Rape and Property: Law, Capitalism and Sexual Violence from Plantation to the Present

Rape and Property examines the relationship between the legal regulation of sexual violence, the logic of capitalism, and status property. Drawing on Marxist political economy, Black feminist theory, and critical legal scholarship from the United States, Jenny Logan analyses sexual violence as a material problem of law and political economy: a problem of who and what can own or constitute property in relationship to whom.

In a compelling historical narrative—spanning spaces of notorious sexual danger such as the household, the workplace, the prison, and the border—Logan illustrates how sexual violence is regulated and produced through the operation of capitalist law, and how the legal regulation of rape works to reproduce capitalism. Logan demonstrates how, over 150 years of changing political, legal, and economic conditions, sexual violence remains linked to relations of race, gender, and class privilege, concluding with a provocative critique of the 21st-century paradigm of affirmative consent.