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This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History on 2010-08-10, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03086534.2010.503394. Deposited by shareyourpaper.org and openaccessbutton.org. We've taken reasonable steps to ensure this content doesn't violate copyright. However, if you think it does you can request a takedown by emailing help@openaccessbutton.org.

Sexual assault generates much attention in social research, but male victims are largely neglected by a predominantly feminist perspective that seeks to highlight the gendered nature of sexual assault as a social phenomenon. As a result there is a relative lack of empirical information on male rape, but it is possible to chart the theoretical development of male rape as a social problem as it emerges in the social research discourse. It is important to examine this development because the current direction of the research on male rape has worrying consequences for how we theorize sexual assault in general. Here I examine how male rape is understood in academic discourse, and I focus specifically on how a credible male victim is constructed with reference to sexual difference, sexuality, and hierarchies of sexual harm. The analysis demonstrates the problems around the concept of 'male rape', and the need for all those researching sexual assault to account adequately for both male and female victims alike.

Book reviews: Gregory, Jeanne and Sue Lees, Policing Sexual Assault (reviewed by Ruth Graham)

THE MARRIAGES OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL DEPUTIES
The marriages of the ecclesiastical deputies to the Convention were revolutionary acts which provide insight to the revolutionary status of women. Responding to the sweet sentiments of nature, some of these priest-deputies married poor citoyennes, rich in republican virtues. But the dowry, still considered necessary, revealed that the revolutionary bourgeoisie did not rule out advantageous matchmaking. In the marriage announcements the wives were not identified as individuals but through the male members of their families. The revolutionary « domestic virtues of a household » elevated wives as companions but in a male-dominated household.
Ruth GRAHAM.

AbstractSociological interest in nonsuicidal self‐injury is over 20 years old, and the last decade shows a marked increase in journal articles and research monographs. Here, we survey and critically evaluate this growing sociology of self‐injury, providing a short history of its development, and describing the focus of four contrasting approaches used in exploring a sociology of such a private practice: institutional interactions; processes of social construal and construction; the social in the lived experience of subjects; and the role of social relations and communication. We argue that these approaches in the sociology of self‐injury more generally represent four broader social theoretical perspectives on how the personal is always‐already social. Understanding this connection between the empirical search for the social in self‐injury, and theoretical conceptualizations of the social in the personal, is key to opening up the future of the sociology of self‐injury, and appreciating what it has to offer sociology more generally. The more we understand what is social in self‐injury, the more we will understand how the personal is always‐already social; and the greater the theoretical investment in our methodological apparatus, the more we will be able to detect and comprehend the social dimension of this intensely personal practice.

AbstractThere is a growing recognition that nonsuicidal self-injury commonly incorporates communicative and interactional dimensions. But regardless of whether we approach self-injury within the terms of deliberate interpersonal communication, it is undeniably something that conveys a significant impact into the social and communicative field between people. As such, it is something that can be approached and analysed as communicative in this more general sense. In this paper, we draw on 13 in-depth qualitative interviews with the parents of people who self-injure, conducted for a larger pilot study, to explore some of these more general communicative processes, spaces and impacts associated with self-injury. By providing a phenomenologically informed examination of parents' experiences, we argue that self-injury is in fact a richly communicative phenomenon, albeit one that cannot be adequately mapped using the traditional sender–receiver communication paradigm. To provide a more nuanced mapping, we look beyond this paradigm to include more subtle, ambiguous, pre-reflexive and bodily forms of communication. Indeed, self-injury offers a particularly powerful case study with which to think through a more complex model of communication, one that connects the interpersonal, intersubjective and intercorporeal levels, and that, as such, is more appropriate to the sociologies of everyday life and embodiment.