Trying Male Rape: Legal Renderings of Masculinity, Vulnerability, and Sexual Violence.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how the legal field reflects and reproduces masculinity. There has been much research on the relationship of women and femininity to the law but less on that of men and masculinity to the law. The law has been largely conceptualized as a site of unified masculine domination. The recent proliferation of scholarship on hegemonic masculinity indicates that masculinity is more complex, and the law is a crucial site where everyday meanings about gender are made because of its state-backed authority. Investigating the relationship between law and masculinity illuminates broader processes of how gender is embedded in and constructed through the law. The empirical focus is male sexual victimization, examining how it emerges as a social problem at different points in the legal process. This dissertation is organized around a three-state comparison – Georgia, Michigan, and Idaho – to investigate how state-level legal regimes affect the framing of male rape cases. These three states are ideal comparisons because they write gender into their rape laws in distinct ways. This dissertation consists of three stages. First, the author created an original database of 67 male rape cases to identify the conditions under which judicial outcomes are most likely to be successful for the prosecution. Second, the author selected a sub-sample of cases to analyze how actors make sense of male sexual victimization in various historical documents such as police reports, investigation files, courtroom transcripts, and appellate opinions. Third, the author interviewed prosecutors and defense attorneys who worked on male rape cases to understand how they select, frame, and allocate resources toward allegations of male rape. This multi-method approach provides strong analytical leverage for an examination of the ways that male sexual victimization enters the legal arena. Legal actors perceive male sexual victims as especially egregious because of cultural assumptions about men’s sexual desires, vulnerabilities (or lack of), and capacity to move safely through the public sphere. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how masculine vulnerability is constructed in the legal field.