What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape

In the tradition of Rebecca Solnit, this is a beautifully written, deeply intelligent, searingly honest – and ultimately hopeful – examination of sexual assault and the global discourse on rape, told from the perspective of a survivor, writer, counselor, and activist.

'Both unflinching and nuanced, Abdulali breaks the East/West boundary so often upheld in feminist writing on this subject. ... Disruptive and powerful ... If the #metoo campaign is to have any lasting impact for change in women’s circumstances around the world, it will be because of books such as this' 

– Preti Taneja, author of We That Are Young

Sohaila 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 called 'After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t' that was widely circulated. 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 is a brilliant and entirely original contribution to our understanding.