Chapter 3 - Rape Culture: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Roseanna, Allison Leotta’s The Last Good Girl, Y. A. Erskine’s The Betrayal, and Heather J. Fitt’s Open Your Eyes

Summary

Rape culture is endemic and devastates women because their bodies and sexualities are controlled by patriarchy through inducing fear of rape. Lisa Levy argues that: “[i]f crime fiction is a mirror of society that reveals our deepest and longest held fears, as I believe it is, then rape culture is one of those fears writ large in novels about men who violate women (sexually or otherwise).” Given how endemic rape culture is, it is therefore not surprising that it is a constant theme in crime fiction. However, the crime genre's treatment of the theme of rape is often ambivalent. Rape culture is a key issue for the #MeToo movement and fourth-wave feminism. Jessica Ringrose, Kaitlynn Mendes, Sophie Whitehead, and Amelia Jenkinson argue that the term rape culture describes social contexts where “sexual violence against women is implicitly and explicitly condoned, excused, tolerated and normalised,” and where female victims are held responsible for their rape. Alisa Kessel traces changing feminist analyzes and approaches to rape culture since the 1970s second-wave feminism. Using an intersectional approach, Kessel argues that rape culture must be seen in wider contexts as supporting “white supremacy, heteronormativity, xenophobia, and colonialism.” This chapter investigates rape culture through the analysis of Allison Leotta's The Last Good Girl (2016), Y. A. Erskine's The Betrayal (2012), and Heather J. Fitt's Open Your Eyes (2022). Prior to this, I examine how the portrayal of rape in earlier crime fiction can be reevaluated through fourth-wave feminist perspectives, using Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's crime novel Roseanna (1965) as a case study. Importantly, other chapters in this book also depict rape culture in their analysis of crime fiction texts, including rape culture affecting women of color and trans women. This chapter, then, investigates how contemporary crime fiction reflects and extends feminist campaigns against contemporary rape culture and its manifestations. The main objective of these campaigns is to call attention to the threats of violence and assault that women face, and ways of articulating feminist resistance to these very real and visceral forms of oppression. This chapter examines a fundamental feminist question, demonstrating how crime fiction in the age of #MeToo is interrogating rape culture through the genre.