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249 CHAPTER EIGHT FLEEING FROM FEMINISM The Troubled Legacy of Rape Law Reform [W]hen the deal goes down, who are you and what do you stand for? I think that’s been compromised, I do, but then . . . that’s generational , I think. An inherent—I was going to say suspicion—is not the word, but it is the word. . . . It has to do with the recognition of the power of the state. And that there is always a balance. And there is a tendency, I think in rape crisis work . . . to embrace the power of the state as a solution and it’s not, always. (South Carolina, small city) The case studies presented here illuminate the treacherous ground RCCs tread: clearly it is no easy task to manage the often-conflicting goals of advocating for individual victims, maintaining community partnerships, and pushing for systemic change. Rape law reform, especially its legitimation of criminal justice systems as the central focus of the state response to rape, has shifted the ideological, political, and legal grounds from which sexual violence emerged as an issue of public concern. In this last chapter, I begin to explore a question I have been mulling over for years: How have rape law reforms, and resistance to reforms, shaped feminist ideology and practices among rape care advocates? Are RCCs Feminist Organizations? Since its inception the anti-rape movement has been divided over how to create transformative social change while serving individuals in need, particularly when change required collaboration with legal and medical systems. These dilemmas, which occupied a prominent place during the 1970s, are much more muted today. The feminist, praxis-based politics that drove the initial wave of rape reforms has been supplanted by social service rhetoric that meshes more easily with the state’s interest in what Matthews (1994) calls “managing,” rather than eliminating, rape. Like many other women’s rights efforts, contemporary RCCs favor an approach that relies on “infiltrating” and “educating,” rather than fundamentally transforming or abolishing, historically male-dominated institutions (Bumiller 2008; Katzenstein 1999; Martin 2005). A chief strategy in mainstreaming anti-rape work has been publicly disavowing feminism. 250 Fleeing from Feminism Defining Feminism As early as 1985, scholars found that RCCs could not be easily dichotomized into feminist and non-feminist; nor was feminist identification necessarily correlated with other organizational factors (such as resources, structure and hierarchy, or extent of political action) (Gornick, et al. 1985). Yet academics researching rape continue to use these characteristics— rather than agency or advocate self-identification—in order to corral resistant RCCs into the feminist fold. The practice of identifying organizations as feminist because of observable features or characteristics, rather than because advocates describe themselves as feminist, is common in most studies of rape care agencies. Patricia Yancey Martin’s (1990) influential article “Rethinking Feminist Organizations” defines a feminist organization as one that is “pro-woman, political, and socially transformational,” and “suggest[s] that an organization is feminist if it meets any one of the following criteria”: it “has feminist ideology,” “produces feminist outcomes,” or “was founded during the women’s movement as part of the women’s movement” (1990, 185). This approach has been adopted by scholars such as Riger (1994) and O’Sullivan and Carlton (2001) in their studies of RCCs. In more recent work, Martin further develops typologies of feminist and mainstream discourses about rape and finds that “RCCs indeed do more political work and use feminist discourse more. Both RCCs and mainstream organizations use mainstream discourse extensively, however” (Martin 2005, 120, emphasis in original). Despite these claims by academics, a significant number of advocates in my interviews, and in other research (Maier 2008a), do not identify themselves as feminists or feminist organizations; instead, they use the terms like social worker, victim advocate, or mental health professional. These findings are consistent with decades of evidence that directors of RCCs “deny, when asked explicitly, that their organizations are feminist” (Martin 1990, emphasis in original). It is not particularly original to say that feminist identification is a highly contested issue. Individuals may espouse principles or hold beliefs that are commonly associated with feminism, and yet not identify as feminist ; beliefs are inflected by factors including age, race, ethnicity, and geography (Henderson-King and Stewart 1994; McCabe 2005; Reid and Purcell 2004; Williams and Wittig 1997; Zucker 2004). In a recent piece Martin argues that “Narrow definitions that question RCCs’ feminist bona fides are less useful . . . than exploring how these organizations are feminist and...

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