Innocent Perpetrators, Guilty Victims—Constructions of Sexualised Violence between 1870 and 1914

Authors

  • Hania Siebenpfeiffer Institut für deutsche Literatur, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14766/121

Keywords:

Gewalt, Macht, Neuzeit, Recht, Geschlecht, Gender

Abstract

Using scientific records and historical legal cases as her sources, Tanja Hommen examines the narrative constructions of (male) perpetrators and (female) victims, taking into account the structures gender and power in which they are embedded. She investigates the discursive strategies which reverse the hierarchical relation between female victims and male aggressors which present the male offender as a “victim” of female sexual seduction, driven by his sexual desires. The female victim, on the other hand, is constructed as a hysterical and therefore unreliable witness. Unfortunately, Hommen does not include media reports which might have provided valuable information about public images and constructions of sexual violence of that time, thus omitting a link between an overarching discourse on the one hand and its legal consequences on the other hand. However, this omission does not weaken the overall strength of this book in which Hommen succeeds at thoroughly investigating an issue t that has long been neglected in academic research.

Downloads

Published

2002-03-01

Issue

No. 6 (2002): Musik, Film, Bühne und Kunst

Section

Offener Teil

License

Copyright (c) 2002 Hania Siebenpfeiffer

Authors retain the copyright of their texts. There is no exclusive copyright transfer to querelles-net.

 From 2009 on, articles at querelles-net have been published under the terms of a CC BY license:

from 2009-2015 the license Creative Commons Attribution 3.0; from 2016 the license Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. These licenses allow users to freely use the texts published here, if the author and place of first publication are given. The uses covered by this license do not require separate consent on the part of the authors.

For texts published before 2009, usually no Creative Commons license was given. These texts are freely available, but further uses need to be permitted by the authors.

 We encourage our authors to publish their texts in other places as well, e.g. repositories.