Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Beyond Blurred Lines
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.sfc.edu/about/facultydirectory * https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickie-phillips-758a254/ * http://www.crimcast.tv/about/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2012078560
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012078560
HEADING: Phillips, Nickie D.
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670 __ |a Comic Book Crime, 2013: |b ECIP t.p. (Nickie D. Phillips)
670 __ |a Beyond blurred lines, 2016: |b eCIP t.p. (Nickie D. Phillips) data view screen (b. 10/7/68; associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY and director of the college’s Center for Crime & Popular Culture. Her research focuses on the intersection of crime, popular culture, and mass media)
PERSONAL
Born October 7, 1968.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Criminologist and professor. St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY, associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, and director of the college’s Center for Crime & Popular Culture.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born October 7, 1968, Nickie D. Phillips is a criminologist and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, and director of the college’s Center for Crime & Popular Culture. She studies the intersection of crime, popular culture, and mass media.
Comic Book Crime
In 2013, Phillips collaborated with Staci Strobl, associate professor in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, to publish Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way, which examines crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. Comics are a historically important American cultural medium that reflects and shapes American ideological identity. In comics, evil is easily identified, good triumphs over evil, and superheroes save regular citizens.
Phillips and Strobl examined 200 comics published between 2002 and 2010 to reveal a new kind of crime and punishment in the post September 11, 2001 world. They show how a hero’s character has much to do with catching and punishing villains. They also discuss how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to define what makes a hero and a villain. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, Phillips and Strobl use criminal justice, criminology, law, history, sociology, and related social sciences to show how comic books reflect an understanding of crime and justice in America. This attention to crime in popular culture has an impact on crime fighting and on America’s disproportionate number of incarcerated citizens compared to the rest of the world.
Angus Nurse commented on the Crime Media Culture website that the authors have “produced an absorbing book which effectively straddles the divide between cultural criminology and the ‘law and literature’ movement.” Nurse added: “A significant strength of the book is the manner in which Phillips and Strobl use their discussions with comics fans to reveal how ‘non-expert’ notions of criminological theory represents a world-view that policymakers frequently misunderstand and misappropriate.”
Beyond Blurred Lines
In 2016, Phillips wrote Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media. She addresses ways that sexual violence is perpetrated, processed, mediated, and negotiated in cultural media, such as television, gaming, and comic books, as well as on college campuses. Before the 1970, the term “rape culture” was used in feminist academic discourse, but now it permeates mainstream media. Phillips discusses how “the media coverage of sexual assault cases and increased discussion of rape culture has raised cultural awareness,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
Phillips explains that women are concerned that rape culture, rape myths, and victim-blaming are embraced in popular media like social media and popular culture. The prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses has also changed the dialogue about sexual violence. Phillips also discusses false rape allegations, college enforcement policies, micro aggressions, gendered harassment, and political correctness. She includes questions and suggestions for policy responses to sexual violence.
In a grim assessment, Phillips notes America’s cultural ambivalence on what constitutes sexual violence and the failure of policy to adequately address it. It is only through continued discourse and topics of news reports, social media, and television crime stories that the subject will continue to be debated and continues to shape popular media culture. Alison Cox wrote online at DWC: “Phillips does an excellent job of revealing how current conversations over rape culture has created a media-cultural environment which ultimately impacts our politics and policy making. While conceptualization and measurement are still implicit in our understanding of rape and sexual assault, Phillips argues that in order to further this understanding, we need to explore the social meaning of rape culture.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2016, review of Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media, p. 61.
ONLINE
Crime Media Culture, http://journals.sagepub.com/ (July 18, 2017), Angus Nurse, review of Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way.
DWC, http://ascdwc.com/ (July 18, 2017), Alison Cox, review of Beyond Blurred Lines.*
Nickie D. Phillips is Associate Professor in the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department at St.Francis College in Brooklyn, NY.
Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media
Publishers Weekly.
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media
Nickie D. Phillips. Rowman & Littlefield, $38 (220p) ISBN 978-1-4422-4627-0
Phillips, an associate sociology and criminal justice professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, devotes this thoughtful study to the concept of
rape culture, showing how it has reshaped public debate. Phillips explains the term's transition from being used principally within feminist
academe--where it originated in the 1970s--to becoming a topic of discussion throughout mainstream media. Exploring recent subjects of
controversy, including the social media--fueled national interest in the Steubenville, Ohio, sexual assault case; the depiction of sexual violence on
television; misogyny within gaming culture; and the incidence of assaults on college campuses, she maintains that today's increased discussions
around the topic have created a "media-cultural environment that ultimately impacts politics and policy making." The book also shows that,
although much work remains to be done in clarifying and improving college disciplinary policies, enforcement of existing rules against sexual
assault is making headway across campuses. And, as Phillips acknowledges, the media coverage of sexual assault cases and increased discussion
of rape culture has raised cultural awareness and a move toward "finding solutions that lie outside the scope of criminal justice." This new book
will contribute to an important conversation. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media." Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352763&it=r&asid=524d6d74da10fc9abcdda7932c0230d3. Accessed 12 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352763
Book reviews
Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American
Way, New York: New York University Press, 2013;289 pp.; ISBN 978-0-814-76788-7;
$24.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by Angus Nurse, Middlesex University, London, UK
Comic Book Crime examines crime, justice and law and order as depicted in American comic
books, while simultaneously examining the manner in which complex criminological perspectives
often manifest themselves as retributive or incapacitation narratives in popular fiction and media
discourse. While comics scholarship is a relatively under-developed area of criminological enquiry,
Phillips and Strobl have produced an absorbing book which effectively straddles the divide
between cultural criminology and the ‘law and literature’ movement. The book tells the story of
an industry that has grown from its pulp fiction beginnings to become a primary source of material
for mass market crime narratives, especially Hollywood cinema, while remaining true to its crime
story origins.
Comic Book Crime is based on analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to
2010 together with the authors’ own immersion and fieldwork in comic book fan culture. Thus
Phillips and Strobl do not simply write about comics as texts through which criminological narratives
unfold; they also discuss the importance of comics to an audience seeking to make sense of
crime and law and order perspectives in a post 9/11 context. Banks and Wein (1998) identify that
comic books (as fantasy-based literature) ‘are a safe and easy place for readers to explore parts
of themselves and their sense of spiritualism and search from transcendence, and to examine
and experiment with issues that worry or fascinate them’ (Banks and Wein, 1998: 2). Crime is a
perennial source of social anxiety, particularly for young males who have historically made up
comics’ core audience (although Phillips and Strobl indicate that as comics have grown up so too
has their audience) and the authors argue that ‘the repetition of cultural meanings in comic book
narratives often reinforces particular notions of justice, especially the punishment philosophies of
retributive justice and incapacitation’ (p.3).
Comic Book Crime’s analysis of comics’ criminological themes considers not just how well
they reflect contemporary ‘real world’ law and order narratives, but also the manner in which the
comics community, a subcultural grouping of fans submerged in the minutiae of comics through
podcasts conventions and forums, makes sense of and critiques unfolding narratives. In this
sense, the events depicted in comics are real to readers expecting consistency in comics’ interior
world articulated through their weekly narratives; readers also expect consistency in characters’
behaviour. This aspect of Comic Book Crime is a valuable contribution to cultural criminological
scholarship, identifying and analysing the complexity of readers’ responses to character and story
571025 CMC0010.1177/1741659015571025Crime, Media, CultureBook Reviews
book-review2015
78 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 11(1)
development and the criminological narratives on display. A significant strength of the book is
the manner in which Phillips and Strobl use their discussions with comics fans to reveal how
‘non-expert’ notions of criminological theory represents a world-view that policymakers
frequently misunderstand and misappropriate. In particular, the authors examine the idea of
‘deathworthiness’ or which characters should be killed as a function of meting out justice, and
how much these judgements are influenced by the character of the hero, the function of the
justice system (which in most comics would seem to be an extreme form of Americanised justice)
and audience expectations. As Phillips and Strobl identify: ‘empirical studies have shown that the
death penalty is unlikely to be a deterrent to crime, and by definition, putting somebody to death
cannot be rehabilitative or restorative’ (p.128). Yet their discussion reveals how comics fans
consider some villains to be worthy of death, given extreme levels of recidivism and the failure of
justice systems to deal with persistent lawlessness. Phillips and Strobl (p.129) contextualize
deathworthiness as:
(1) the avoidance of killing with the possible exception of self-defence
(2) the killing of those responsible for harms done to others
(3) the killing of those morally depraved, for any reason, whom [heroes] encounter along the
path to justice; and
(4) the killing of innocents as collateral damage in the battle between good and evil.
Philips and Strobl identify that comics sometimes struggle with the use of deadly force and fan
reaction to this is also mixed, but an acceptance of the necessity of deadly force as a function of
western criminal justice is evident. Matozzi (2003) identifies that comics have passed through
both golden and silver ages where superheroes have been ‘transformed, cancelled, revived, killed,
deconstructed, reconstructed, revisited’ (Matozzi, 2003:1). One characteristic of modern comics
is the emergence of grittier, more vigilante-style anti-heroes, which reflects both the anxiety of the
post 9/11 world and the need for appropriately tough responses to contemporary crime threats
such as terrorism, government corruption and transnational organised crime.
Central to Phillips and Strobl’s analysis is an appreciation of comics as a sophisticated art form
capable of rivalling and even superseding the written memoir, reportage and ‘real’ literature
(Versaci, 2008). Within Comic Book Crime they analyse issues of class, ethnicity, gender, race and
sexuality and the manner in which these terms are constructed in comics’ narratives as a way of
producing meaning for the heroes and villains depicted in comics and for the audience which
consumes these narratives. In doing so, the authors identify both the conservative and the
progressive aspects of comics which reflect some of the difficulties inherent in contemporary
society. Comics’ depiction of women, for example, has always been problematic; particularly in
respect of the fetishized nature of much comics artwork which arguably persists in portraying
female superheroes largely as sex objects and has historically relegated female supporting characters
to the role of love interest or victim. In Chapter 7, ‘Take Down the Bad Guys, Save the Girl’,
Phillips and Strobl argue that gender is a fluid concept while noting that within the ‘hypermasculine’
world of comics ‘females must negotiate their crime fighting in ways that express
femininity in culturally approved ways’ (p. 141). Thus, while the authors note that contemporary
comics explore possibilities in relation to gender and sexuality and depict gay and lesbian
characters as heroes in a way that other popular culture media often fails to do, the ‘white
Book reviews 79
male heteronormativity of the comic book landscape’ remains a dominating factor (p.168).
Similarly their chapter ‘Aren’t there any Brown People in this World?’ identifies how graphic
representations of ethnicity remain stereotypical and problematic. Assessing how minorities
portrayed as heroes have often overcome criminal or antisocial pasts, the authors observe that
‘in the intersection between race/ethnicity and crime fighting, a heteronormative context that
upholds a white, male, patriarchal perspective is prevalent even today’ (p.196).
Comic Book Crime is an important and engaging book of relevance not just to cultural criminology
scholars interested in how popular media depicts crime and justice issues, but also to
those interested in the complexities of criminological discourse and its frequent reduction into
simplistic law and order narratives. While comic book fans may prefer more discussion of their
preferred heroes and criminologists might prefer a more critical exploration of the complexities
of criminological theory, the authors have produced an effective discussion of comics and crime
which deserves to reach a wide audience.
References
Banks AC and Wein EE (1998) Folklore and the comic book: The traditional meets the popular. New
Directions in Folklore 2. http://astro.temple.edu/~camille/comics1.html (accessed 14 July 2014).
Mattozzi A (2003) Innovating superheroes. Reconstruction, Spring 2003: 3(2). http://reconstruction.eserver.
org/032/mottazzi.htm (accessed 14 July 2014).
Versaci R (2008) This book contains graphic language. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.
Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?
London: Sage, 2013; 204 pp.; ISBN 978-1-849-20108-7 (pbk) £25.99; 978-1-849-
20107-0 (hbk) £79.00
Reviewed by Randolph Myers, Old Dominion University, USA
We’ve been thinking about social exclusion all wrong, say Simon Winlow and Steve Hall in their
latest book Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? Social exclusion is not some
condition that besets the poor in neoliberal times. Social exclusion, at its most corrosive, is
the sometimes deliberate (oftentimes unconscious) escape from meaningful reciprocal social
relationships: it is not something that happens to those people in that neighborhood because
of the imposition of ill-conceived or unjust economic, criminal justice and social policies; social
exclusion is something that the neoliberal subject aspires to. When this escape from ‘the social’
becomes the default (and sought after) subjectivity for young and old, rich and poor, hopes for
solidarity, reciprocity and a social hierarchy not premised on one-upmanship and differentiation
through consumption fades from view. In such a world, we are all excluded from the social.
This is a particularly scary characterization of social exclusion, one which contrasts in important
ways with the dominant bodies of scholarship on the topic in the USA and Europe. Social exclusion
is not something only constructed by scheming politicians or city planners seeking to please
corporate partners at the expense of poor communities. It is not only the gentrification and
targeted policing of a neighborhood to make way for escapist consumption: it is the escapist,
BOOK REVIEWS- SPRING 2017
HomeBook Reviews- Spring 2017
Section Editor: Venessa Garcia
Phillips, Nickie D. (2017). Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Reviewed by Alison Cox, B.S., M.S., Michigan State University
A strong debate remains over whether popular media influences our behavior, and in particular, if it directly causes violence. In her new book, Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media, criminologist Nickie D. Phillips uses a cultural criminology framework to demonstrate how the concept of rape culture has entered our collective imagination, and in turn, provides a cultural space where violence against women is often ignored, implicitly condoned, or explicitly encouraged (2017). Primarily focusing on rape culture in the United States, Phillips purposively samples content from numerous popular culture and media outlets. While some academics or scholars may pejoratively dismiss this data analysis as “low culture” (Phillips, 2017, 175-176), Phillips does an excellent job of revealing how current conversations over rape culture has created a media-cultural environment which ultimately impacts our politics and policy making. While conceptualization and measurement are still implicit in our understanding of rape and sexual assault, Phillips argues that in order to further this understanding, we need to explore the social meaning of rape culture.
Chapter 1 provides the reader with the origins of rape culture and demonstrates its evolution from the halls of academia to its increasing presence in popular culture. A term emerging from the radical feminist movement of the 1970s, Phillips highlights how scholars such as Susan Brownmiller (1975), Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson (1974), and the Cambridge Documentary Films release of Rape Culture (Lazarus & Wunderlich, 1975/1983) first introduced the concept. She then traces how the concept has come to be recognized in low culture spaces where, simultaneously, a culture of casual misogyny is revealed. By using various (and offensive) definitions of rape culture supplied by online users of UrbanDictionary.com; discussing its feminist and gender performance history through Riot Grrrl and SlutWalk initiatives; and by detailing the different types of microaggressions experienced by women in their everyday lives, including the debate over whether their trauma is a real struggle or not, Phillips reminds us just how contentious this topic can be. Furthermore, as measuring rates of sexual violence has proven to be quite the challenge, public discourse around the concept of rape culture frequently relies on the validity of the data. While these measurement issues remain, Phillips is clear that one aim of her book is to address criticism over rape statistics in the context of rape culture (p. 34).
The meat of the book, Chapters 2 through 6, focus on some of the various outlets in popular media that help shape and create context of rape culture. In Chapter 2, Phillips provides recent examples that emulate the concept of rape culture and demonstrate how they have permeated our mainstream media coverage. For instance, she first highlights the gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, which occurred in New Delhi, India in late 2012. Attempting to show how “rape culture isn’t just India’s problem” (p. 36), Phillips compares this case with the infamous juvenile trial of two high school football players from Steubenville, Ohio, who were found guilty of raping Jane Doe, an unconscious sixteen-year old girl; the 2013 “Song of the Summer,” “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke; and the increasing number of allegations of “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby, drugging and sexually assaulting women throughout his career.
Next, Phillips discusses depictions of rape and sexual violence against women in the popular media form of television in Chapter 3. Highlighting several televised dramas that pull in a large number of viewers in each week such as The Walking Dead, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, The Fall, as well as several of Shonda Rhimes’ televised dramas including Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, How To Get Away With Murder, and Scandal, Phillips recalls the varying levels of reactions from the audience through a collection of articles, websites, blogs and Twitter hashtag campaigns urging a call to attention to sexual violence against women on TV. She also features a focused analysis of the popular series, Game of Thrones, and discusses several problematic instances of rape and sexual assault that are riddled throughout its six seasons. So why are we compelled to watch? Based on Phillips’ analysis, this helps explain how our responses and reactions to rape and sexual assault are not solely intellectual; viewers are most passionate when they discuss how the scenes made them feel rather than how they made they think.
Chapters 4 and 5 continue this discussion through an analysis of the territorial “geek spaces” of online gaming and comic book communities. Through detailed examples of doxxing attacks on popular-culture critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Zoe Quinn (#GamerGate), Phillips discusses the pervasiveness of misogyny and sexual harassment in the gaming community. Although she is clear to point out that mainstream media coverage was generally supportive of the notion that there is evidence of a gendered problem within gaming and online harassment, Phillips ultimately argues that one legacy of these doxxing attacks may be how its supporters have been successful at reframing sensitivity to rape culture and sexual violence itself as a form of political correctness that is a threat to the broader societal culture at large and to free speech (Phillips, 2017).
These issues continue to resonate in comic book culture. Returning to her wheelhouse and reminiscent of her first book, Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way (2013, co-authored with Staci Strobl), Phillips underlines how women have historically been shunned from these spaces, or if included, how they have primarily been perceived and received by “traditional fans:” white males aged thirty to forty-five (Bringham-Grette, Thaller & Wilson, 2015). Like gaming culture, women in comic books are hypersexualized and riddled with sexual harassment and violence to fuel their storylines. For example, Phillips highlights how female characters are drawn in sexually explicit and anatomically impossible poses, a phenomenon known as “broke back” and how female characters tend to be relegated to supportive or passive roles, or in situations where they need assistance from a male. To close the chapter, Phillips discusses what seems to be pervasive sexual harassment at comic book conventions and the lack of (and resistance to) anti-harassment policies in order to make these conventions safer.
In Chapter 6, Phillips brings back the concept of rape culture to its original research setting by focusing on the pervasiveness of rape culture on college campuses and how conversations have shifted around the topic. While there have been a myriad of reactions and responses since its conceptualization, Phillips sadly demonstrates how rape culture has been dismantled in more recent times through increased scrutiny and the enforcement of Title IX. Despite President Barak Obama establishing the White House Task Force on Protecting Students from Sexual Assault in 2014, the “one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college” (Krebs et al. 2007) statistic remains hotly contested and unproven in regards to the social understanding of rape culture. While this result may come as a surprise for some of us familiar with the literature, or for those of us who are regularly immersed in academic circles, however, Phillips is superb in explaining where this breakdown occurs. Recalling previous chapters, Phillips reminds us that we must understand this transformation, or dismantling, within the larger cultural context of how rape culture has been negotiated. She is keen to point out that although college campuses have traditionally been the dominant space through which these debates have evolved, popular culture has also contributed to our understanding of what rape culture is (Phillips, 2017). In other words, our social meaning of rape culture, which has been largely shaped by popular culture, has come to influence our understanding and acceptance/rejection of sexual violence against women.
What does this mean for our politics and overall policymaking? Phillips ends her book on a bit of a grim note, concluding that our failure of policy reflects our cultural ambivalence around what constitutes sexual violence (Phillips, 2017). So where do we go from here? While there are indeed no easy solutions to the problems of sexual violence, regardless if you accept the concept of rape culture or not, Phillips optimistically concludes that the term is here to stay. As it has evolved from the halls of academia, she claims that it “is now ubiquitous in popular discourse, showing up in news reports, social media outlets, and television crime dramas” (p. 185). It is through this observed discourse that more broadly contributes to larger ideological debates around feminism, social justice, academia, censorship, free speech, and due process of the law (Phillips, 2017). Regardless, Phillips insists that there is no going back now when she writes: “There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle; there’s no erasing the concept” (p. 185). It would be a disservice to the field if we dismiss the social meaning of rape culture and how it has been shaped by our popular media culture.
Even though Phillips expects her analysis to easily be dismissed as “low brow” or “irrelevant” (p. 185), she makes an important and noble stride in her work. By focusing on more recent events (nearly all examples in the book are from the year 2012 and beyond), this type of analysis is a breath of fresh air in what can be our sometimes-confining academic halls. I applaud her for providing a low-culture analysis and feel that she did an excellent job in exploring how the social meanings of sexual violence are contested through popular media outlets, and how the concept of rape culture enters our collective imagination. I feel this is a major advancement to study of rape and sexual assault, as well as, our sociological behavior and expectations associated with it. Although each chapter takes on a different outlet, community, or institution present in popular media (mainstream news coverage, television, video games and online gaming, comic book culture, and college campuses), Phillips seamlessly weaves each of these arenas together to serve her narrative purpose. She successfully argues that the concept of rape culture cannot be fully understood apart from these prime arenas, as these spaces are the very ones that inform our collective imagination and influence our perceptions of sexual violence. As our society becomes more immersed and/or dependent on social media, it is important that we expand our research settings to include empirical analyses of these spaces.
While I thoroughly enjoyed Phillips’ book, I hope the following critiques are taken as helpful and constructive. The methodology is provided in the Appendix, and Phillips does a good job explaining how she collected the original data, but as a fellow qualitative researcher I would have liked to read more detail, especially in terms of data analysis. For example, this section only seems to mention newspapers. Did Phillips gather data from blogs, Twitter accounts, hashtag campaigns, and other websites from these academic and newspaper sources? How that specific data was collected was a bit unclear. It is clear, however, that Phillips did extensive work and pulled from several media and popular culture resources – the Resources and Notes sections total 99 pages alone – so giving a little bit more time and attention to the methodology behind her low culture analysis would have been appreciated.
Additionally, the first chapter provided a few handy tables and figures, which I would have liked to continue to see throughout the text. While I was personally satisfied with the amount of qualitative content included (quotes from articles and interviews, tweets, and eye-catching headlines from news media outlets), perhaps others would appreciate increased visuals to go alongside with the text. Lastly, Phillips claims that she is using a “cultural criminological framework” (p. 3) and while it may interrupt the flow of the text, perhaps a chapter or sub-section on cultural criminology theory would be helpful for readers. I think this would also help satisfy those academics who require a deeper theoretical analysis and connection.
Despite the occasional appeasement to academics, the audience of this book is quite broad. I highly recommend this book and feel that many would benefit from reading it. Besides academics, this book can be easily digested by educators, journalists, politicians and policymakers, members of law enforcement, those involved in the entertainment industry, as well as social media and the tech industry. Beyond Blurred Lines is especially a good resource for undergraduate students that may help them better connect the concept of rape culture and problems associated with sexual violence to their everyday lives, the lives of their peers, and to the lives of victims and survivors. I honestly wish I had this text when I taught my first course in the Fall of 2015, Women in Criminal Justice. It would have really come in handy.
References
Bringham-Grette, J., Thaller, M., & Wilson, G. Willow. (2015) “Conference on World Affairs,” Colorado.edu, Boulder, CO, April 2015, http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/search_results.html?year=2015&words=G.+Willow+Wilson.
Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Penguin.
Connell, N., & Wilson, C. (1974). Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. Plume.
Krebs, C. P., Lindquist, C. H., Warner, T. D., Fisher, B. S., & Martin, S. L. (2007). The campus sexual assault (CSA) study: Final report. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice.
Lazarus, M., & Wunderlich, R. (1975). Rape Culture. Cambridge Documentary Films.
Phillips, Nickie D. (2017). Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Phillips, an associate sociology and criminal justice professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, devotes this thoughtful study to the concept of rape culture, showing how it has reshaped public debate. Phillips explains the term’s transition from being used principally within feminist academe—where it originated in the 1970s—to becoming a topic of discussion throughout mainstream media. Exploring recent subjects of controversy, including the social media–fueled national interest in the Steubenville, Ohio, sexual assault case; the depiction of sexual violence on television; misogyny within gaming culture; and the incidence of assaults on college campuses, she maintains that today’s increased discussions around the topic have created a “media-cultural environment that ultimately impacts politics and policy making.” The book also shows that, although much work remains to be done in clarifying and improving college disciplinary policies, enforcement of existing rules against sexual assault is making headway across campuses. And, as Phillips acknowledges, the media coverage of sexual assault cases and increased discussion of rape culture has raised cultural awareness and a move toward “finding solutions that lie outside the scope of criminal justice.” This new book will contribute to an important conversation. (Nov.)