influence and constrain public debates over sexual violence.;Chapter three, "The Specter of Silence," engages two contemporary Violence Against Women Act campaigns---"It's On Us" and "1 is 2 Many." Drawing from each campaign's public advocacy and marketing materials, this chapter explores how male speakers frame a heteronormative "victim"---a heterosexual, cisgender, white, able-bodied, U.S. American, middle class woman---in need of protection from a male body and male gaze. In investigating how these materials codify contemporary anxieties over normative sexual and political identities, this chapter argues that this idealized body looms in the background of a U.S. imaginary conditioning publics to sympathize with certain "victims" while erasing others, ultimately precluding progressive action.;Chapter four, "The Proof is in the Body," considers how sexual assault forensic evidence kits---commonly referred to as "rape kits"---serve as powerful tools for rape adjudication even though a backlog of tens of thousands of untested and unprocessed rape kits has accumulated on law enforcement shelves. This chapter engages public conversations about the backlog to trace a deep anxiety about the rhetoricity of a raped woman's body, locating how the rape kit is deployed as a tool to suppress the embodied, visceral accounts of rape and privilege technological sources of evidence for adjudicating rape. In analyzing this tension, this chapter suggests that celebrating and expanding the use of rape kits constitutes an attempt to remove rape justice from the realm of the rhetorical.;Chapter five, "'Everything inside me was silenced,'" examines two recent high profile rape crimes in the United States---the cases of Emily Doe and Emma Sulkowicz. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).