Improper Advances

Download or read book Improper Advances written by Karen Dubinsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-09-15 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a study of women, men, and sexual crime in rural and northern Ontario, expanding the terms of current debates about sexuality and sexual violence. Karen Dublinsky relies on criminal case files, a revealing but largely untapped source for social historians, to retell individual stories of sexual danger - crimes such as rape, abortion, seduction, murder and infanticide. Her research supports many feminist analyses of sexual violence: that crimes are expressions of power, that courts are prejudiced by the victim's background, and that most assaults occur within the victim's homes and communities. But she refuses to view women solely as victims and sex as a tool of oppression, demonstrating that these women actively distinguished between wanted and unwanted sexual encounters, and that they attempted to punish coercive sex despite obstacles in the court system and the community.