ABSTRACT
The story we tell most frequently about rape culture is a story developed through feminist theorising of rape as a political issue: that rape is an act of violence normalised by and within a male-dominated culture that objectifies and exploits women. My goal in this chapter is two-fold: I want to tell an alternative story of rape culture, through a peace-studies lens, and I want to use that alternative story to explain why we fail to see aspects of rape culture as violence. In this alternative story, where rape is still understood as an act of violence, a feminist-inflected peace studies produces nuanced analysis of forms and inter-relationships of violence: those we experience and recognise as such (direct violence) and those produced by social and institutional structures, and by our cultures. This lens offers insight into why we might be tempted to deny that almost all, if not actually all, of our gender-hierarchical cultures are saturated in misogyny, why we might be tempted to deny that rape culture exists, and why we might be tempted to deny that rape culture is a set of relations that both reduces some people’s ability to maximise their potential and could be otherwise (the two key criteria of the peace studies concept ‘structural violence’).
