1 These are just some of the means of representation. In contemporary society, television, computers and international wire services communicate images rapidly and globally. See Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues 6 (London: Verso, 1990) (“Wallace, Invisibility Blues”).Google Scholar

2 Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Bad Object-Choices, ed., How do I Look? (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991) (specifically critiquing the representation of homosexuality in film and video).Google Scholar

3 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988).Google Scholar

4 Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) (covering both film and still photographs).Google Scholar

5 Eve Blau & Edward Kaufman, eds., Architecture and Its Image (Montreal: Centre Canadien d'Architecture, 1989; Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992).Google Scholar

6 Wallace, Invisibility Blues; for an analysis of images of race in a wide variety of works see bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), and id., Black Look: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992.Google Scholar

7 See Frug, Mary Joe, “Re-reading Contracts: A Feminist Analysis of a Contracts Casebook,” 34 Am U.L. Rev. 1065 (1985), for an early and classic work in this genre that critiques the representation of women in a standard law school textbook. For my own analysis of the representation of battered women and gay men in legal contexts, see Freeman, Jody, “Constitutive Rhetoric: Law as a Literary Activity,” 14 Harv. Women's L.J. 305 (1991).Google Scholar

8 Wallace, Invisibility Blues 6: “I consider it a cultural crisis of the first order that so few people of color, especially women, are in positions of power and authority in the production of newspapers, books, magazines, television, films, radio, music, movies, academic journals and conferences, and university faculty and curricula”.Google Scholar

9 See Wallace, Invisibility Blues 3 (cited in note 1): “Combinations of racism and sexism are much harder to diagnose in the visual modes than in the discursive modes, just as they are much more palatable in the form of art or photography than in the form of analysis…. [P]eople, especially black people, know so little, in a conscious way, about how images affect them”.Google Scholar

10 Kristin Bumiller, “Rape as a Legal Symbol: An Essay on Sexual Violence and Racism,” 42 U. Miami L Rev. 75; id, “Fallen Angels: The Representation of Violence against Women in Legal Culture,” 18 Int'l J. Soc. L. 125 (1990); Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice and En-gendering Power (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992 (“Morrison, Race-ing Justice”).Google Scholar

11 Nell Irvin Painter, “Hill, Thomas, and the Use of Racial Stereotype,” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice 206–10, referring to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Stein's As Fine us Melanctha, as well as many other texts and films.Google Scholar

12 I exclude white men's sexuality from this list not because it is somehow less a product of representation than the sexuality of women and black men but because it is the background norm against which other sexualities are created. What I mean is that white male sexuality functions as does race for white people: whites can easily be unconscious of themselves having a race because it is others who are raced compared to them. Similarly, white male heterosexuals can be unconscious of their sexuality because it is accepted unproblematically as the norm.Google Scholar

13 In his essay, Winkler points out that the title of the work varies in the ancient manuscripts but is dated to some time in the late second or early third century B.C. Winkler relied on a text by Michael Reeve (Daphnis and Chloe (Leipzig: Teubner, 1986).Google Scholar

14 See R. L. Hunter, A Study of Daphnis and Chloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); A. Heiserman, The Novel before the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977; and G. Anderson, Eros sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play (Chico, Cal.: Scholars Press, 1982); even those who notice the violence in the text see it either as a rejected alternative to the couple's destined bliss (see T. Pandiri, “Daphnis and Chloe: The Art of Pastoral Play,” 14 Ramus 116 (1985)) or as a painful, though necessary rite of passage for Chloe. See H. H. O. Chalk, “Eros and the Lesbian Pastorals of Longos,” 80 J. Hellenic Stud. (1960).Google Scholar

15 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; repr. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).Google Scholar

16 V. A. Shahane, E. M. Forster, “A Passage to India”: A Study (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977); L. Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1966), as cited by Winkler.Google Scholar

17 Here she draws largely on Catharine MacKinnon's theory of the “split reality” of rape, by which she means that men experience the encounter as consensual and women experience it as forced. This leads to a situation in which a woman is “raped, but not by a rapist.” See Mackinnon, Catharine A., “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Towards a Feminist Jurisprudence,” 8 Signs 636, 654 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 For examples of critics commenting on Tess's purity, Rooney cites Mary Jacobus, “Tess: A Pure Woman” in S. Lipshitz, ed., Tearing the Veil: Essays on Femininity (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, “1978), and Laura Claridge, Tess: A Less than Pure Woman Ambivalently Presented,” 28 Tex. Stud. Language & Literature 324 (1980).Google Scholar

19 My analysis of the Tyson trial is based on the trial transcripts, primarily on the direct examination and cross-examination of Washington and Tyson. Indiana v. Tyson, Cause No. 49G04–9109-CF-116245, Marion County Sup. Ct. Transcript of Proceedings at Trial, 31 Jan. 1992, 8 Feb. 1992. I thank Alan Dershowitz for generously making these available to me. My analysis of the Smith trial are based on viewing the entire trial as broadcast on the Cable News Network and viewing the videotape of the proceedings made by Court T.V. as part of its Trial Training Program.Google Scholar

20 Alan Dershowitz, Tyson‘s lawyer on appeal, described Tyson's interpretation of events this way: “He is convinced he did not do anything wrong. He is convinced this woman was a groupie and just expected from him what she got. She certainly behaved like a groupie.”“Larry King Live,” Cable News Network Transcripts, 14 Oct. 1992.Google Scholar

21 “20/20,” ABC News, 21 Feb. 1992, Barbara Walters interview.Google Scholar

22 At trial, the prosecutor posed questions to Mike Tyson that were clearly intended to make his defense sound ludicrous and to play up the innocence of the alleged victim. Q. “Desiree Washington, 18 years and one month old, just graduated from high school … incoming freshman from Coventry Rhode Island says, basically, ‘You want to fuck me? Fine. Call me’?” Transcript of Proceedings at Trial, 8 Feb. 1992, p. 1912.Google Scholar

23 Id.Google Scholar

24 I am not arguing here that Ms. Washington is “in fact” assimilated or that being assimilated is a good thing. My use of the word assimilated is meant critically. My point is that her “credentials” made her less stereotypically black and more stereotypically white, and that this helped displace negative stereotypes which made it easier for white audiences (and presumably the jury) to relate to her as a daughter “like their daughter.” I think this case would have been radically different if Washington had been a prostitute, or a drug addict, or simply uneducated, and I think this only because of prevailing biases against such people, particularly when they are people of color.Google Scholar

25 Alan Dershowitz, responding to a caller's question on “Larry King Live” (cited in note 20).Google Scholar

26 In fact, that Tyson was convicted and sentenced to serve time in prison is unusual since, according to one study, “the only category more likely to receive probation than prison is the black/black category” (referring to crimes of assault by blacks on blacks). Anthony Walsh, “The Sexual Stratification Hypothesis and Sexual Assault in Light of Changing Conceptions of Race,” 25 Criminology 153, 161 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The response to her in some black communities, however, was not favorable. She was denounced for destroying a black role model and for, in effect, betraying her race. The same criticism was made of Anita Hill in the context of her accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. Carol Swain argues “For African Americans generally, the issue was not so much whether Hill was credible or not; she was dismissed because many saw her as a person who had violated the code of censorship, which mandates that blacks should not criticize, let alone accuse, each other in front of whites.” See Swain, Carol M., “Double Standard Double Bind: African-American Leadership after the Thomas Debacle,” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice 225 (cited in note 10).Google Scholar

28 I encountered one male law professor who commented: “Of course, he is guilty. Look at him. He‘s an animal. If you drilled a hole through his head [while making the motion of drilling into his head], you' d find a brain the size of a pea”.Google Scholar

29 Many commentators shared my view. One described Vincent Fuller's strategy as “pandering to one of the most enduringly powerful racist preconceptions about black sexuality: the mystique of the black male libido, and the voracity of the black female in satisfying it.”Independent (London), 16 Feb. 1992.Google Scholar

30 Judith Rowland, interview on “Larry King Live,” Cable News Network Transcripts, 27 April 1992.Google Scholar

31 Following an acquittal in a rape trial in Fort Lauderdale, one juror said, “She asked for it. We felt she was up to no good the way she was dressed.” See N.Y. Times, 7 Oct. 1989, cited in Judith A. Baer, ed., 2 Women in American Law 246 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991.Google Scholar

32 Id. at 249. Four of the six defendants were convicted. Commonwealth v. Raposo, No. 12268 (Mass. Super. Ct., 22 March 1984); Commonwealth v. Cordeiro, No. 12267 (Mass. Super. Ct., 22 March 1984); Commonwealth v. Silvia, No. 12266 (Mass. Super. Ct., 17 March 1984); Commonwealth v. Vieira, No. 12265 (Mass. Super. Ct., 17 March 1984).Google Scholar

33 Barbara Walters interview (cited in note 21).Google Scholar

34 In fact, three other witnesses were prepared to testify that Smith had sexually assaulted them. The prosecution‘s motion to introduce the evidence was denied because the evidence did not show a distinct “pattern of behavior” as opposed to a propensity. Because of Florida's rape shield law, Bowman's sexual history was inadmisible, but the press widely publicized her alleged abortion and the fact that she was a single mother.Google Scholar

35 Cross-examination of Patricia Bowman, Court T.V. Trial Training videotape.Google Scholar

36 In fact, the majority of rapes are committed by people known to the victim. See Susan Estrich, Real Rape 12 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Although her statistics date from the 1970s, Susan Brownmiller cites numerous studies indicating that the majority of reported rapes are committed by men against women who are of the same race, with the overwhelming majority of reported rapes being black on black. See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape 235 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975) (“Brownmiller, Against Our Will”). Recently, the National Victims Center Survey conducted by the Medical University of South Carolina reported that in 70% of rapes, the victim is acquainted with her assailant.Google Scholar

37 Although Bowman owned her own home and had a trust fund, her status was clearly inferior to that of a member of the Kennedy family.Google Scholar

38 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, “Whose Story Is It Anyway?”in Morrison, Race-ing Justice 209 (cited in note 10) (“Crenshaw, ‘Whose Story?’”).Google Scholar

39 Walsh, , 25 Criminology at 154 (cited in note 26).Google Scholar

40 See Crenshaw, “Whose Story?” at 413: “Lest it be believed that such doubts have been banished to the past, a very recent study of jurors in rape trials revealed that black women‘s integrity is still very deeply questioned by many people in society. One juror, explaining why a black rape victim was discredited by the jury, stated, You can‘t believe everything they say. They're known to exaggerate the truth.” Crenshaw cites Gary LaFree, Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth, 1991).Google Scholar

41 Marty Longelan, the former president of a rape crisis center, underscored the constraining impact of types and images, saying, “If you‘re 18 years old and you're naive and you get youself in a particular situation and get raped, maybe the jury will believe you. If you‘ve been drinking or, God forbid, used drugs or are a single mother or any way other than sort of a perfect, you know, unspoiled teen-ager, you may not be believed. What are we really saying to women in this society—that if they're not perfect, they can be raped and they can't do anything about it!” National Public Radio, “Morning Edition,” 12 Feb. 1992.Google Scholar

42 The exception here might be a white athlete from a sport like hockey or boxing. I doubt whether a professional tennis player, white or black, would use such an approach. Here, considerations of race, class, and profession intersect. I thank Howard Erlanger for pointing this out.Google Scholar

43 Independent (London), 13 Feb. 1992.Google Scholar

44 The physical comparison of Tyson and Washington could not have been more dramatic. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, 26 Jan. 1992, at 19, Charles Laurence said of Tyson, “close up, he is simply huge. He kept rolling his battering-ram head, as if the mighty neck muscles were cramping his windpipe.” In every photograph or film I have seen of Washington she appears tiny, young, and feminine.Google Scholar

45 Black men convicted of raping white women still receive the heaviest sentences of any sexual assault defendants. See Wortman, Marlene Stein, ed., 1 Women in American Law 247 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985). See also Jennifer Wriggins, “Rape, Racism and the Law,” 6 Harv. Women's L J. 103 (1983).Google Scholar

46 The presence of sports metaphors to evaluate the performance of the lawyers in the coverage of the Tyson trial was both amusing and disturbing. Diane Sawyer acknowledged this while covering the trial for ABC News, 7 Feb. 1992, when she interviewed a writer from Sports Illustrated about how “each side” of the trial was doing: “I suppose there is an unfortunate tendency in these trials to follow them as sporting events, and to report on them as they progress. Perhaps that‘s encouraged by television. It's not a very good idea.” Ms. Sawyer then went on to do exactly that.Google Scholar

47 Williams, Joyce E., “Secondary Victimization: Confronting Public Attitudes about Rape,” 9 Victimology 66, 76 (1984).Google Scholar

48 Id. at 68.Google Scholar

49 Id.Google Scholar

50 Boston Globe, 12 Feb. 1992, quoting Greta Van Sustern.Google Scholar

51 The argument that women who step out of prescribed gender behavior should not be surprised if they are raped sounds rather extreme. It is voiced, however, even by those who call themselves feminist. See Camille Paglia, “Rape and Modern Sex War,” in Camille Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture 52–53 (New York: Vintage Books, 1992): “Every woman must take personal responsibility for her sexuality, which is nature‘s red flame. She must be prudent and cautious about where she goes and with whom. When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences.” Even for those who think an “assumption of the risk” defense for rape is untenable, the view that women ought to know better than to take risks may infect the assessment of credibility or seep into a juror's determination of whether she consented. But what is most disturbing about the assumption of risk approach is that it assumes the inevitability of male sexual aggression and treats women as the appropriate bearers of that risk. The representation of rape as the natural consequence of risk taking allocates all the burdens of existing social relations to women without any suggestion that a different allocation is possible.Google Scholar

52 “For an argument in the same genre about the disciplinary effect of sexual abuse see Duncan Kennedy, Sexual Abuse, Sexy Dressing and the Eroticization of Domination,” 26 New England L Rev. 1309 (1992). Kennedy understands “disciplinary” in the sense that abuse functions to enforce patriarchal social norms which include norms about dressing, and other more general notions of what men and women should be like. Although there is much in his article with which I take issue, Kennedy's view of how discipline works and his description of dress practices as a sign system that can also be a site of conflict seems consistent with my argument here.Google Scholar

53 One of the negatives of categorization is that it affects social attitudes in general, even the self-image and behavior of the people who internalize ascriptions. Social science supports the view that people tend to categorize others in order to interact with them and that labeling and treating people in a particular way can lead to them conforming to the description. See, e.g., David Sudnow, “Normal Crimes,” 12 Soc. Problems 255 (1965); Thomas J. Scheff, Being Mentally Ill: A Sociological Theory (Chicago: Aldine/Atherton, 1971; Walter R. Gove, The LabeUing of Deviance (Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1980).Google Scholar

54 Crenshaw, “Whose Story?” at 409 (cited in note 38).Google Scholar

55 When I say or imply that stereotypes are reductive or work against the interests of women and people of color I do not mean that their interests are the same or even that we can always know what they are. And it's not that the stereotypes are necessarily “damaging” or “against their interests.” It might be otherwise in a different culture or context. I am merely arguing that in this culture and context the stereotypes about women and black men that I have critiqued have a particular historical meaning and have successfully worked to maintain their position of social inferiority.Google Scholar

56 See Keith Botsford, Independent, 11 Jan. 1992, p. 25. The lead for this article read, “You‘ve had the Supreme Court judge, you've seen the Kennedy nephew. Now, to shock and bemuse you, the first big fight of 1992: the former world heavy-weight champion v. the Miss Black America contender.…” Although they were often compared, many commentators claimed that there was a wide disparity in coverage of the Smith and Tyson trials, which they attributed to a variety of things, including the defendants' different races, the fact that Smith was connected to the Kennedy family, and the reluctance of the media to be seen to attack black men. See Washington Timer, 14 Dec. 1991, at A-5.Google Scholar

57 Barbara Walters interview (cited in note 21). Washington said in the interview that the people who offered her the money told her to say that she was “afraid because of what happened to Patricia Bowman, that I was afraid because of how Anita Hill was exploited.” The Reverend T. J. Jemison, President of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., has been accused of making the offer. See N.Y. Times, Sat., 1 May 1993, at A–10.Google Scholar

58 F. Lee Bailey & Henry B. Rothblatt, Crimes of Violence: Rape and Other Sex Crimes 277–78 (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co., 1973).Google Scholar

59 Maja Hanks, “Liability for Rape,” in Carol H. Lefcourt, ed., Women and the Law§ 15–03 ∥ 2 (New York: C. Boardman, 1990).Google Scholar

60 Walsh, , 25 Criminology at 161 (cited in note 26). See also numerous studies and statistics cited to the same effect by Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will 236–37 (cited in note 36). Interestingly, and contrary to what happened to Tyson, the studies revealed that blacks who assaulted blacks received the most lenient sentences. Tyson's sentence may have had to do with a number of factors, including his celebrity status and the need to make an example of him. His cynical defense strategy probably did not evoke any sympathy when it came to sentencing either.Google Scholar

61 For example, Anita Hill was subjected to ridicule by the senators, and by much of the public. She was accused of being vindictive, crazy, a lesbian, and a tool of liberal white interests. See Lubiano, Wahneema, “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” in Morrison, Race-ing Justice 323, 340–42 (cited in note 10).Google Scholar

62 This is not unlike the behavior of the male characters in A Passage to India, who bonded together across race lines in response to the accusation of rape. See Silver's analysis of Fielding choosing Aziz when forced to take sides between Aziz and Adela, in Rape and Representation at 124.Google Scholar

63 Lynn A. Higgins, “Screen/Memory: Rape and Its Allies in Last Year at Marienbad,” at 318: “So then what of the dilemma of the critic caught between the postmodern text and feminist interpretation? Are the two, as Alice Jardine worries, oxymoronic? If so and if keeping rape literal is our feminist goal (as it must be in nonliterary life), we have to be antipostmodern”.Google Scholar

64 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Mark Poster, ed., Jean Baudril-lard: Selected Writings 166 (Stanford, CaI.: Stanford University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

65 One might object here that in order to critique existing stereotypes, one must have an alternative reality in mind, a race- and gender-neutral model, for example, based on the notion that men and women, or whice and black people, are fundamentally “the same.” I am not arguing against the notion of differences, only against the use of stereotypes to maintain hierarchies based on gender, race, and class.Google Scholar