Description: Why has so much of the public discussion of rape focused on a few specific cases, and to what extent has this discussion incorporated the feminist perspective on rape? Rape on Trial: How the Mass Media Construct Legal Reform and Social Change explores these questions and provides answers based on a detailed examination of the mainstream news coverage and subsequent fictionalized representations of three highly publicized trials in the United States from the period between 1978 and 1988: the John and Greta Rideout marital rape case, the Big Dan's Tavern gang rape case, and the Webb-Dotson rape recantation case. These trials all received extensive national media coverage, and each was later used as the subject of a fictionalized text (a television movie-of-the-week, a major motion picture, and a confessional autobiography, respectively). Lisa M. Cuklanz discusses each case in the context of rape law reform efforts and arguments, analyzing how traditional and reformed views of rape were included in or excluded from the public discourses surrounding the trials. Rape on Trial thus provides insights into the different roles news coverage and fictionalized texts play in adjudicating between traditional views of rape and those advanced by advocates of rape law reform. In both realms of mainstream discourse, the rape law reform movement has had a significant impact on the way rape is discussed.

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