ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates how contemporary popular media depict Title IX as a tool to fight sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. Projansky traces the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights’ (OCR) increasingly expansive feminist definition of Title IX. She shows that the OCR has shifted from a more literal application of Title IX to equal access to admissions and sports, to a more interpretive application to the hostile environment sexual harassment produces, culminating in a 2011 Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) that explicitly states that Title IX prohibits sexual violence. Projansky then analyzes how mainstream media have responded to this association. Using case studies of the CNN documentary The Hunting Ground and coverage of Emma Sulkowicz’s performance art, “The Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” Projansky details media celebration of both individual and collective anti-rape activism that uses Title IX and is facilitated by social media. She shows that media now tend to accept victims/survivors’ perspectives on sexual assault, as well as feminist arguments that rape is pervasive and that institutional structures, such as universities, implicitly support rape. In short, this chapter articulates how media, as well as government and judicial policy, take up emergent feminist interpretations of sexual violence
