One Night

One night, anthropologist Cathy Winkler awoke from a deep sleep to find a rapist standing by her bed. For the rest of that night, she lived a woman's worst nightmare as she was repeatedly raped and beaten by the stranger. The event changed her life into something resembling a Kafka-esque movie: a justice system that bungled the case then blamed the victim, a social service system that provided no comfort, uneasy and awkward friends, exploitive media, and insensitive university colleagues. The pain of those few night hours were dwarfed by the frustrations of her decade-long fight to find the rapist and bring him to justice. Winkler, a brilliant observer and ethnographer, chronicles this decade of struggle here— including her own growing awareness of her power to stare down district attorneys, use the media to her own ends, and, ultimately put the rapist behind bars for life. As a story of triumph over adversity, ONE NIGHT is an inspirational work. It provides a model of how we ethnographers turn the lens inward and incisively examine ourselves and our own world. And it offers a convincing argument that scholarship and activism should go hand-in-hand.

Author Biography: Cathy Winkler is a cultural anthropologist and rape-survivor activist in Virginia.