What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape

Sohaila Abdulali

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781620974742, 9781620974735
• eBook ISBN: 9781620974759
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is brilliant, frank, empowering, and urgently necessary. Sohaila Abdulali has created a powerful tool for examining rape culture and language on the individual, societal, and global level that everyone can benefit from reading."
—Jill Soloway

In the tradition of Rebecca Solnit, a beautifully written, deeply intelligent, searingly honest—and ultimately hopeful—examination of sexual assault and the global discourse on rape told through the perspective of a survivor, writer, counselor, and activist

After surviving gang-rape at seventeen in Mumbai, Sohaila Abdulali was indignant about the deafening silence that followed and wrote a fiery piece about the perception of rape—and rape victims—for a women's magazine. Thirty years later, with no notice, her article reappeared and went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang-rape in New Delhi, prompting her to write a New York Times op-ed about healing from rape that was widely circulated. Now, Abdulali has written What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape—a thoughtful, generous, unflinching look at rape and rape culture.

Drawing on her own experience, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with rape as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali tackles some of our thorniest questions about rape, articulating the confounding way we account for who gets raped and why—and asking how we want to raise the next generation. In interviews with survivors from around the world we hear moving personal accounts of hard-earned strength, humor, and wisdom that collectively tell the larger story of what rape means and how healing can occur. Abdulali also points to the questions we don't talk about: Is rape always a life-definining event? Is one rape worse than another? Is a world without rape possible?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a book for this #MeToo and #TimesUp age that will stay with readers—men and women alike—for a long, long time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Who am I to talk?
• 3 Shut up or die, crazy bitch
• 4 Totally different, exactly the same
• 5 Yes, no, maybe
• 6 What did you expect?
• 7 Oh, please
• 8 How to save a life
• 9 The Abdulali guidelines for saving a rape survivor’s life
• 10 The official version
• 11 Your love is killing me
• 12 A brief pause for horror
• 13 A bagful of dentures
• 14 Teflon Man
• 15 Keys to the kingdom
• 16 A brief pause for fury
• 17 Rx—polite conversation
• 18 All in the family
• 19 A brief pause for confusion
• 20 Stealing freedom, stealing joy
• 21 Lead weights for drowning
• 22 A brief pause for ennui
• 23 The quality of mercy
• 24 Your rape is worse than mine
• 25 Good girls don’t
• 26 Rape prevention for beginners
• 27 Boys will …
• 28 A brief pause for terror
• 29 The full catastrophe
• Notes
• Index
• Original sources and permissions
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author