Is Seeing Believing? Rapist Culture on the Screen

Abstract

Screen culture regularly transmits rapist culture – making rape seem inevitable, while eroticizing and masculinizing men’s violence against women and girls (including transgender women and girls). This essay selects classic and contemporary representations, mostly film and some television, that propagate the rapist faith, with particularly attention given to issues of the fusion of sex and violence, the intersections of rape with racism, and the ways that rape attempts to destroy the integrity of self. Also considered here are resistant viewer responses to screen culture as well as active and creative representations, ones that see through rapism, reclaim sovereignty and integrity, and imagine the possibility of a future without rape.