Utter(ing) Unspeakability: Identity, Meaning, and Mediatization in the Greg Haidl Gang Rape Trial

Abstract

Between the Steubenville gang rape case, the suicides of several teenage rape victims, and the fatal attack on a young female student in Delhi, contemporary news is full of stories about rape and sexual violence. Different forms of media played substantial roles in each of these cases - as records of the events, as pieces of evidence, as blackmail material, and as an organizing tool and avenue for public outrage. Each of these cases highlights the ongoing problem of rape culture and the complicated nature of representations of sexual violence, while also exposing the power of media as a purveyor of competing discourses, a tool of oppression and violence, and, potentially, an avenue for reclamation. This dissertation investigates media representations of the Greg Haidl gang rape case to show how hegemonic discourses about sexual violence silence sexual assault victims and limit the pursuit of justice. Through an examination of media texts spanning from 2002-2012, this study explores how dominant cultural discourses about rape, innocence, sexuality, and criminality function to construct and constrain understandings of rape. Using a cultural studies framework influenced by feminist theory, critical race theory, geography, and performance theory, this work focuses on examining how the juries in the two Haidl trials “read” the film the perpetrators created of their crime. The study concludes with a short film that “reconstructs” Haidl trial coverage using an artistic praxis influenced by feminist film theory and cultural studies methodology. The film and text explore the idea that dominant discourses of sexual violence construct a subject position for rape victim/survivors that is marked by “unspeakability”. Unspeakability perpetuates the violation of victim/survivors and the dominion of violent and destructive rape narratives. The film suggests that alternative media narratives can provide ways to combat dominant narratives through the expression of more complex and agentic subjectivities. Ultimately, this study argues for the expansion of cultural studies as a form of artistic praxis which might promote new discourses that center the experience of rape victims, provide a way to “speak back” to dominant rape narratives, and generate creative approaches to combatting sexual violence in contemporary culture.