scholarly journals Modern Rape-Revenge Movies and Shelley’s The Cenci

k ta ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Sahar Jamshidian ◽  
Fazel Asadi Amjad

Viewing Shelley’s The Cenci from the political upheavals of the nineteenth century would limit one’s response to the play to the issues of that century. However, this play continues to be played in the twenty first century, which makes one wonder how a modern spectator with a feminist inclination might react to the theme of rape and revenge. The Cenci shares with a number of movies flourishing with the rise of the second wave feminism during the 1970s, the theme of a female victim transformed into a hero-avenger, who takes law into her own hands and avenges herself in the face of a dysfunctional legal state. As revisions of the archetypal narratives of violation-revenge-violation, these modern movies have been praised for depicting heroines who are no longer powerless, miserable and victimized, but strong enough to avenge themselves with impunity. Though The Cenci repeats the traditional pattern of violation-revenge-violation, it focuses on the corruption and irresponsibility of the patriarchal legal system as well as its reformation, which have been neglected by both mythical narratives and modern rape-revenge movies. By reading The Cenci along with William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” and Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” we examine how The Cenci challenges the modern rape-revenge movies and how Beatrice could have used her agency and her anger in a more effective way to fight against tyranny. 

Author(s):  
Jack Santino

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance

The epilogue connects tropes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews, dance, and modernization with late twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations. Popular works such as Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Dirty Dancing (1987), Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel (1995), Kerry Greenwood’s Raisins and Almonds: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (1997), Helene Wecker’s The Golem and the Jinni (2013), and Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver (2018) reveal the continued efficacy of the mixed-sex dancing trope in fictional representations of Yiddish-speaking Jews. These works are often less didactic than nineteenth-century predecessors; they envision more opportunities for female agency and frequently end happily. Not only is the dance floor a flexible space, the dance trope is a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions. In other words, the trope of Jewish mixed-sex dancing charts the particularities of the Jewish “dance” with modern culture.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley ◽  
Chien-san Feng

The student-led anti-media-monopoly movement in Taiwan has generated strong momentum since mid-2012. In early 2013, the National Communications Commission responded by drafting the “Prevention of Broadcasting and Television Monopoly and the Maintenance of Diversity Act”, which was approved by the Executive Yuan in April 2013 and is now waiting to be debated in the Legislative Yuan. In contemporary Taiwan, the social is often connected with the political. The existing democratic system, which is a legacy of the democratisation process in the twentieth century, no longer seems adequate to serve the citizens of the twenty-first century. This paper considers the anti–media-monopoly movement and the burgeoning civic movements in recent years as part of a “second wave” of democratisation for further political reform and democratic consolidation. When martial law was lifted in Taiwan in 1987, the “first wave” of media liberalisation ended with the commercialisation of industry. The “second wave” of media democratisation has picked up where the first wave left off and may finally establish, through increasingly more thoughtful media policies, a better and fairer media environment that is more suitable for democratic Taiwan.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Manley

Chapter 6 addresses the ways in which many Dominican activists interrogated the role of Balaguer’s government in the regulation of individual’s women’s lives and families and challenged many of its violent, dictatorial tendencies. Refuting the regime’s argument for a “revolution without blood,” many women described the government’s agenda to national and inter-American audiences as “blood without revolution” and continued to mobilize within the opposition through the discourse of motherhood and family. However, the chapter also looks at the many cracks developing in the discourse of maternalism that, coupled with an ever-deepening awareness of the tools and tactics of international second-wave feminism, pushed many women to challenge a model of political participation that constructed their roles in the political arena merely as nurturers and caretakers.


Making Waves ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Diana Holmes ◽  
Imogen Long

The relationship between 1970s French radical feminists (the MLF) and Françoise Giroud, the first ‘Minister for Women’ in France, was a difficult one. Second-wave feminism in France was grounded in the contestation of the status quo, in the wake of the 1960s student movement out of which some of the groups emerged. Being part of the political establishment was therefore in itself an anathema to some second-wave feminists, as can be seen, for example, by satirical feminist films mocking Giroud’s role and her interventions. Through the prism of 1975, officially declared ‘International Women’s Year’ by the United Nations, this chapter explores the key campaigning and cultural themes of the MLF and their relationship to Giroud’smore reformist and, arguably, impossible task as Minister for Women.


Author(s):  
Emily E. LB. Twarog

The introduction traces the involvement of working-class housewives in political action from the 1930s as their involvement in cost of living protests, such as meat boycotts, led to a complicated involvement in organized political action. Tracing the entrance of these women into the political sphere through the emergence of the conservative right, it argues that as housewives negotiated the intersection of their homes, labor, community, and the marketplace, they formed a unique political constituency group in the twentieth century, which failed to find cohesion with the second-wave feminism in the 1970s, which dismissed domestic politics that these women were engaged in because it was rooted in the traditional family model, viewed with suspicion by works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. This left a distinctive form of activism to pave the way for conservative women’s movement made famous by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and the conservative watch group the Eagle Forum.


Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet

This chapter introduces early 1970s feminist antirape theorizing and organizing. The feminist antirape movement emerged within the context of the larger women’s liberation movement, sometimes also referred to as second wave feminism. Feminist antirape activists critiqued the failings of the law, medicine, and society at large in responding to rape. Initially a mostly white group, feminist antirape activists pursued a variety of organizing strategies—from demonstrations and speak-outs to creating rape crisis centers and hotlines to support victims. Over the course of the decade the movement diversified and black feminists pushed the broader movement to incorporate an intersectional analysis into their antirape agenda. Feminists of all racial and ethnic backgrounds held particular contempt for the legal system which, from local police to the state courts, dramatically failed to meet the needs of rape victims. In law journals nationwide, feminist legal scholars exposed the inadequacies of rape law, argued that the legal system was totally ineffectual in stopping rape, and advocated for significant law reform.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 499-530 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Franceschet

This article compares the outcomes of first- and second-wave feminism in Chile. The author argues that the double-militancy strategy of second-wave feminists emerged out of shifts in the political opportunity structure that led the movement to adapt its collective action frame. First-wave feminists had constructed a gender frame that depicted women as apolitical. In a context in which political parties were class based and saw little need to address women’s issues, neither the gender frame nor the political opportunity structure invited a double-militancy strategy. The context for second-wave activists was different. The politicization of women’s maternal identities altered the meaning of the maternal gender frame. Because the prodemocracy parties needed the support of women’s movements (and female voters), they invited women’s participation. Thus, the political opportunity structure and a more politicized gender frame encouraged a double-militancy strategy, ultimately leading to the realization of some of the movement’s goals.


1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dick Howard

LIKE MANY OF HIS APHORISMS, MARX'S DESIGNATION OF THE FRENCH as the model political nation (leaving the economy to the English and philosophy for the Germans) contained enough of a grain of truth to remain relevant for over a century. Since 1989, the idea of politics based on the revolutionary experience begun in 1789 and pursued by a unified and international working-class subject has lost its utility for understanding the political choices facing modern industrial democracies. Nowhere is the need for a new understanding of the political more clear than in France itself, as illustrated by the strikes that paralysed the country for more than three weeks in November and December of 1995 and forced the government to retreat. While some saw the birth of a ‘social movement’, cheered the victory of society against the state, or imagined that class struggle had begun anew, the more pessimistic argued that the French had once again proven themselves incapable of political reform. The former presuppose a model of politics from the nineteenth century, the latter look forward to a globalized twenty-first century. For those of us still living in the twentieth, analysis of the French strikes can help us to understand how politics can make the shape of the twentyfirst century less inevitable.


Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 530-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Coole

This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they agree that emancipation is an ongoing critical task, I emphasize two aspects of Foucault's version: his attention to practices of liberty that entail bodily as well as subjective reconstruction and his inclusion, among topics for critique, of modernity's ontology of the human subject. In the case of women's emancipation, I argue that both aspects of emancipation must proceed simultaneously because of the distinctive nature of their oppression. For second‐wave feminism, I note a continued, although reoriented, equation between women and slaves. But now I identify a further framework whereby emancipation emerges as a threefold although systemic undertaking in which legal, subjectivist, and economic dimensions are at stake. I argue in conclusion that each entails unfinished emancipatory projects that represent timely ways to revive emancipation in the twenty‐first century.


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