The Violate Man

Male/Male Rape in the American Imagination

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by Aaron C. Thomas

Type

Essays

Subject

Sociology

Keywords

sociology, homosexuality

Publishing date

2025 (October 15, 2025)

Publisher

Vanderbilt University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 284 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8265-0814-0

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Book Presentation:
The Violate Man is about the discourse of male/male rape in American culture since the mid‑1960s. Author Aaron C. Thomas analyzes film, television, and theater to indict how treatments of male/male rape narratives have encouraged us to interpret sexual violence over the last sixty years. This discourse is productive for our thinking about the real world. The Violate Man finds that these narratives establish—and often maintain or reinforce—longstanding racialized and sexualized traditions about where male/male rape happens, who commits it, why it is committed, and which of us is vulnerable to its victimization. The most influential of these rape narratives also reinforce a complex series of masculinist assumptions that produce the male body as able‑bodied, whole, and impenetrable, disallowing bodies broken by violence, sexual and otherwise, from the very category of male.

From the punchline of bro comedies to the vengeance arc of prison dramas, Thomas argues that male/male rape narratives are used by writers, filmmakers, and comedians to make sense of the changing landscape of American masculinity, and that these narratives have shifted widely since the 1960s, reflecting masculinity’s varying anxieties and concerns.

About the Author:
Aaron C. Thomas is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at Florida State University. He is the author of Love Is Love Is Love: Broadway Musicals and LGBTQ Politics, 2010–2020 and Sondheim and Wheeler's Sweeney Todd.

Press Reviews:
"The Violate Man is an important, eye-opening study of representations of male rape in modern US culture. It exposes remarkable blind spots in our understandings of the rape and sexual assault of men and how it affects their loved ones and the broader culture and society."
—​Thomas A. Foster, author of Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men

"Thomas develops an insightful, incisive, and entirely original analysis of the cultural discourse on male/male sexual violence, demonstrating persuasively that the frequent disavowal of such discourse–the repeated claim that such violence is never spoken of–both belies and reveals its pervasive presence. A must-read for all who seek to understand the powerful and often damaging ways that sexual assault is represented in film, television, and literature."
—Ann J. Cahill, author of Rethinking Rape

See the publisher website: Vanderbilt University Press