The current revolution of women-directed rape-revenge narratives / Bruna Foletto Lucas

Rape-revenge narratives have a long history in film and they have notoriously been used, primarily, by male filmmakers as a way to talk about broader issues while neglecting the particular experiences of sexual assault survivors. What this talk aims to investigate is the progression and revolution of rape-revenge narratives that have been either written and/or directed by women and that are doing the work of updating and reworking rape-revenge tropes. The talk will therefore present a comparative analysis of older films directed by men and newer films directed by women to investigate how recent films, mainly those released after the #MeToo movement, are updating and rewriting rape-revenge’s long-standing sexist tropes by prioritising the characters’ post-rape trauma and exposing the diegetic and extra- diegetic systemic sexism that allows for rape culture to manifest itself.

Bruna Foletto Lucas is a third-year PhD student at Kingston University London, where she is expanding her previous research on women-directed horror films (her PhD is titled: ‘Reclaiming Horror: Understanding the Paradigm Shift of Female Representation in Horror Films’). Bruna has recently given a lecture on the evolution of the monstrous-feminine at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies in London, she has presented her work in several horror conferences, and she is currently taking part in Alison Peirse’s ten–month training programme ‘Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History’.

This event is free and donation-based

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