Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre

By Claire Henry

Considered a notorious subset of horror in the 1970s and 1980s, there has been a massive revitalization and diversification of rape-revenge in recent years. This book analyzes the politics, ethics, and affects at play in the filmic construction of rape and its responses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137413956

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Revisionist Rape-Revenge

Revisionist Rape-Revenge

Redefining a Film Genre

Claire Henry

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revisionist rape-revenge

Copyright © Claire Henry, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 978-1-137-41416-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Henry, Claire, 1982-

        Revisionist rape-revenge: redefining a film genre / by Claire Henry.

            pages cm

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

        ISBN 978-1-137-41416-8 (hardback)

        1. Rape in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.R27H46 2014

791.43’6556—dc23

2014017522

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Amnet.

First edition: October 2014

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Reapproaching Rape-Revenge

1    Remaking Rape-Revenge: The Last House on the Left (1972/2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978/2010)

2    The Postfeminist Trap of Vagina Dentata for the American Teen Castratrice

3    Rape, Racism, and Descent into the Ethical Quagmire of Revenge

4    The Shame of Male Acolytes: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Through Rape-Revenge

5    Collective Revenge: Challenging the Individualist Victim-Avenger in Death Proof, Sleepers, and Mystic River

Conclusion: Challenging the Boundaries of Cinema’s Rape-Revenge Genre in Katalin Varga and Twilight Portrait

Notes

Works Cited

Filmography

Index

List of Figures

I.1    Adam (Danny Dyer) challenging the spectator in a final look to camera in Straightheads (Dan Reed, 2007)

1.1    I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) film poster. Courtesy of Barquel Creations, Inc.

1.2    Jennifer (Sarah Butler) takes revenge on Stanley (Daniel Franzese) in I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010)

2.1    The final look in Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007). Does Dawn (Jess Weixler) harness her power, or resign herself to her situation?

3.1    Maya (Rosario Dawson) in the final shot of Descent (Talia Lugacy, 2007)

4.1    Chasely (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) becomes the Final Girl in Acolytes (Jon Hewitt, 2008)

4.2    The Book of Revelation (Ana Kokkinos, 2006) DVD menu screen.

4.3    Daniel’s (Tom Long) embodiment of shame in The Book of Revelation (Ana Kokkinos, 2006)

4.4    Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) looks directly into the pedophile’s camera in Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011)

5.1    The final freeze frame of Death Proof (Quentin Tarantino, 2007)

5.2    Jimmy (Sean Penn) and Sean (Kevin Bacon) flash back to their childhood friend Dave’s abduction in Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, 2003)

C.1    Katalin (Hilda Péter) recounts her experience of being raped to Antal (Tibor Pálffy) and Etelka (Melinda Kántor) in Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan in New York, Robyn Curtis and Erica Buchman, for taking on this book and being supportive throughout the process to publication.

The initial research was enabled by a full PhD studentship granted by the English, Communication, Film and Media Department at Anglia Ruskin University (Cambridge, UK) in 2009. I was very fortunate to have Dr. Tanya Horeck as my supervisor and Dr. Tina Kendall as my second supervisor, who not only saw me through to successful completion in 2012, but also gave me feedback on some of the new research presented in this book. I was blessed with a lovely cohort of fellow PhD candidates in the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences: Sharifa Begum, Karin Brunby, Ian Burrows, Beverly Carpenter, Amy Crawford, Ellie Crouch, Lynsey McCulloch, Rob Tovey, and Jo Vine. These British friends, along with E-j Scott, Helen Marshall, and Ruth McPhee, sustained me through my expatriate adventures and descent into the study of rape-revenge. Thank you also to my PhD examiners, Dr. Michele Aaron and Dr. Sean Campbell, for their helpful feedback and for encouraging me to publish the research as a book.

I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to present this research at conferences, including a paper on The Last House on the Left at Cine-Excess V: Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess in London in 2011 and a paper on Katalin Varga and Twilight Portrait at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Chicago. Thank you to Dr. Xavier Mendik for publishing my article, "The Last House on the Left: The Redemption of the Remake," in the inaugural issue of the Cine-Excess peer-reviewed ejournal, Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Poetics of Excess, and for permission to include it in this book. Thank you also to Marc Sheffler (Junior in the original The Last House on the Left) for his commentary on my article in the journal. The concluding chapter of this book was originally published in the Intellect journal, Studies in European Cinema (Volume 10, Issue 2–3), and I would like to thank Professor Owen Evans for permission to include it here. I am also grateful to Meir Zarchi for permission to use the I Spit on Your Grave poster.

Thank you to my colleagues in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne, in particular Dr. Wendy Haslem and Dr. Dion Kagan for inviting me to present guest lectures on rape-revenge to third-year and master’s students; Professor Angela Ndalianis and Dr. Caroline Wallace for their comments on Chapter Five; and Professor Barbara Creed, who was a wonderful master’s supervisor and continues to be an inspiration. Thank you also to my fellow alumni Dr. Ramon Lobato and Dr. Romana Byrne for their feedback on the book proposal.

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the librarians at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Anglia Ruskin University Library, and The University of Melbourne Library.

I am greatly indebted to the love and support of my parents and sisters, and I am also deeply grateful for the love and patience of my partner, Blake Cykner.

Introduction: Reapproaching Rape-Revenge

At the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2009, I chanced upon a screening of a new rape-revenge film, Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009). Its simple narrative was recognizable as that of a rape-revenge film, and yet it was in a completely different package to the more notorious examples of the genre such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978) or Ms. 45 (Abel Ferrara, 1981). I was lulled by the film’s panoramic Romanian landscapes and horse-and-cart pace, but through genre expectation and character identification, I still anticipated that the road journey taken by protagonist Katalin (Hilda Péter) would lead to the genre-defining inevitable act of violent revenge against her rapist. Katalin does kill her rapist’s accomplice, Gergely (Roberto Giacomello), but when she catches up with her rapist, Antal (Tibor Pálffy), she converses with him rather than kills him. More shocking than this, she herself is killed in an act of revenge (by Gergely’s brother-in-law [Sebastian Marina]) at the end of the film. I was stunned by this ending and felt almost a sense of outrage at the protagonist’s brutal punishment. The ending went against character identification, against genre expectation and the genre’s laws of justice (based on lex talionis , where retribution restores order following rape), and seemed an affront to my feminist politics. Why did I respond in this way to the ending, feeling swindled somehow? And was this response designed to be positive or productive, leading me to interrogate my own ideas about responses to rape, feminist ethics, and the morality of revenge? Was the ending a cheap twist on the rape-revenge formula, or was it a deeper interrogation of the moral precepts of the genre? Was Strickland’s take on rape-revenge politically problematic, and was I right to take exception to it? Is rape-revenge not (or no longer) a feminist genre that provides its spectators with a cathartic sense of justice through retributive violence? These initial questions became broader as I observed that there has been a revival of rape-revenge cinema with many equally fascinating contemporary takes on the genre. Together these films prompted the exploration of the politics, ethics, and affects of the revisionist rape-revenge genre that I present in this book. ¹

Strickland’s film neither adheres to the rape-revenge genre nor presents a playful homage; rather, it is interested in what the genre can do (here particularly for exploring themes of revenge, redemption, responsibility, and forgiveness). This book similarly asks what the genre can do, using contemporary case studies to analyze the potential and limitations of this under-theorized genre for cultural explorations of political and ethical issues surrounding rape and revenge. My study also explores the contemporary genre’s attempts to convey phenomenological experiences of rape trauma and its efforts to elicit spectators’ affective responses to cinematic spectacles of violence. The evolution of this film genre—from exploitation classics of the 1970s to its articulation in art house and mainstream cinema more recently—demands a reframing of critical questions. Film theorists working on this genre previously have been responding to different films and different paradigms in film theory from those explored here, and it is important now to adjust the critical frameworks to be responsive to generic shifts and the contemporary films. In the following pages, I set out ways to redefine and reframe the genre in order to approach it anew.

Rape-Revenge as Genre

The first of these reframings is to understand rape-revenge as a genre as opposed to simply a narrative pattern or a historically specific cycle. Jacinda Read, a key theorist of rape-revenge cinema, argues that it is not a genre (or a horror subgenre, as Carol Clover places it) but a narrative structure which, on meeting second-wave feminism in the 1970s, has produced a historically specific but generically diverse cycle of films (2000, 11). It is easy to see how Read would come to the conclusion that rape-revenge is a historically, rather than generically, specific cycle (2000, 23) because of her focus on the genre’s interaction with second-wave feminism. No doubt second-wave feminism’s high cultural profile in the 1970s (tailing into the 1980s) invigorated the genre, and rape-revenge provided a forum for feminist issues and the role of feminism in society to play out.² But while rape-revenge was understandably popular in this period, it is not exclusive to it, and rape-revenge has had another wave of popularity and prolificacy in the decade since Read’s book was published. With the benefit of hindsight, it appears Read was too hasty in suggesting that with the maternal avenger, the rape-revenge cycle may have run its course . . . the narrative possibilities the rape-revenge structure offers may have been exhausted (2000, 245). The case studies in this book—and the great variety of contemporary rape-revenge films beyond—illustrate that rape-revenge has not yet run its course, if indeed it is ever going to. Rape-revenge has proven to be more versatile and durable than Read expected, sustained through the high numbers of remakes and adaptations as well as hybridity with the torture porn genre on the one hand and the move into art house cinema on the other.

My insistence on the ongoing relevance of rape-revenge is supported by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ recent study, which provides an updated overview of the genre, including a survey of new titles (2011, 155–87). She points to the recent spike of rape-revenge films with a large number of contemporary examples, noting, The current ubiquity of sexual violence and retribution puts an end to any suggestion that rape-revenge is historically or generically specific (2011, 155). Against Read’s historically confining definition of rape-revenge and Clover’s generically confining definition, Heller-Nicholas sets out to demonstrate the scope of rape-revenge and its diversity across genres, borders, and historical periods. Her emphasis on rape-revenge’s magnitude and variety results in a strong impression that it is far from a cohesive genre; indeed, the main conclusion that can be drawn from her review is that there is no singular or unified treatment of rape across this category when surveyed as a whole (2011, 1). Nevertheless, her book helps to begin filling the wide gap in the critical literature by providing a useful resource, synopsizing and commenting upon a broad sample of rape-revenge films and updating the genre’s filmography to include more contemporary and global examples.³ Heller-Nicholas makes the interesting suggestion that if people are confused about what sexual violence ‘means,’ then these films offer a notable contemporary example of why contradictory and often hypocritical attitudes can co-exist more generally (2011, 1). In this book I regard the genre not just as a notable example of these attitudes but as a cultural key that can help to reveal and interrogate the meanings of rape and the political, ethical, and affective responses to it (on both individual and social levels). The more in-depth case studies I present in this book show that there is a cultural need to try to understand what rape is, what impact it has, and how to respond. The contemporary genre provides insight into these issues and a cultural forum for the complexities of rape politics to be worked through.

The genre’s diversity, and its frequent hybridity with other genres, does not discount that rape-revenge can be considered a genre in its own right. Read supports her argument that rape-revenge is not generically specific (2000, 24) by identifying examples in a range of genres (Westerns, erotic thriller/neo-noir, detective, melodrama, courtroom drama, and science fiction). I agree with Read that rape-revenge should not be considered a subgenre of horror as Carol Clover (1992) and Barbara Creed (1993) have positioned it, since rape-revenge indeed appears blended with a range of genres. Rape-revenge seems best conceptualized as a typically hybrid genre, and while that may be generally true of all film genres (and arguably more so in postmodern times), rape-revenge in particular has produced many interesting mixes with other genres from Westerns to torture porn. Heller-Nicholas’ book includes a chapter-long overview of The Rape-Revenge Film Across Genres (2011, 60–102), giving examples of hybrids with Westerns, horror, exploitation/blaxploitation, TV movies, comedy, supernatural, and science fiction genres. However, Heller-Nicholas similarly shies away from terming rape-revenge a genre and avoids theorizing what rape-revenge is (whether it is a cycle, narrative pattern, or genre). She defaults to the model established by Read, in which rape-revenge as a narrative pattern is mapped onto more established genres. To describe rape-revenge as a narrative structure is limiting, as although rape-revenge may appear in many guises, it does have its own loose iconography (mud-covered semi-naked rape victims; red lipstick and fetish costumes of the transformed avenger; castration; women with guns), stock characters (young, white, attractive victim turned femme fatale avenger; rapists; rednecks), and key themes and conflicts (transformation; rape trauma; ethics of revenge; vigilantism; torture) as well as the standard two-part structure most critics identify (rape followed by revenge). The settings and aesthetics of the genre are often modified by the other genres rape-revenge hybridizes with, but rape-revenge does have discernible characteristics that are becoming further defined as both the critical literature and the genre itself grow. Rape-revenge has identifiable semantic/syntactic elements (to use Rick Altman’s schema) and also displays Altman’s seven characteristics of Hollywood genres: dual protagonists and dualistic structure; a repetitive nature; dependence on a cumulative effect; predictability; a heavy use of intertextual references; a symbolic usage of key images, sounds, and situations; and a social function (1999, 24–26).

Genre is a preferable term for rape-revenge because genre studies help us to understand its processes of flux and inter-genre mutation. This labeling is also a political move to validate the rape-revenge genre as being significant and worthy of study alongside the traditional genres of Westerns, film noir, and horror most commonly given attention in genre studies (which resulted in the field privileging male protagonists and assumed male audiences). Feminist film theorists have worked to include and legitimize other genres within the genre studies canon, such as musicals, melodrama, and, most recently, pornography (like rape-revenge, the latter’s long neglect was perhaps due to it being a low cultural form). While rape-revenge is a relatively small, less established, diverse, genre-hybridized, and often B-grade set of films, studying the films as a genre can contribute to genre studies. Rape-revenge’s versatility, durability, cult popularity, its ideological ambiguity or ambivalence, and its chameleon nature offer interesting issues for the field. Genre studies also has a lot to offer in the understanding of rape-revenge, for instance, in making sense of its waves of popularity (other genres reveal similar patterns, though tied to different historical and ideological circumstances). Read and Heller-Nicholas do employ genre studies when they both compare rape-revenge Westerns with Will Wright’s structural analysis of the Western’s vengeance variation (Read 2000, 127–39; Heller-Nicholas 2011, 73).⁴ It is understandable that Read’s insistence on the historical specificity of rape-revenge, and Heller-Nicholas’ insistence on the broadness and diversity of the category, might lead them away from labeling rape-revenge as a genre, but I believe denying that rape-revenge is a film genre risks closing off the rich insights afforded by the field of genre studies. For instance, recent research into the torture porn genre offers models for grappling with genres that seem tied to historically specific sociopolitical contexts and that present complex issues of spectatorship, spectacle, and graphic violence, such as the rape-revenge genre. The fact that rape-revenge hybridizes with torture porn in several of my case studies—The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009), I Spit on Your Grave (Steven R. Monroe, 2010), Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005), and Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011)—further demonstrates the relevance of utilizing this genre studies research for understanding rape-revenge cinema. This book is not a definitive genre study—for instance, the depth of the case studies limits the number able to be included—but it establishes the usefulness of studying rape-revenge as a genre and explores some of the most interesting issues that contemporary films are raising, such as the phenomenology of rape trauma and the ethics of revenge.

This book’s title, Revisionist Rape-Revenge, provocatively refers to a latter stage of development in evolutionary models of genre, but it also refers to revisionist genre theory, indicating a reassessment of rape-revenge within these newer models of genre. The evolutionary models exemplified by the work of Thomas Schatz (1981) and John G. Cawelti ([1979] 1995), where periods of experiment and classicism are followed by parody and revisionism, have fallen out of favor in film genre theory since at least Rick Altman’s influential Film/Genre, where he characterizes such models as restricting change to prescribed limits (1999, 21–22). I use revisionist as an evocative and potentially provocative label—rather than a proscriptive one—for the various trends in the genre over the past 20 years, illustrated through this book’s case studies. Revisionism is a catch-all term for not only the characteristics Schatz associates with later stages of genre development—ambiguity, thematic complexity, irony, formal self-consciousness (1981, 41)—but also to describe shifts such as the postfeminist rather than feminist engagement with rape politics within some of the contemporary films; the common ethical questioning of revenge (the moral and affective lynchpin of the genre); and the various ways of reworking, refining, or reinstating the genre’s codes and conventions.

In film genre theory, revisionist is most commonly prefixed to Western; for example, Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992) is frequently discussed as a revisionist Western. The Western’s traditional ideology and relationship to violence is mirrored in many classic rape-revenge films, and Unforgiven’s revisionism models that of the contemporary rape-revenge genre. Unforgiven uses iconic Western imagery but deploys darker modern themes and depicts violence as corrupting and murder as deeply consequential. It displays generic awareness and self-reflexivity, and it brings the moral order of the Western genre into question. Carl Plantinga argues that Eastwood upheld the American ideology of redemption and purgative violence embodied in traditional Westerns, as well as the notion that purgative violence leads to cultural and personal restoration, within many of his own Westerns and the Dirty Harry films (1998, 65). Unforgiven contrasts with other Eastwood films in withholding any easy justification of violence and presenting thematic and affective ambiguity, but Plantinga suggests that the film’s contradictions problematize "claims that Unforgiven, in its treatment of violence, is unquestionably a moral triumph" (1998, 66). Unforgiven arguably presents a critique of violence, illustrating how violence has serious consequences and haunts its perpetrators, but this critique gives way to a climactic scene of vengeful violence when William Munny (Clint Eastwood) kills the sheriff to avenge his murdered partner, delivering affective and dramatic satisfaction in the revenge scene. This shootout is a compromise and throwback to the conventional Western myth, a dissonant chord within an otherwise consistent revisionism (Plantinga 1998, 77). Compromises, throwbacks, and nostalgia mark many of the case studies in this book too, as the revisionist films aim to challenge the precepts of rape-revenge but cannot resist delivering on the expectation of a climactic revenge scene. Watching graphic acts of revenge is a key generic pleasure of rape-revenge, so while revisionism challenges the ethics of violent responses to rape and considers the consequences of sustaining the cycle of vengeance, brutal climactic scenes of revenge remain core. Unforgiven, then, foreshadows the issues with revisionist rape-revenge films explored in this book, which are similarly fascinating, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory texts.

The term revisionist in the title of this book also refers to the revised understandings of film genre and its uses within film theory. This study examines both continuities and changes in the genre while acknowledging that in carving a space for the contemporary genre in critical literature, it is not only the films themselves that have shifted, but the way in which these films are read. I have asserted that rape-revenge can be regarded as a genre even within traditional models of genre, and later in this chapter I outline the characteristics of rape-revenge through the case study of Straightheads to satisfy traditional criteria of genre definition. However, rape-revenge, like many current film genres, also challenges older models of categorization, inclusion and exclusion, and predetermined evolutionary cycles. This diverse and frequently hybridized genre fits well with a newer understanding of how "the industry’s uses of genre . . . exploit the permeability of generic boundaries, refocusing critical attention on genre as cross-media, cross-cultural process rather than end product (Gledhill 2012, 2). In addition to close textual analysis of the films themselves, this book pays attention to cross-media and extratextual processes in the formation, familiarity, and play with genre. Another way in which genre has come to be defined is through audience expectations, and the recognition of rape-revenge as a genre in these terms is demonstrated in the concluding chapter, in two case studies where genre expectations are manipulated to achieve genre innovation. In this book, revisionist rape-revenge" is then not a clearly delineated stage of a predetermined evolutionary trajectory, but an evocative descriptor to characterize and extend the analysis of a fascinating group of films.

New Angles: Politics, Ethics, Affect, and Phenomenology

Rape-revenge films have been of great interest to feminist film theorists working with a range of approaches. The methodology used in this reconceptualization of rape-revenge combines in-depth textual analysis of key examples of the genre produced within the past two decades—particularly their rape and revenge scenes—with the application of phenomenological and ethical concepts. The aim is to expand and update the study of rape-revenge from sociopolitical and psychoanalytic perspectives to include embodied, phenomenological perspectives and a treatment of the ethical issues raised. Read has critiqued Clover’s and Creed’s use of psychoanalysis and their reading of rape-revenge within the horror genre (2000, 28, 43, 53, 247). Read’s classification of rape-revenge as a historically rather than generically specific set of films explains her misgivings about the universal and ahistorical psychoanalytic concepts, such as castration anxiety, used by feminist film theorists like Creed in analyzing horror (2000, 43). Read’s main issue with Clover’s reading of rape-revenge seems to be Clover’s combination of historical contextualization with psychoanalytically based arguments about male spectatorial pleasure and identification (2000, 53). Read suggests, Some of the inconsistencies and ambivalence in Clover’s arguments perhaps stem from this uneasy and never fully resolved alliance between psychoanalytical perspectives and socio-historical perspectives (2000, 28). I suggest that such inconsistencies and ambivalence spring from the complexities of the rape-revenge films themselves, and that it is possible (even necessary) to draw on a range of approaches to understand these complex and often contradictory films. Some psychoanalytic concepts are useful in understanding the construction and appeal of rape-revenge, as I demonstrate in the chapter on teen castratrices. Read argues that many films now also exhibit such a high degree of self-consciousness about the kinds of theoretical paradigms that have been used to analyse them that many of the central tenets of feminist film theory have become obsolete or at least in need of historicizing (2000, 246–47), and specifies psychoanalytic concepts such as castration anxiety as particularly redundant. However, filmmakers’ postmodern preemptive moves should not force feminist film theorists to lay down their tools; rather, it is proof of a productive discourse between filmmakers and theorists. For example, Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) is very knowing and self-conscious about castration anxiety in its play with the vagina dentata myth but, as I demonstrate in Chapter Two, with a combination of ideological and psychoanalytic analysis (as well as contextualization within media and other cultural discourses), the film is still deeply invested in the castration anxiety that underpins the myth—its self-conscious, postfeminist reworking has not changed that central meaning. In contrast to Read’s study, this project focuses explicitly on the never fully resolved alliance between contextual and psychoanalytic readings of these films, contending that such tensions are operating at the heart of these films themselves and consequently need further interrogation and an interdisciplinary approach. This book reappraises the rape-revenge genre through innovative approaches in contemporary film theory, analyzing contemporary films that have outgrown (sometimes self-consciously) the limitations of previous theoretical approaches.

Politics

The rape-revenge genre is a rich site (or perhaps a minefield) for contemporary theory, and I propose that the films and theory can inform and enrich each other, particularly in the fields of politics, ethics, affect, and phenomenology. Of these approaches, political angles have been the most common in the critical literature on rape-revenge to date. Like many of its predecessors, this study presents a feminist perspective on the genre. However, while these previous studies understand the genre as being primarily in discourse with second-wave feminism and shifts in gender politics, this study considers additional and diverse aspects of the sociopolitical contexts that influence the contemporary genre. For instance, the dominant focus on gender has marginalized critical attention to race, a problematic absence in the genre’s critical literature that I aim to redress, particularly in Chapter Three. By drawing on the work of bell hooks (1995; 1996), Kimberlé Crenshaw (1992), and Sara Ahmed (2007), Chapter Three uses intersections of race theory and phenomenology to provide new insights into the genre’s political potential and limitations. In other chapters, my approach takes cues from the burgeoning work on the torture porn genre by authors such as Jason Middleton (2010) and L. Andrew Cooper (2010), who situate their analyses within sociocultural tensions and the politics of the American war on terror. Contemporary rape-revenge films are often hybridized with torture porn (as will be discussed in the following two chapters), and similarly present spectacles of violence that are connected to—and perhaps help to process—sociopolitical conflicts and their media representation, particularly around issues of violence, retribution, torture, and trauma. This project continues to scrutinize rape-revenge films through a feminist framework while also being attentive to the range of sociopolitical conflicts and issues at play, in this way presenting a more comprehensive and current ideological picture of the genre.

While this approach might arguably be described as postfeminist, I reject this label in favor of feminism, in order to assert the dynamism and contemporary relevance of feminism, and also to acknowledge this study’s intellectual debt to feminist film theorists, ethicists, and phenomenologists. Where the term postfeminism is used here, it is in line with the prevailing usage by other feminist cultural theorists, referring to an object of cultural and political analysis as opposed to the theoretical approach itself.⁵ Postfeminism is a slippery term, at its broadest encompassing "a set of assumptions, widely disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the ‘pastness’ of