On rape and property: how laws reproduce spaces of violence

Logan, Jennifer (2025) On rape and property: how laws reproduce spaces of violence. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This dissertation is about the changing relationship between law, space, property, and sexual violence in the United States, from the plantation to the present day. While much has been written about the “neoliberal turn” initiated by the law and economics movement – which broadened the scope of legally sanctioned theft, displacement, and violence against the working classes, women, and people of color around the world – changes in sexual violence law during the late 20th century also shored up the legitimacy of formal contract principles in sexual relations. These changes, I argue, represent a co-optation of demands for recognition and justice that came out of the civil rights movements of the 1960s and beyond. While much of feminist scholarship approaches sexual violence as an epistemic problem – a problem primarily of speech and knowledge-making – I approach sexual violence as a material problem of who and what can own or constitute property in relationship to whom, and where. The object of my research is not the (atypical) case of stranger rape, but rather the much more common occurrences of sexual violence within spaces like the household, the workplace, and the prison. Using a series of case studies drawn from the plantation south to the present day, I show how and where sexual violence functions as an apparatus of property creation in spaces where law has transformed human relations into market relations and bodies into property. Far from representing a clean break between the 19th and early 20th century’s legally sanctioned rape of enslaved and post-enslaved peoples, children, wives, and other marginalized persons, I show how the neoliberal law and economics of the late 20th century ushered in a jurisprudence of sexual violence where the best we can hope for in sexual relations is the fiction of non-domination embedded in modern contract law.

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