Book review: What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture
| Author | Jill E. Sturges |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580221149038 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
International Review of Victimology
2023, Vol. 29(2) 313 –317
© The Author(s) 2023
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Book reviews
Stephanie R. Larson
What It Feels Like: Visceral Rhetoric and the Politics of Rape Culture
University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021, ISBN 9780271091433 (hbk),
209 pp.
Reviewed by: Jill E. Sturges, West Virginia University, USA (jes0098@mix.wvu.edu)
DOI: 10.1177/02697580221149038
What It Feels Like brings a new voice and perspective to the problems surrounding rape and rape
culture by examining visceral rhetoric. The author delves deeply into the topic of visceral rhetoric
using several different examples and case studies scattered throughout her book. Visceral rhetoric
examines how language and visuals can evoke emotion from participants. Larson investigates
several anti-rape campaigns to determine the problematic procedural and linguistic definitions of
rape defined in these campaigns. Moreover, the visceral rhetoric in the campaigns is scrutinized as
triggering a nexus to the rape culture in society today.
Larson’s contribution is unique for several reasons. First, she synthesizes rape culture through
various case studies that started with the Meese Commission in the United States and ended with
word-for-word accounts of victims. She begins chapter 1 by examining how the Meese Commission
procured male hysteria and reveals how this inadvertently redirected the blame for rape onto vic-
tims (p. 27). In addition, demonstrating this as such sets the stage for future responses to rape, as
well as by defining victims as being angelic, virginal, White, women who are cisgender and hetero-
sexual. Viewing victims in this manner left a void that does not address lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) or non-White victims. Second, the author examines
how the Meese Commission led to ways in which the public debate surrounding rape culture
shifted away from victims’ viewpoints and toward the overall political ideation of the time, which
put pornography at the center of attention. In doing so, the blame for rape was shifted onto women
and away from men. Thus, rape culture was born.
Larson coins the term ‘patriarchal spectrality’ as a new method to scrutinize the campaigns. This
approach combines a feminist perspective that examines how a male perspective has shaped his-
torical procedural and linguistic definitions of rape and spectrality. Spectrality is a methodology
that investigates the visual analysis of ‘specters and spectacles’ while critically observing historical
trends of oppression. The author details how campaigns, such as the It’s on Us and 1 Is 2 Many, are
evident in public discourse. With the use of visceral rhetoric, these campaigns engage the viewers
to believe the onus of rape is now on the bystanders; bystanders who are strong men of hero status
who will intervene in rapes that occur on public college campuses.
Furthermore, these campaigns continue to elicit the victim as White, college-aged, cisgender,
middle-class, angelic females. Larson grabs our attention by getting the reader to envision the
Ghosts of Prevention Discourses of the Past by incorporating an enthralling examination of the
1149038IRV0010.1177/02697580221149038International Review of VictimologyBook reviews
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