Chair: Ruth Lawlor, Department of History, Cornell University

Abstract: »Over the past two decades, scholars have begun to document the centrality of sexual assault in the U.S. political landscape. There has been significant research on how sexual assault (and anti-rape activism) shaped the long civil rights movement, military occupations, and the dynamics of modern feminism. However, scholars are only recently considering how the politics surrounding sexual assault have defined major state institutions, i.e., the military and the prison system. Likewise, stories of anti-rape activism and community organizing are often overshadowed by narratives that emphasize courtroom dramas and legal proceedings.
In this panel, we bring together three scholars whose work pushes the field to consider sexual assault and its implications both for the state and communities “on the ground.” Taking a comparative perspective across time and space, it generates new questions about activism, state power, and the law. First, R.M. Douglas (Colgate University) grounds his paper in U.S.-occupied Italy during World War II. Focusing on U.S. servicemen accused of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), this paper investigates the dynamics of occupation, military power, and sexual violence. Second, Jana Lipman (Tulane University) moves forward in time to examine the “Big Dan’s Rape Case” in the mid-1980s. This was a horrific and public case of sexual assault in New Bedford, MA, that gained national publicity and extensive media attention. Her paper turns our attention to feminist and community activists in New Bedford, MA. Unlike in military occupations, where leaders often assume sexual assault is a fall-out from war, here we can examine how a seemingly “exceptional” case brought class, ethnic and gender politics into sharp relief. Finally, Catherine Jacquet (LSU) brings our conversation into the 1990s, examining the pioneering research on rape in women’s prisons produced in that decade. As a group, incarcerated women had long faced dismissal and neglect within the carceral system. This neglect extended to the scholarship produced on prisons and prisoners, which largely excluded women and women’s facilities. Jacquet examines how and why scholars and activists pursued their research on the sexual abuse of incarcerated women in the 1990s and how that impacted larger political conversations about rape in carceral facilities as well as the efforts to prevent such abuse. Ruth Lawlor (Cornell University) will bring her expertise on sexual assault, the military, and the 20th century to comment on these papers. Collectively the panel highlights new research and demonstrates the necessity of incorporating sexual assault, and activists’ resistance to it, in our understanding of 20th century institutions.« (Source: Online Program)

Lectures:

	“Deserving” or “Undeserving” Victims? Prosecuting Sexual Ofences by U.S. Soldiers against Italian Civilians, 1943–1945 R.M. Douglas
	Providing “much needed information”: The First Studies on the Sexual Abuse of Incarcerated Women Catherine Jacquet
	Re-thinking the “Big Dan’s Rape Case”: Feminists, Immigrant Advocacy, and the Law Forty Years Later Jana Lipman

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in the United States