ABSTRACT
Many college and university administrators, faculty members, and students are “no longer surprised” by the “reprehensible” realities of sexual violence on campus; instead it has “become part of our normal” (Wooten & Mitchell, 2015, p. 186). This normal adheres to a dominant script: Sexual violence is a form of gendered violence committed by (cisgender) men against (cisgender) women. It fails to identify other dimensions of identity as important to consider (Belknap, 2015; Phipps, 2010; Wooten, 2015). In the 1970s, feminist activists removed the “cloak of invisibility” from women’s victimization, empowering women to speak out about victimization (Belknap, 2015, p. xiv). Prior to this time, sexual violence was narrowly conceptualized as a “sex crime carried out by pathological men” (Fried, 1994, p. 562), conjuring images of a stranger in a back alley. Now, women were breaking the silence and making the scope of sexual violence visible and revealing that rape could occur “in bedrooms . . . at parties, in offices, and within families” (Kim, 2012, p. 264). The antirape movement, born in the 1960s, redefined sexual violence to include victim and survivor perspectives and to illuminate how male power is used as a form of social control over women (Donat & D'Emilio, 1998; Rose, 1977). However, perspectives of white cisgender, economically privileged women seemed to dominate the movement, and this may have had the unintended consequence of shaping conceptualizations of sexual violence as heteronormative and heterosexist (Wooten, 2015). This is seen in the absence of an analysis of sexism combined with racism and heterosexism as well as other forms of oppression (Belknap, 2015) in U.S. higher education policy on sexual violence.
