Copyright (c) 2009 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/aya_gruber Recent documents in Aya Gruber en-us Sun, 31 May 2009 03:37:39 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/aya_gruber/2 http://works.bepress.com/aya_gruber/2 Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:05:16 PST Over the past several years, feminism has been increasingly associated with crime control and the incarceration of men. As America became more and more punitive, feminists seemingly hopped on the bandwagon by advocating a host of reforms to strengthen state power to criminalize and punish gender-based crimes. In the rape context, this effort has produced mixed results. Although modern sexual assault laws that adopt prevailing views criminality and victimhood, like sexual predator laws, enjoy great popularity, reforms that counter cultural and gender norms, like rape shield and affirmative consent laws, are regarded as highly controversial by the public and have produced little empirical success. After over thirty years of using criminal law as the primary vehicle to address sexualized violence, the time is ripe to reassess continued feminist involvement in rape reform. This article cautions feminists considering making further investments of time, resources, and intellect in strengthening criminal rape law to weigh carefully any purported benefits of reform against the considerable philosophical and practical costs of criminalization strategies. In advancing this caution, the paper systematically catalogues the existing intra-feminists critiques of rape law reform and discusses possible reasons these critiques have proven relatively ineffective at reversing the punitive course of reform. The article then crafts a separate philosophical critique of pro-prosecution approaches by exposing the deep tension between the basic tenets of feminism and those animating the modern American penal state. Finally, it discusses why the purported cultural norming and utilitarian benefits from rape reform cannot outweigh the destructive effect criminalization efforts have had and continue to have on feminist discourse and the feminist message. The article concludes that feminists should begin the complicated process of disentangling feminism and its important anti-sexual coercion stand from a criminal system currently reflective of hierarchy and unable to produce social justice. Aya Gruber Criminal Law and Procedure Evidence Jurisprudence Law and Society Psychology and Psychiatry Public Law and Legal Theory Sexuality and the Law Social Welfare Women