Rape Culture on Campus

While speaking directly into an undergraduate university context, this book should be required reading for anyone involved in education at any level. . . . Minister’s riveting, brilliant presentation is simultaneously sobering and inspiring; sobering because she intrepidly and incisively diagnoses what ails us as a society (of which we and our institutions are inescapably a part) but also inspiring because she firmly believes in and models the ways that classrooms, as the “soft flesh” of the university, can transform society. Honestly, between her analysis and her concrete, achievable strategies related to how we shape our classes in terms of both content and form, she equips us all to participate immediately and efficaciously in transformative education, no matter our starting point. She has left us with no excuse for timidity or failure. For that we owe her deep gratitude. This book isn’t just another interesting armchair read on pedagogical theory. Rather, it will make you change your syllabus and specific assignments for your courses right away. * The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching *
For those of us exhausted by the ineffectual and insincere efforts to contain the problem of sexual assault on our college and university campuses, Meredith Minister’s Rape Culture on Campus is a welcome reprieve. Minister’s book is written for an audience of academics, in our native language (that of Bourdieu, Edelman, and Ahmed), but recognizes this audience as one deeply in need of both analytical and pedagogical practices that resist rape culture. To this end, Minister deploys the work of feminist, womanist, queer, crip theorists to re-frame the issue, one that is all too often reduced to compensatory damages. Using her background in Religious and Theological studies, Minister effectively situates the problem as an outgrowth of the cultures of purity and law enforcement that remain ignored. Coercion, sexism, and religion, she argues, maintain the culture of violence that animates rape culture on campus. Beyond her astute assessment of the problem, Minister provides her readers with concrete approaches to institutional policies and pedagogical practices that offer a vision of higher education that can not only prevent, but resist the foundational and practical entrenchment of rape culture. For anyone concerned about their students, survivors of sexual assault, and the integrity of institutions of higher education, Rape Culture on Campus is essential reading material. -- Sara Moslener, Central Michigan University