The Social Cults of Cinematic Gendered Violence: A Challenge and Transformation

The modern female rape–revenge cinema polarizes gender relations as it endorses a misandrist logic and brutal forms of reprisal. Wilson Harris, the British/Guyanese fiction writer and theorist, argues that these hypnotic forms of female-revenge media are social cults of violence that generate a conflict of gender. Using the film, I Spit on your Grave and Rihanna’s music video Man Down, this research demonstrates that the female-revenge mediascape is prime corollary to the promotion of misandry and violent vigilante justice. The film theories of Claire Henry, Hilary Neroni, and Jean Baudrillard will undergird the arguments of this research. The research methodology for this study employs a narrative analysis intersected with the lens of Wilson Harris’s shamanistic ontology of gender. The findings of this paper reveal that a shamanic vision of gender could therapeutically convert the psychical imprisonment of cinematic rape-revenge violence.