Status Updates From Watching Rape: Film and Tel...

Thelma and Louise's climactic flight into/over the Grand Canyon is both utopic, because it evokes women's freedom and pleasure, and dystopic, because it suggests that the assaultive male-dominated social order is so powerful the only way to escape it is to die.

[Re The Accused] The graphic representation is also explicit in its visual & aural depiction of sexual violence toward women, thus increasing the amount of violence against women that exists in popular culture. Thus in this film, the graphic rape scene functions, paradoxically, both to challenge rape myths from a feminist perspective & to contribute to the existence of violence against women in media culture.

In [rape-revenge] films, sometimes revenge is taken by a man who loses his wife or daughter to a rape/murder&sometimes by women who have faced rape. The 1st depends on rape to motivate&justify a particularly violent version of masculinity, relegating women to minor props. The 2nd can be understood as feminist narratives ...women recognize the law will neither protect nor avenge them&take the law into their own hands.