Film Politics, Aesthetics, and History - Ananya - Ray - Ananya Ray

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned": Negotiating with the Feminist Ethics of
Violence, Revenge and Justice in Hollywood Rape-Revenge Films
Since, historically, women have been associated with docility, submissiveness and the ability to
care and nurture in most cultures across the world, acts of violence and revenge have often
been deemed unbecoming of the fairer sex. Women across cultures have often been victims of
patriarchal oppression and subjugation which include physical abuse and sexual assault among
other forms of violence against women. Denied justice by the legal system and shamed into
silence by the patriarchy, women have always been taught to endure their woes silently.
The Early Modern Revenge Tragedy plays deem violence against women a legitimate
justification for exacting revenge1 but the male avengers suffer from a loss of selfhood and are
often characterized as effeminate and self-alienated while the female revengers on the
Renaissance stage have a profoundly different relationship to revenge2.
The figure of the female revenger avenging herself has been a point of great contention and
anxiety in feminist discourses, especially in the post Me-too world.
The genre of 'rape-revenge' films became popular in the 1970s in Hollywood3. Meant to
stimulate audience with sexualised violence and gratuitous sex, these films usually portray
women who have survived extreme abuse and trauma early on, and the subsequent narrative
unfolds her violent revenge on her perpetrators. A subgenre of exploitation horror movies,
rape-and-revenge films incorporate violence and gratuitous sex and show a wronged woman
avenging herself.
According to Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
the genre of rape revenge films emerged in the seventies as a reaction to the feminist critique of
rape and the legal system’s failure to take it seriously4. Some of these films reek of revenge like
Ms 45 which features a woman who kills not just her rapist but a string of men who commit a
variety of sexist acts, only some of which involve violence. The plot of I Spit on Your Grave is
also driven by revenge as the protagonist carefully plots and executes extraordinarily gruesome
and graphic murders of the men who raped her. These films may seem vengeful because they
respond to the way violence against women has been ignored by the legal system and made
1
Dawson, Lesel, editor. Revenge and Gender in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance
Literature. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. JStor,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv7h0vqp. Accessed 2 November 2022.
2
Stanavage, Liberty Star. Domesticating Vengeance: The Female Revenger in Early Modern
English Drama, 1566-1700. Ph.D. Dissertation. 2011. Alexandria Digital Research Library,
Santa Barbara, University of California, Santa Barbara,
https://alexandria.ucsb.edu/lib/ark:/48907/f3xs5s9j. Accessed 2 November 2022.
3
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, 2d Ed. McFarland,
Incorporated, Publishers, 2021.
4
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film - Updated
Edition. Princeton University Press, 2015.
light of by the entertainment industry as in the Harvey Weinstein sexual allegation cases which
triggered the #MeToo movement. But the response of many of these films is not really about
vengeance; it is about justice, and confusing the two motives is damaging for feminists who are
strongly invested in the latter. In The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails To Do
What's Right, Thane Rosenbaum writes that unlike vengeance, justice should consist of an
apology and “other human interactions and gestures that serve the purpose of healing”.
Rosenbaum also notes that the criminal justice system does not necessarily guarantee justice
but the hope of it.
This paper, therefore, will attempt to carry out a feminist media analysis of the following films of
the rape-revenge genre namely, I Spit on Your Grave (1978) directed by Meir Zach, Teeth
(2007) directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, Jennifer's Body (2009) directed by Karyn Kusama, A
Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and Promising Young
Woman (2020) directed by Emerald Fennell and try to locate the figure of the female revenger in
the cultural context of revenge narratives. Further, this paper will seek to negotiate with the
feminist ethics of violence and revenge vis-a-vis the concepts of legally mediated justice through
a reading of relevant legal case studies. Finally, this paper shall endeavour to gender revenge
by negotiating with the figure of the female revenger who is seen as equal parts sadistically
aggressive madwoman, evil femme fatale and the powerful harbinger of retributive justice.
Keywords- Rape-revenge, feminism, justice, rehabilitation, films.

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"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned": Negotiating with the Feminist Ethics of

Violence, Revenge and Justice in Hollywood Rape-Revenge Films

Keywords- Rape-revenge, feminism, justice, rehabilitation, films.

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