Voices that resonate: popular music subverting and reinforcing the rape script

Abstract

As case after case of rape comes before the court and different prevention policies are tried, scholars and activists are frustrated by the continual prominence of sexual violence. Many believe that if our society viewed rape as a serious offence and prosecuted it correctly, fewer people would rape. Along with the number of sexual abuse cases, representations of rape, or rape narratives as I will call them, have infiltrated mainstream media; film, television, and music all share the horrific tales of rape victims and, in some cases, seem to uphold feminist standards by giving a voice to those who have previously been silenced both by the legal system and societal gender expectations. While scholarship has made the instances of sexual violence more visible and examined many aspects of rape (motivations, myths, the trauma of the victim, etc.), there is still much to be done to challenge the deeply entrenched rape culture we live in. In order to do so we must see how rape is constituted through discourse and how representations of rape affect those discourses. To see how rape narratives simultaneously perpetuate and question the authority that makes sexual violence possible, this work uses post-structural analysis to examine how rape is represented in popular music texts.