Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men edited by Shing-Ling S. Chen, Zhuojun Joyce Chen, and Nicole Allaire is an excellent anthology of qualitative inquiries that unravels the complexities of sexual misconduct cases, powerfully depicts the patriarchy in society, and raises our consciousness of social capital and the power of narratives that are used as tools to cover up crimes by powerful men.

Communication Booknotes Quarterly

Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men would be important to both men and women, especially those making policy decisions on a state or national level.

Communication Booknotes Quarterly

Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men draws needed attention to one of the gravest, neglected, and most complicated issues of our time. The book features recent cases in which relatively powerless women were pitted against powerful male celebrities, and the university campus was too frequently revealed as a hostile environment indifferent to sexual assault victims. Sensitizing readers to the complexity of sexual misconduct cases, the authors of these chapters raise our consciousness of the many advantages held by perpetrators as they seek to cover up their crimes, shame and silence victims, and evoke familiar tropes of the feminist killjoy and spiteful political assassinations. In this #Me Too moment, The Weinstein, Cosby, Kavanaugh, and Franken cases pulsate through our everyday consciousness. This book helps us understand how and why.

Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida

Building Sexual Misconduct Cases Against Powerful Men is an unabashedly feminist and academic collection of individual research articles which, taken on their own, seek to answer important and interesting research questions in tandem with the #MeToo movement; and taken together, explore multiple facets of the rape culture that still permeates everyday life. The running meta-narratives of perpetrator entitlement exposed in this volume empower celebrities, politicians, and athletes to engage in asymmetrical warfare with sexual assault survivors. Naming and understanding these dynamics are empowering. This timely and contemporary collection shows exactly how survivors of sexual assault and misconduct are typically the weaker parties in these battles, how they frequently absorb the costs, and how they often prevail, in spite of their weaker position, in the shifting landscape of media opinion and courts of law.

Carol Rambo, University of Memphis

This is a very important book about the American patriarchal rape culture, sexual misconduct, and the seemingly infinite ways in which powerful men continue to be protected. The knowledgeable and critical voices in this collection use qualitative inquiry to honor the experience and injustice of sexual oppression and to highlight the challenges and promises of the uphill battle in building cases against powerful men in a culture that was designed to protect powerful men. As a collection, this book is a powerful, timely, and much needed book for social justice.

Marcelo Diversi, Washington State University, Vancouver