For the last twenty years, my research has focused on the ways that legal, medical, and community organizations respond to sexual violence in the United States. This research has been informed and, I believe, enriched by my work in local organizations that provide supportive services to survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence and to those seeking access to abortion. When I arrived at Rutgers for graduate school, I was surprised and frustrated at how few of the stories I heard as a service provider had made their way into the academic discussions about feminism, feminist movements, and feminist organizations that I encountered in the political science literature.

My experience as a service provider gave me a unique vantage point from which to watch the ongoing successes and failures of feminist rape reform efforts and led me to start from different places and ask different questions than I would have if scholarly literature had been my only guide. The perspective I had gained from my activism proved to be quite important in reassessing a common claim among feminist academics that the antirape movement and rape crisis centers were among the great successes of second-wave feminism—a claim that is important not only in its own right, but also as an example of what I think is the need for greater attention to feminist practice as a primary source for generating and critiquing feminist theory.

Some scholars use triumphalist rhetoric to praise the antirape movement, describing rape reform efforts as incredibly successful at infusing legal, medical, and cultural institutions with feminist understandings of rape (Bevacqua Reference Bevacqua2000). While the power of rape crisis centers to change institutions—especially criminal law—is celebrated by some, others find that success troubling. Scholars, particularly those attentive to law, depict contemporary rape crisis centers as handmaidens of the state. These studies describe centers as eager partners in expanding and amplifying the neoliberal, carceral, and sexually repressive projects of the modern state (Bumiller Reference Bumiller2008; Gruber Reference Gruber2009). Such assertions must be taken seriously, given the ways that a handful of incidents—especially the horrific sexual murders of children such as Megan Kanka, Polly Klaas, and Jessica Lunsford—have generated and absorbed enormous legal and cultural attention, energy, and resources. They have redefined modern sex crime laws in ways that expand state surveillance; rely on racist, classist, and homophobic understandings of criminality and sexuality; and co-opt feminist rhetoric to advance antifeminist goals (Corrigan Reference Corrigan2013).

And yet, to invert Foucault's (Reference Foucault1978) classic insight about how the “repression” of sexuality actually stimulates an outpouring of discourse about sex, my research shows that depictions of unalloyed rape reform success and the subsequent narrow focus on a handful of highly publicized crimes that scholars hold up as illustrative of the movement's outcomes obscure troubling silences about sexual violence. These silences could contribute significantly to our understandings about feminist institutions and institutionalization, relationships between theory and practice, and gaps between legal changes that occur in the statehouse or the courtroom and implementation of those changes on the ground.

Decades of research demonstrating the ineffectiveness of many rape law reforms at shifting criminal justice practices (Spohn and Tellis Reference Spohn and Tellis2012) resonated much more with my experiences than did claims about the power and influence of rape crisis centers. Indeed, my background as a service provider in several different community organizations led me to be deeply skeptical of when, why, and how centers claimed to be powerful forces in local communities. In my case, familiarity bred not contempt, but a different set of research questions that ultimately yielded rich data about the ways the feminist antirape movement was transformed into contemporary rape crisis centers and how conflicts over feminism have influenced those transformations.

My research—which focuses primarily on understanding how state policy innovations of the last twenty years have reshaped legal, medical, and community responses to sexual violence—draws on data gathered through interviews with 167 victim advocates at 116 rape crisis centers around the country between 2005 and 2008 (Corrigan Reference Corrigan2013). But I was also interested in exploring what these advocates thought about feminism: while working in the field I had seen organizations mobilize feminism in a variety of strategic ways—both claiming and denying feminist identities in an attempt to gain some political traction. Ultimately, I found that the most common way rape care advocates described the relevance of feminism to their work was the need to defend themselves from the very real consequences of being labeled “feminazis” by government officials and community members: consequences that included loss of funding, being denied access to victims, and political marginalization. It was a depressing day when I admitted to myself that apparently the most important theorist of feminism in the last twenty years was Rush Limbaugh, not the scholars whose transformative and insightful work many of us know, admire, and cite.

Yet such mass media discussions (and distortions) are critical in shaping the local conditions in which rape crisis centers find themselves and provide an alternative explanation for why institutionalization occurred as it did in the antirape movement. My research shows that local law enforcement officials have used feminazi language and related accusations of “bad behavior” (particularly defined as adversarialism or publicly criticizing ineffective criminal justice responses to rape complaints) to undermine the legitimacy of rape crisis centers. Rape crisis centers describe themselves as struggling to hold on to some distinctive institutional identity while working collaboratively with partners that dislike and often disrespect them. In response, many rape crisis centers have moved away from using language or concepts associated with feminism as a way to bolster their credibility with law enforcement personnel and thus, they believe, be more effective in improving legal responses to victims of sexual assault (Corrigan Reference Corrigan2013). A truly nuanced understanding of feminist activist strategies requires greater attention to simultaneous struggles over identities, strategies, and broader historical developments (Rivera Reference Rivera1996; Smith Reference Smith2005).

Such approaches also require turning a critical lens on feminist theory itself. Part of the reason why rape care advocates have found it easy to distance themselves from feminism is because feminist theory no longer offers them powerful tools to explain or challenge sexual violence. In her discussion of the importance of “street theory” to feminism, Mansbridge (Reference Mansbridge, Ferree and Martin1995, 28–29) calls for greater attention to the role that grassroots activists play in developing and testing feminist theories. She describes “street theory” as a “discursive process [that] is always collective,” where women in the movement adopt “what is of use” in explaining and challenging “the gender domination that they feel and are beginning to understand.” If street theory is “made up of women figuring out and telling each other what they think makes sense,” as Mansbridge (Reference Mansbridge, Ferree and Martin1995, 28) asserts, then many rape care advocates have told each other that feminist thinking about rape is a liability rather than an asset. It costs them much and offers them little in the daily struggles they face to ensure justice and offer care to victims of sexual violence.

The criticisms of feminism that rape care advocates offer need to be taken seriously, not because every individual's understanding of feminism is particularly reflective or insightful (though many of these advocates are extraordinarily smart), but because, generally, the movement offers an important critique of feminist theory as produced in the academy. Failing to broaden the circle of those recognized and “authorized” contributors to feminist and political theory impoverishes the type and scope of questions available to scholars. For decades now, some mainstream political scientists of various stripes have stressed the usefulness of immersion in the internal pressures and motivations of institutions as a way to generate theory (Fenno Reference Fenno1978; Gaventa Reference Gaventa1980; Lipsky Reference Lipsky1980). Feminist scholars, for example those working in legal interventions around domestic violence, have also shown the intellectual and political value of moving between thinking and doing for building theory and making change (Coker Reference Coker2001; Schneider Reference Schneider2000). Renewing attention to the work of local women's groups offers scholars the opportunity to study more fully the ways that policy success can produce unintended negative consequences and to explore how activists manage to transform unavoidable constraints into creative and powerful interventions that transform women's lives.