The Discovery of Rape: The Outlawing of Intimate Violence in Modern Europe, 1960-1997

My dissertation analyzes the transatlantic exposure of intimate violence as a social and political problem and its legal aftermath in Europe between 1960-1997. Drawing on a hybrid of sources, my dissertation traces two entangled developments across western Europe: the changing social attitudes towards violence in the home, and the changing views about the applicability of the law in the realm of the intimate. Second-wave feminists transformed intimate violence from a private injury into a public matter for state protection. This transformation created a language of activism and expertise adopted by the state, and entailed an unprecedented intensification of state power as a result. Citizens and revolutionaries became patients and clients. But it has drawn resistance to that state power in numerous forms, most notably as a politics concerning how, and by whom, intimate violence is defined and measured, and its role in pathologizing certain men and women.