Dr. Megan Kruer, University of Central Oklahoma
Candidate for Assistant Professor of French-Newark
This talk will open with an analysis of the predominance of law in modern conceptions of sexual violence. It will then lay out some of the ways in which modern understandings of rape oversimplify the specific violence of sexual violence by determining even experiences of it according to legal understandings of consent. It argues that the Lettres portugaises unsettles the primacy of consent in understandings of sexual violence through its figuration of the violence of seduction and the experiential problems that consent, intentions, and desire present for victims.
Dr. Kruer earned her Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell in 2016. She specializes in 17th- and 18th-century French studies with interests in sexual violence in literature, law and literature, feminist and queer theory, trauma theory, and medical humanities.
