Sohaila Abdulali will be talking at Straub Hall in Oregon. The talk will feature her story and themes from her book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape (Myriad, 2018).

Abdulali was gang-raped as a seventeen-year-old in Mumbai. Indignant at the silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for an Indian women’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later her story went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang rape in Delhi and the global outcry that followed. In 2013, Abdulali published an op-ed in The New York Times “After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t” that received wide circulation.

Now, as the #metoo and #timesup movements blow open the topic of sexual assault and rape, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape (The New Press, 2018) is a brilliant, sharp, and entirely original contribution to our understanding.

Drawing on her own experience, her research, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with the issue as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali examines the contemporary discourse about rape and rape culture, questioning our assumptions and asking how we want to raise the next generation.

Sponsors for this talk include the University of Oregon CAS Deans, Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, Center for the Study of Women and Society, CSWS Women of Color Project, Department of Anthropology, Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Office of the Dean of Students, Sexual Violence Prevention & Education.

Note: This talk is being sponsored by the Eugene Public Library and will also take place there on Wednesday, April 17 from 6-8 p.m. 

This event is free. For more information, head here.