The New Avengers: Feminism, Feminity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle

In this, the first full-length study of the rape-revenge film, Jacinda Read suggests that the rape-revenge cycle can be read as one of the primary ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing shape of heterosexual femininity in the post-1970 period. Arguing that rape-revenge is better understood not as a genre, but as a narrative structure, the author analyzes the ways that various deployments of this structure rework the “mass cultural fictions of femininity” inscribed in the genres over which they have been mapped.