The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. By Sarah Deer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 232 pp. $22.95 paperback.

• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12257
• Published date: 01 March 2017

generalized relevance outside thelegal system that demands individ-

ual and particular justice.

This book is a rich collection of essays each of which could be

read on its own in classes on law, politics, sociology, criminology,

philosophy, and media studies. As a whole, the book is only the

beginning of a deeply important conversation about the state’s per-

sistent and suffocating mechanisms of control justified as legal pun-

ishment for criminal behavior but which punishment we see and

understand through popular culture to be discriminatory and inhu-

mane. Whether we understand popular culture as a window onto

reality, as unmasking hidden structures and meanings in society, or

as a constitutive force in the socio-political institutions that bind and

organize us, we know these stories work on us and persist through

us. When their subject is punishment and justice, stakes seem higher

and their e ffect on our b odies greater. This book calls us to pay atten-

tion, and indeed it is captivating. Punishment in Popular Culture is a well-

conceived book hopefully followed by many others developing its

themes.

References

Binder, G., & Weisberg, R. (2000) Literary Criticisms of Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Univ.Press.

Sherwin, R. (1996) “Picturing Justice: Images of Law and Lawyers in the Visual Media,”

30 Univ. of San FranciscoLaw Rev. 891–901.

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The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in

Native America. By Sarah Deer. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2015. 232 pp. $22.95 paperback.

Reviewed by Evelyn Rose, The University of Melbourne

Native American scholar Sarah Deer’s new book is a timely and

valuable contribution which offers a wide-ranging and insightful

consideration of the crisis of sexual violence against Native women.

The author opens by challenging the description of this problem as

an “epidemic,” arguing that the term depoliticizes the issue by con-

juring images of a mysterious, spontaneous problem of unknown

origin. Deer wastes no time in convincing us that, in reality, the

rape of Native women is founded upon a history of state-sponsored

Book Reviews 209