Description:
This book traces the role of surveillance technology in film and television depictions of rape in the 2000s. It shows how the stranger rape narrative is popularly used as a sense-making tool for the entanglement of the body, digital technology, and institutions of power.
Review Quotes:
This timely and incisive book interrogates the enduring power of the stranger rape narrative and its entanglement with technology in contemporary media. By asking what the relationship is between rape and technology - and why this partnership persists - the book offers a compelling critique of how cultural attention is strategically misdirected away from patriarchy as the root of gender-based violence. Engaging with digitality not only as a site of harm but also of possibility, the book is part of a crucial and growing body of scholarship that grapples with the complexities of sexual violence in the digital age. Through nuanced analyses of concepts such as the tracked body, trauma, and revenge, it reveals the discursive work rape performs within technological discourse, demanding we reconsider how violence is represented, understood, and ultimately challenged.
Kaitlynn Mendes, Professor of Sociology, Western University