The Emergence of a Concept of Rape Culture

One challenge in tracing the development of the concept of rape culture is to both colocate and disentangle it from analyses of rape itself. Inasmuch as radical feminist analysis theorized rape as an assertion of male dominance, rather than a matter of individual deviancy, the two concepts became entwined though they are, of course, distinct. A related challenge is that the idea of a rape culture arose in some analyses of rape without being identified by a distinct term. Given these two challenges, I trace feminist analyses in which rape, the threat of rape, and the rape accusation are conceived as exertions of political power. These analyses seed the ground for the eventual emergence of a concept of rape culture that articulates how myths, discourses, and practices shape and reinforce popular ideas about what rape is, who a rape victim is, and who a rape perpetrator is. First, I explore the myth of the Black male rapist who threatens white femininity, a myth that emerges explicitly during the Reconstruction period to justify lynching. Second, I explore the myth of the “bad man” rapist, which regains prominence in some conservative feminist circles in the mid-1970s, as these feminists sought antirape reforms. Third, I explore the places where the term “rape culture” begins to appear explicitly in the mid-1970s within antirape analysis and activism.

These brief explorations are not meant to reveal a straight-line of analysis, nor are they a full-throated genealogy. Rather, they reflect what Kimberlé Crenshaw (Reference Crenshaw, Lutz, Vivar and Supik2011) describes as tracing the travels of an idea.Footnote ⁶ These travels reveal how the concept of rape culture emerged and why an explicitly intersectional analysis of rape culture is essential. This analysis also reveals how an intersectional approach expands the scope of rape culture beyond the script of male perpetrators and female victims and how US rape culture relies on relations of subordination beyond patriarchy alone, including white supremacy and capitalist exploitation. It is by virtue of the entanglement of varied structures of oppression and, crucially, the reinforcement of their entanglement through the myths, discourses, and practices of rape culture that, despite widespread public condemnation of rape, sexual violence (particularly against marginalized persons) continues largely unacknowledged, unreported, and unabated. An intersectional approach allows us to expose the entanglements and in doing so, perhaps, to oppose them.

Some of the most potent political analysis of rape and the rape allegation comes from Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass, who observed an emerging myth that Black men posed a violent, sexual threat to white women. This myth had not existed prior to emancipation but arose in the Reconstruction period to justify a new strategy of white terror: lynching (Alexander Reference Alexander2012, 28; Davis Reference Davis1983, 183; Wells Reference Wells1895, Chap. 1). During the Antebellum and Civil War periods, there is no evidence that rape of white women by Black slaves was a widespread concern (Douglass, part II). Yet, once Black persons could no longer be controlled via the system of chattel slavery, Wells notes, “a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed” (Chap. 1). This system required moral justification: the myth of the Black male rapist emerged as the salacious and sensationalistic ground for white men to claim the moral authority to torture and murder newly emancipated Black men and boys.

As Angela Y. Davis argues, the new disciplining of Black citizens through lynching had a related economic purpose. Powerful white men were able not only to maintain political supremacy but also to use the myth to their economic advantage. Davis argues that, in the wake of the Civil War, Northern control of the Southern economy required a strategy that could continue to exploit Black labor and to pit white and Black working-class individuals against each other (Davis Reference Davis1978, 27–8). The myth of the Black male rapist (and the terror of lynching) did both: it disciplined Black persons whose economic successes threatened white economic dominance and it gave the white working class a spurious rationale to avoid solidarity with the Black working class.

Wells’s analysis reveals that white supremacy also depends on what we now call white heteropatriarchal power. One particular assault of a Black woman by a whole group of white men, Wells notes, was “a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was a colored woman,” and so the men were acquitted (Wells, Ch. 6, emphasis added). Wells reveals that the outrage of a white mob is not directed at the crime of rape itself. The outrage is directed only at rape (or even consensual sex) that threatens whiteness by challenging the white man’s claim to control “his” women as property. The white woman’s body was the vessel of whiteness, and whiteness—not the woman—was protected by white male supremacist power. The practices of “protecting” white femininity (as reproductive power) and of disciplining Black masculinity were two sides of the same coin.

Eventually, white women also sounded the call to protect white femininity, and despite the solidarities that had existed between the slave abolitionist and women’s movements, the myth of the Black male rapist took root in the fertile soil of white supremacy within the women’s movement. Tommy J. Curry argues that “the dawn of the twentieth century birthed a feminist activist that used the myth of the Black male rapist as a bridge between white women’s moral capacities and more visible political presence and engagement with societal problems. The Black male was most often the problem feminists chose to address” (Reference Curry2017, 57–8). Curry details the many white women activists, from Rebecca Latimer Felton to Charlotte Gilman to Jane Addams, who accepted the myth of the Black male rapist and, in some cases, even defended lynching (56–8). As Curry shows, white men and white women used the myth of the Black male rapist, albeit in different ways, to exert political power, and to contribute to a collective discourse of Black men and boys as irreducibly immoral and criminal. The myth of the Black male rapist has persisted far beyond the Reconstruction period, from a fictional rape in Birth of a Nation (1915) to the false rape allegations against Black men and boys, including the Scottsboro Boys (1931), Emmett Till (1955), and the Central Park Five (1989), and to the threat that Amy Cooper leveled at Christian Cooper (no relation) in the Central Park Ramble in May 2020.Footnote ⁷

During the 1960s and 1970s, another politically expedient myth emerged: the myth that “real” rape was perpetuated by sinister male rapists against defenseless female victims (Stansell Reference Stansell2010, 347). Ironically, this myth gained a new foothold from antirape activists. Historian Christine Stansell (Reference Stansell2010) argues that radical feminist analysis in the late 1960s and early 1970s had demanded both women’s liberation from male supremacy and women’s sexual autonomy. Their arguments had been instrumental in the abortion debate, culminating in the 1973 Roe decision (326), but met resistance from more conservative feminists. Stansell suggests that anxiety about radical feminist arguments for women’s bodily autonomy led conservative feminists to adopt a different approach when arguing for antirape initiatives related to date rape, marital rape, and rape shield laws. Inasmuch as antirape initiatives were able to gain popular support, that support depended on the assertion of the myth that most rape involved a violent, predatory male rapist (often a stranger) who attacks a defenseless female (347).Footnote ⁸ Stansell suggests that this myth was able to gain traction in feminist “body politics” circles by reaffirming radical feminist arguments about the ubiquity of violent masculinity, but it moved to a more conservative mainstream by bypassing arguments about sexual autonomy in order to reaffirm female victimhood and weakness: “it was easier to invoke feminism when it meant protecting women than when it meant ensuring they could protect themselves from the adverse consequences of sex” (345). Here, radical feminist principles were overrun by political expediency, at great cost to antirape efforts. Contrary to the crucial radical feminist insight that the normalization of sexual violence was essential to the maintenance of white supremacist, heteropatriarchal power, this myth suggested that only “bad apples” committed rape. The reassertion of this myth obscured the everydayness of rape, and perpetrators who were outwardly judged to be “good guys” were largely presumed to be incapable of rape and therefore often went unpunished.Footnote ⁹

In the interstices of the myths of the Black male rapist and the bad male rapist/defenseless female victim is the Black woman. By virtue of her Blackness, this woman is figured both as hypersexual and as strong and domineering (Harris-Perry Reference Harris-Perry2011, 55–6 and 88). Black women were never “beneficiaries” of the myths of the bad male rapist and injured female victim because Black women were figured both as hypersexualized and as inhumanly strong and therefore needed no protection from rapists because they must be engaging in welcome sex or they would overwhelm their attackers themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ This myth ensures that the centuries-long sexual victimization of Black women at the hands of white men, a victimization that was often made more common by Black women’s proximity to the domestic life of white families, is not collectively imagined to be victimization.Footnote ¹¹ As Wells noted, sexual assault of Black women hardly raised a white eyebrow since, by virtue of her Blackness, the Black woman was mythologized as impossible to victimize.

The two mythic assailants—the Black male rapist and the evil rapist—both of whom attack undeserving, defenseless, white, middle and upper class women, justify ongoing white male dominance in the popular US imagination in two ways: by empowering white men to use violence to protect “their” women from external threats and by deflecting attention away from the ubiquity of white male rape. But they also nourish other, related myths, such as the hypersexualized and unrapeable Black woman, which in turns supports the myth of the unvictimizable (working-class, white) tease. In effect, these myths perpetuate a culture in which individuals are only recognized as rape victims if they are deemed good enough, innocent enough, or helpless enough and others are only recognized as perpetrators if they are bad enough, criminal enough, or inhuman enough. The construction (and reconstruction) of these myths imposes specific meaning on the threat or act of rape. This was “rape culture,” though antirape activists had not yet found the words to name it.

In April 1971, the New York Radical Feminists hosted a “speak-out” on rape, which emerged out of earlier consciousness raising efforts. Analysis from the speak-out included a compilation of “facts and figures on the extent to which society ignores, tolerates, and even encourages repeated acts of rape and sexual exploitation” (Connell, Wilson, and New York Radical Feminists Reference Connell, Cassandra, Connell and Wilson1974, 60). The New York Radical Feminists argued that societal forces subjected all women, despite their differences, to patriarchal oppression, which meant rape was an essential matter “to be dealt with in feminist terms for female liberation” (6). Although the analysis focused on rape as a tool of male domination, it offered two other insights that signal the importance of intersectional analysis. First, the analysis acknowledged in general terms that there were differences across women’s experiences, which were revealed through consciousness raising, wherein women spoke about their own experiences (5); this acknowledgement countered an analysis that would universalize women’s experiences. Second, by identifying a whole series of experiences with sexual violence, not only rape itself, the New York Radical Feminists argued that “rape, as an issue, was a means of analyzing the psychological and political structures of oppression in our society” (3). These two insights opened up the possibility to push beyond an account of rape that necessarily centers the experiences of white women and that treats rape as an individual-level phenomenon in order to think about difference across experiences and reveal something about the broader structures at work. But at their speak-out in 1971, they had not yet deeply engaged these questions.

That same year, Susan Griffin published an essay entitled “Rape: An All-American Crime.” The essay, republished in Reference Griffin, Chappell, Geis and Geis1977, does not use the phrase “rape culture,” but explains that cultural discourses about male aggression and female passivity translate into an assertion that overwhelming male sexual desire is natural and uncontrollable and that women are simultaneously demure and (secretly) desirous of being raped (50–51).Footnote ¹² Although Griffin’s essay starts from the position that all women are subject to the threat of rape by men, she extends her analysis to race as well, noting that rape myths and discourses benefit white men in particular. For example, Griffin explores the myth of the Black male rapist, citing Douglass’s argument about its emergence during Reconstruction, but she goes on to observe the particular precarity of Black women and the heteropatriarchal terms of the protection of white women: “The white male’s open rape of black women, coupled with his overweening concern for the chastity and protection of his wife and daughters, represents an extreme of sexist and racist hypocrisy” (62). Griffin’s exploration of the dynamic relation between race and gender approaches intersectional analysis, especially when compared with other analyses by white feminists at this time who name race and gender while still treating them as discrete structures of control, rather than as interlocking ones.

The 1975 documentary Rape Culture (which may be the first place the term is actually used), also approaches an intersectional account of the concept. Although “rape culture” is never defined in the film, the contributors note that the allure of rape—typically, to men—is “programmed by the … mass media” (4:57) and constitutes a “total process of socialization” (7:12) that reinforces broadly accepted ideas about rape. Although the dominant assumption of the film is that only men can rape, the film nevertheless offers a more capacious account of victimhood than many analyses at the time offered. Contributors affirm that rape victims can be of any class; that Black, Asian, and Indigenous women are all sexualized in unique ways, but are similarly figured as rapeable; and that men, like women, can be victims of rape.Footnote ¹³

Two years later, the Combahee River Collective would affirm the notion that rape knits oppressive relations together to sustain white male supremacy: “We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression” ([1977] Reference Moraga and Anzaldúa2015, 213). The Collective named the politicization of rape, explicitly accounting for its racial and gendered dimensions and implicitly referencing its heterosexist and capitalist exploitative ones (212). Rape, the Collective understood, was a political weapon, and the analysis in the statement pointed to an intersectional understanding of how this weapon was wielded. Yet, their analysis did not seem to inspire a capacious, intersectional account of rape culture from other feminists. Instead, the biologized account of rape from some radical feminists seeded a gender-dominant analysis of rape culture that eventually made its way to the mainstream.

The Mainstream Account of Rape Culture and Its Shortcomings

If Black feminist and some radical feminist analyses were considering rape culture in intersectional terms, why did the mainstream fail to push its understanding of rape and rape culture in the same direction? Why has rape culture been defined and analyzed in the mainstream as what intersectional theorists call a “single-axis” issue, almost entirely in terms of male subordination of women? In 1975, Susan Brownmiller published Against Our Will, a significant, sustained antirape analysis that suggested that rape perpetration is exclusive to men and rape victimization is exclusive to women. Her book, which has not been out of print since it was published over 45 years ago, advances an explicitly patriarchal analysis of rape, which Brownmiller defines as “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Reference Brownmiller1975, 15). For Brownmiller, the perpetration of rape is exclusive to the domain of men because male genitalia has—“from prehistoric times to the present”—been weaponized against women (14–5). Brownmiller does not use the term “rape culture,” but describes rape as both an exercise of power in itself and as a process of control that extends beyond the act of rape. Brownmiller’s analysis provided—and provides still—a crucial exploration of rape as an exertion of power codified in laws, fortified by institutions, carried out on battlefields and in bedrooms, and permeated as a threat in the daily lives of all women. It brought antirape analysis activism into mainstream conversations in ways that few earlier interventions had and emphasized the gendered component of rape.

Yet Brownmiller’s account may have been a little too influential in focusing on gendered analysis, and this influence has endured. In 2015, a Time article about Brownmiller’s book noted on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of its publication, “What today’s feminists describe as ‘rape culture’ has its roots in Brownmiller’s theory of rape as a means of social control, her emphasis on gender role socialization and her critique of the glorification of sexual violence in the media” (Cohen Reference Cohen2015). In light of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein in 2015, and the resulting growth of the #MeToo movement, The Guardian noted that “Brownmiller’s work is suddenly crisp again, its prescience and enduring relevance noted anew by anyone old enough, or well-read enough, to be familiar with it” (Cooke Reference Cooke2018). David Remnick wrote in a Reference Remnick2017 The New Yorker article that “‘Against Our Will’ remains an important prod to our understanding of the social order.” In short, Brownmiller’s text is and was profoundly important to mainstream feminism’s critical analysis of rape. But it is not without its problems, and those problems have migrated into mainstream feminist analysis of rape culture.

Though her work is focused on patriarchal relations, it must be said that Brownmiller takes questions of race, settler colonialism, and class seriously. But in crucial moments, most notably in her treatment of the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till, Brownmiller’s analysis replicates white supremacist anxieties about the Black male rapist (Brownmiller Reference Brownmiller1975; Davis Reference Davis1983, 196–9). For example, Brownmiller claims that “the recurrent nightmare in the eighteenth-century slaveholding South had been the white male dream of black men rising up to rape ‘their’ women” (252), a claim that, as I have noted, is not supported by the historical record. Brownmiller is appalled by the murder of Till and the acquittal of Bryant and Milam but writes, “rarely has one single case exposed so clearly as Till’s the underlying group-male antagonisms over access to women, for what began in Bryant’s store should not be misconstrued as an innocent flirtation” (247). Rather, Brownmiller argued, Till was trying to show his friends that he could “get a white woman. Till’s action was more than a kid’s brash prank and his murder was more than a husband’s revenge” (247). To Brownmiller, the attribution of male sexual desire to Till seemed to be a reflection of his masculinity. But Till was a kid, and his Blackness allowed Brownmiller to categorize him as a criminally adult male, rather than as a child—much less a child from Chicago who did not know that there were things he simply could not do and survive a family visit to Money, Mississippi. Implicit in Brownmiller’s analysis is the presumed validity of the myth of the Black male rapist, which she imposes on Till in order to defend Carolyn Bryant’s accusation, an accusation that, Brownmiller could not have known, Bryant would later recant. On Brownmiller’s reading, Bryant is worthy of defense and her motives are above reproach, while 12-year-old Till behaves like all men—or worse, like a Black man.Footnote ¹⁴

Two problems emerge from what is called “single-axis” thinking about rape and rape culture, the kind of thinking that does not recognize systems of subordination as multiple and interlocking. The first problem is political: single-axis thinking isolates marginalized groups from one another. In the Rape Culture documentary, rape education consultant Karla M. Jackson explains that rape is an exercise of violence with a specific political intent: “when we talk about rape, we talk about violence and the threat of violence that is used to keep people in their place, just like racism is used to keep people in their place, whatever that place may be. That place may be in the lower socioeconomic strata, in a particular neighborhood, in their houses, afraid” (24:10). Jackson’s analysis explicitly connects rape, race, and socioeconomic status and implicitly references the geographic control of marginalized groups in ghettos, which Michelle Alexander (Reference Alexander2012) and Loïc Wacquant (Reference Wacquant2002) identify as central to the ongoing disciplining and control of African Americans. The documentary argues that the reason rape functions so well to control subordinate groups is that the myths, discourses, and practices of rape culture isolate groups by virtue of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality and teach each group to fear or hate the others. The beneficiary of this isolation is white heteropatriarchy, which is comparatively unscathed by rape culture.

The second problem is analytical: single-axis analysis cannot expose how marginalized groups are not only isolated but also pitted against one other by rape culture. Brownmiller’s text is a case in point. Davis writes, “In pretending to defend the cause of all women, [Brownmiller] sometimes boxes herself into the position of defending the particular cause of white women” (1983, 198). It is not surprising that Brownmiller yields to this temptation, having been raised in a rape culture that taught her to believe it, nor is her faulty analysis grounds to reject her work out of hand (Davis, a pointed critic of Brownmiller, is also unwilling to draw that conclusion). But why is Brownmiller, despite her commitments to unearthing the structural, political bases for rape, nevertheless drawn into white supremacist analysis? Davis suggests that what’s missing in Brownmiller (and subsequent white feminist) analysis of rape culture is the insight that the myths and discourses that comprise a rape culture, those that “make meaning” of sexual violence, do so by pitting marginalized groups against one another. The social conditions for rape are not limited to patriarchy, but are also structured by white supremacy and capitalism (Reference Davis1978, 177; Reference Davis1983, 196). Addressing this analytical problem requires a framework that can reveal the “pitting”: it must uncover what the rape myths and discourses are, who is empowered by them, and how they are reinforced.

The myths, discourses, and practices of rape culture sustain white male control over all the subordinates of white heteropatriarchy by evolving and expanding to apply to any group that threatens this control. Davis writes that the myth of the Black male rapist “is an aggression against Black people as a whole” because “the mythical rapist [also] implies the mythical whore” and therefore implicates Black women (Reference Davis1983, 191). She also argues that “racism nourishes sexism, causing white women to be indirectly victimized by the special oppression aimed at their sisters of color” (177). Davis’s two points, taken together, contain the intersectional insight that structures of oppression interact in order to reassert white heteropatriarchal control. The myth of the Black male rapist and the myth of the Black hypersexualized woman become crucial mythologies to discipline other oppressed groups. Because “racism nourishes sexism” through the myths of rape culture, it’s no great distance from the mythic whore who is a hypersexualized Black woman to the mythic whore who is a “white trash” tease who is “asking for it.”

Still, despite the critical, intersectional insights of antirape activists and analysts, the mainstream account of rape culture, including Brownmiller’s influential but incomplete analysis, continues to identify rape culture as primarily a phenomenon of male domination of women. This literal misconception of rape culture reproduces misunderstandings of sexual violence. Patricia Hill Collins notes that “because theories explain the social world, they affect the social world” (Reference Collins2019, 4). When mainstream feminists declare that rape culture is about gender, they are not just theorizing, they are also doing political work: their misconception of rape culture amplifies a cultural understanding of rape that fails to recognize it as a multifaceted strategy of control.Footnote ¹⁵ Put differently, the gendered framing of rape culture dominating mainstream discourse confines the “meaning” of rape to a “single-axis” frame,Footnote ¹⁶ and its white supremacist, capitalist, heteronormative, and other dimensions remain obscured. As a consequence, the mainstream account of rape culture impedes analysis that can recognize rape and the threat of rape as exertions of power (specifically, of discipline and control) over anyone in a structurally subordinate position within white heteropatriarchal society.

Revelations of Intersectional Thinking

In her recent book, Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory, Patricia Hill Collins describes intersectionality as a metaphor, a heuristic, and a paradigm. I draw on her idea of intersectionality as a heuristic, which asks “how an intersectional [analytical] framework would shift what is considered to be fixed, and fix what has been in flux” (Reference Collins2019, 36) and which considers how multiple structures of discipline and control relate to each other. In this project, a heuristic approach exposes the operations of a rape culture by reorienting the analytical gaze in multiple ways to call into question what is fixed and what is in flux. Vivian May describes intersectional analysis as a task of rotating a multifaceted object of inquiry on multiple axes, viewing it through critical lenses both singly and together, in order to try to see what is regularly overlooked, what contradictions arise, and what refractions become evident (Reference May2015, 33–6, 57). The heuristic orientation attends to the simultaneity of the critical lenses and of the “enmeshed multiplicities (of identity and power)” (22) that operate not only in the object of inquiry [in this case, rape culture but also in the very social positions and epistemological positions occupied by scholars who use this method (23)].Footnote ²³ The following analysis interprets rape culture through different facets to reveal the relationships between and among the structures of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist exploitation. Intellectual rotation and observation can reveal reflections and refractions between facets in order to provide a more comprehensive picture of the political work being done by rape culture.

I use this approach to explore a 2013–14 news story involving Jameis Winston, an African American student and quarterback for the Florida State University Seminoles, and a white female FSU student named Erica Kinsman. The myth of the Black male rapist seemed to rear its head again when Kinsman identified Winston as her assailant in a 2012 rape. But in the years that followed, Winston was neither arrested nor tried for rape and was eventually found “not responsible” for violating FSU student conduct rules.

On December 7, 2012, Erica Kinsman reported to the Tallahassee Police Department (TPD) that she had been raped earlier that night. Kinsman underwent a forensic medical exam (a “rape kit”), but could not positively identify her assailant because, as she noted at the time, she did not know his name. Kinsman reported going to a club that night with friends and meeting a man who offered to buy her a shot; she also reported that she believed she had been drugged (The Hunting Ground 1:14; results of her medical exam indicated that Kinsman was inebriated but did not find evidence of drugs in her system; Maddan and Pazzani Reference Maddan and Pazzani2017, 158). A month later, Kinsman identified Winston to police, having learned his name in one of her new spring semester classes, an identification which was later corroborated by DNA evidence collected during her medical exam (The Hunting Ground 1:21; Bogdanich Reference Bogdanich2014). Yet, in February 2013, a month after Kinsman identified Winston, the Tallahassee Police Department investigator suspended the case, having neither questioned Winston in person nor collected evidence. Almost a year later, the state prosecutor filed no charges due to insufficient evidence (1:22; Bogdanich Reference Bogdanich2014).Footnote ²⁴ In early 2014, Winston was awarded the Heisman Trophy and Florida State won the Bowl Championship Series, at which point FSU had not completed its student conduct investigation of Winston. The university held Winston’s conduct hearing in December 2014, timing that ensured that Winston’s appeal, should he choose to file one, would not be due until January 13, 2015, about two weeks after FSU’s January 1, 2015, Rose Bowl appearance. The consequence of this timing was that any sanction imposed on Winston, including suspension or expulsion, would not begin until after Winston’s FSU football career was over. In the hearing, Florida State found Winston not responsible for violating its student conduct code.Footnote ²⁵

At first glance, and on a single-axis reading, the Winston and Kinsman example might evince a disruption of white supremacy, the rejection of the myth of the Black male rapist. For once, it might be supposed, the Black man is not presumed to be guilty, is not scripted as criminal (Jackson Reference Jackson2006, 80). In reaction to that observation, some feminists might be tempted to counter that disregard of Kinsman’s accusation confirms the mainstream feminist claim that rape is an act of misogyny so powerful that it can overcome even white supremacy. Yet neither of these readings captures the dynamics at work in this case which, despite appearances to the contrary, powerfully sustain white heteropatriarchy and capitalist exploitation. Single-axis thinking of the Winston and Kinsman example could lead one to draw conclusions about either the decline of white supremacy or about the primacy of patriarchy, but neither conclusion would reveal the multiple entanglements of rape culture in preserving white heteropatriarchy. Winston and Kinsman’s encounter is, in fact, the exception that proves the rule.

The ensuing analysis neither renders a judgment about guilt or innocence for Winston or Kinsman nor adjudicates the truth or falsehood of their claims. Instead, the purpose of the analysis is to reveal the multiple exertions of control over Winston and Kinsman that make each person a both/and: each is rendered—at once—both guilty and innocent, both honest and deceitful. As I mentioned above, my approach to intersectional analysis involves the mental action of rotating the object of inquiry in order to view the reflections and refractions from several entry points. The simultaneity of entry points (including, but not limited to, race and gender) is revealed in Winston’s and Kinsman’s experiences. The myth of the Black male rapist is, of course, not the only means of white control over Black men, and it would be a mistake to assume that it is the only racist myth at work here. Intersectional analysis of the encounter between Winston and Kinsman must consider, in addition to the myth of the Black male rapist, the practices of control, discipline, and management that collectively serve white heteropatriarchy.

By extension, the myth of the tease who is “asking for it” is not the only means of male control over female (or feminized) bodies. One powerful discourse evinced by the Winston and Kinsman example is the proposition that women (especially white women) use sex to gain advantage and the subsequent practice of vilifying accusers. As The Hunting Ground details, many people—from ESPN commentators to FSU fans—expressed doubt that Kinsman had been assaulted by Winston and presumed she was seeking fame and attention (Payne Reference Payne2015),Footnote ²⁶ a presumption that is countered by Kinsman’s inability to identify her assailant in December 2012 (during her medical exam). As the documentary shows, some commentators expressed suspicion about the timing of the allegations because the news story did not gain public attention until December 2013, almost a year after the assault was first reported, but just before FSU’s championship game appearance (see also Payne Reference Payne2015). The assumption was that Kinsman timed her allegation to correspond to the game, an assumption that reflects the discourse that women use rape allegations for their own gain (a discourse substantiated in part by white women’s false allegations against Black men). In fact, the story broke because the Tampa Bay Times made a public-records request to Tallahassee Police Department in November 2013 (Bogdanich Reference Bogdanich2014). The assumption that Kinsman was an opportunist and a liar shaped the public discourse; she was vilified by some commentators and fans, and even received death threats (Payne Reference Payne2015).

In addition to its gendered and raced dimensions, analysis of this set of events should consider the racial-economic structure of US collegiate athletics. Sports journalist William C. Rhoden describes a “plantation power dynamic” that preserves white control over Black athletes in much the same way that the plantation owner was able to profit from the physical labor of the fellow human beings he had enslaved. Today, Rhoden argues, the defining feature of this dynamic is that the “owner” determines the rules of recruitment and profit (Reference Rhoden2006 73, see also 139, 240). The financial benefit of such control is staggering. In a recent analysis, Forbes reported that an NCAA football championship earns tens of millions of dollars for the football program alone: “Florida State[‘s] … income was up 33% in its title season [2014] and a staggering 63% across three (the Seminoles had football revenue of $43 million the year before winning in 2014, and $70 million in the following season)” (Smith Reference Smith2017). In the US, collegiate athletics is a multibillion dollar a year industry whose profits are earned by the unpaid labor of the gifted athletes who comprise its teams, and Winston’s abilities were worth tens of millions of dollars to Florida State.

To protect its economic interests, collegiate athletics exerts two kinds of control over Black athletes. First, Rhoden explains, collegiate athletics takes advantage of the socioeconomic dependency that many Black college athletes face: “The trick for the masters of the [Conveyor Belt of recruitment of black athletes] … is to get control of young athletes early, take them away from any competitive interests—especially in their own communities—and reward them with flashy goodies in order to keep them quiescent” (Reference Rhoden2006, 178). Beyond any “flashy goodies” they may have offered to Winston, Florida State and the Tallahassee Police Department may have fostered a distinct kind of dependency relation with Winston when they gave him cover from a racist criminal justice system that, whether he was guilty or innocent, would almost certainly not have been fair to him. In this context, the TPD officer’s decision not to collect evidence created a dependency that made it hard (if not impossible) for anyone to render a judgment about Winston’s innocence or guilt.Footnote ²⁷ Without an investigation, Winston is “protected,” but only as an investment: he remains eligible to compete, but at a personal cost. The decision of the investigating officer at TPD to suspend the case may have ensured that Winston could never be found guilty, but it also meant he could never be exonerated. Thus the myth of Black male rapist—which was never disrupted, even as Kinsman was blamed as a fame-seeker—remained intact, and may loom over Winston for the rest of his life.

Second, David J. Leonard and C. Richard King argue, white control of Black athletes simultaneously unleashes the profitability and disciplines the imagined threat posed by Black masculinity so white persons can feel comfortable about profiting from Black athletic achievement. In Commodified and Criminalized, Leonard and King argue that Black male athletes’ “bodies and performative actions [even actions on the field or the court] are routinely scapegoated and demonized, and in turn are subjected to discipline and punishment for the good of the game and society” (Reference Leonard and King2011, 12).Footnote ²⁸ As Rachel Alicia Griffin notes, the body of the Black male athlete becomes “a site of enticement for Whites, as long as Black men can be packaged to Whites to safely consume and enjoy ‘Blackness’” (Reference Griffin2012, 167). This commodification is a practice of economic exploitation that depends on white oversight and financial control, both of which are justified in terms of the mere potential of Black criminality. In the context of a rape culture, this practice of exploitation justifies and is justified by the decision to suspend investigation of Winston rather than gather potentially exonerating evidence. The decision to suspend investigation suggests that investigators either believed that Winston must be guilty, implicitly confirming the myth of the Black male rapist, or that the legal system (of which they were a part) would not treat a Black male accused of rape fairly. Either way, Winston was rendered a commodity who—even if he was also a criminal—could (and because of his potential criminality, should) be controlled by white interests, and therefore, to borrow Griffin’s language, could remain comfortably consumable to white fans. In some respects, Winston may have escaped the Black male rapist myth, but only because he was ensnared in the racial capitalist practice of controlling Black men as commodities and criminals. Winston is not exonerated, so he cannot be innocent, but as long as he is not guilty, he can still play football.

Because Winston is neither innocent nor guilty, it becomes possible simultaneously to invoke the myth of the innocent (and therefore white) female victim (if Winston is guilty) and to vilify Kinsman as a false accuser (if he is innocent). This dual invocation serves neither Winston nor Kinsman but protects the structure of white heteropatriarchy. By rendering a judgment about neither Winston nor Kinsman, white heteropatriarchy upholds judgments against both: Winston can be the guilty rapist and the managed athlete and Kinsman can be the innocent white female victim and the lying opportunist. If we reflect on only one vector of power at a time, we are unlikely to see what is revealed when we consider them together: Winston is not and cannot be exonerated and Kinsman is not and cannot be vindicated. Those who protected Winston retained their financial interest in his success. Both Winston and Kinsman become collateral damage, albeit in different ways, in service to the financial interests of Florida State Football. The consequences for Winston and Kinsman are not a victory over white supremacy or misogyny. On the contrary, they reveal how white heteropatriarchal and racial capitalist power work in tandem through rape culture to sustain control over nonwhite and nonmale persons.

The example of Jameis Winston and Erica Kinsman reveals how an intersectional approach, pushing beyond single-axis analysis, can disentangle the complexity of rape culture and its role in sustaining sexual violence and white supremacist patriarchy. An intersectional analysis reveals how structures of white supremacist and misogynistic domination persist and support one another through rape culture myths, discourses, and practices. The Winston and Kinsman example seems to disrupt, but actually reaffirms, how the interactions of race, gender, and capitalist exploitation via a rape culture serve white heteropatriarchy by creating conditions in which Winston cannot be exonerated and Kinsman’s accusation cannot be adjudicated. Through the entwinement of the myth of the Black male rapist and the female false accuser, they both lose—he’s always not innocent, she’s always a liar and opportunist—and white heteropatriarchy continues to operate with and through mythologies, discourses, and practices of rape culture to sustain itself and to normalize rape.