Streaming Sexual Violence: Binge-watching Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why

This article explores the politics of streaming sexual violence through the case study of Netflix Original 13 Reasons Why (2017-). Evaluating the observation that long-form drama with its extended temporality can engage with rape culture in more sustained and critical ways, this article argues that this is not necessarily the case. Tracking the ways in which Netflix hooks and trains its audiences to binge-watch 13 Reasons Why—in both its narrative hermeneutics and its structures of reception—I argue that those reception practices and narrative hooks, particularly around sexually graphic content, are cultivated around successive levels of intensity, similar to levels in a video game. In effect, sexual violence is gamified in 13 Reasons Why and is used as a structuring punctuation device for the full-drop season, which aims to keep viewers locked into Netflix’s streaming interface. I conclude that the seriality of 13 Reasons Why as a binge-able Netflix product places a premium upon the ‘next episode’ in a way that ultimately forecloses a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the serious issues of sexual violence and victimization. This article argues for the importance of examining how new technological and networked modes of delivery and response are shaping audience’s affective encounters/engagements with images of sexual violence in the digital streaming era

The new extremisms: rethinking extreme cinema

This article considers the salience of extreme art cinema across a range of different cultural, historical, and socio-economic contexts. It asks what happens to the specificity of the notion of a 'new extremism in cinema' when the net is cast a bit wider, to include more global and mainstream instances of cinematic violence and provocation

#MeToo in British schools: Gendered differences in teenagers' awareness of sexual violence

This article explores how British secondary school students responded to and made sense of the rising public awareness of sexual violence in British society that emerged during lockdowns for COVID-19. Based on the findings from a 2021–2022 study conducted in five secondary schools, the article explores the gendered discrepancies in girls’ and boys’ awareness of violence against girls and women. In particular, it examines how the youth participants in this study responded to two related media stories during lockdown: the news of Sarah Everard’s kidnapping and murder by a police officer and the viral spread of sexual abuse testimonies on the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ Instagram page and website. The article demonstrates how girls were more likely to experience, recognize, and discuss sexual violence, in part due to feminist consciousness raising during lockdown via digital technologies like Instagram and TikTok. Although some boys did recognize the problem of violence against women, in general, they were much less aware of Sarah Everard’s murder and Everyone’s Invited and were prone to absorbing manosphere-like discourses around false rape accusations In focus groups, some boys deployed a defensive masculinity and adopted a discourse of male victimhood, which denied the scale and scope of violence against girls and women. However, through involving boys in focus group discussion with both us and their male peers about power and privilege, progress was made in challenging and counteracting rape myths and anti-feminist male victimization narratives

‘Rosie’s Room’ and ‘Bullet’s Phone’: The Commodification of the Lost Girl in The Killing and its Paratexts

This chapter looks at what happens in the shift from the Danish to the American version of the popular TV series Forbrydelsen/The Killing in order to consider the cross-cultural significance of the ‘lost girl’ crime story. While TV crime drama has been accused of trading in degrading images of violated women for shock value, this chapter focuses attention on how the lost girl trope is presented on such shows via forms of new media technologies. Its central assertion is that, in order to fully account for the often-damning gender politics of contemporary TV crime dramas, one must look not simply to the content of their storylines but to their modes of framing and address across platforms, and the affective responses that they in turn enable and/or disenable. How do technological processes of mediation and remediation shape cultural/ideological understandings of violence against girls and women on contemporary TV dramas? And how does the remediation of violence through the digital interface extend beyond the TV crime dramas themselves to the paratextual materials that increasingly surround post-network TV

Public rape: representing violation in fiction and film

Second-wave feminism fought to end the blanket silence shrouding rape and bring it to public attention. Now feminist critics must confront a different issue. In Public Rape Tanya Horeck considers the public investment in images of rape and the figure of the raped woman. Introducing the idea of 'public rape', Horeck looks at how images of rape serve as cultural fantasies of sexual, racial and class difference. Looking at rape in real life as well as in literature and films such as The Accused and Boys Don't Cry, Horek reveals how representations of rape raise vital questions about the relationship between reality and fantasy, and between violence and spectacle

A “momentary melancholy” : Female desire and the promise of happiness in the cinema of Sarah Polley

Description to be added.Cannot be left empt

#AskThicke: “Blurred Lines,” Rape Culture, and the Feminist Hashtag Takeover

Description to be added.Cannot be left empt

‘Too Good for this World:’ Keanu Reeves, God of the Internet

This essay examines the memefication of Keanu Reeves in 21st century digital remix culture, exploring the cultural investment in an idea of him as being ‘too good for this world’. To reflect on how Reeves, in the middle-aged period of his stardom, has become a receptacle for good will and positive affect, the essay situates his internet stardom in relation to the rise of the ‘sad man’ meme. Exploring the networked affective processes through which Reeves' star persona has taken on recharged cultural significance, the essay argues that the surge of internet memes surrounding the actor work to articulate cultural anxieties and desires surrounding male stardom in a post-cinematic, #MeToo era. While the essay explores how the cultural adulation of Reeves wards off deep-seated concerns about male stardom as a central site for the reproduction of toxic masculinity, it concludes by sounding a cautionary note about the risks and limitations of such worship

From documentary to drama: capturing Aileen Wuornos

This essay explores the cross-promotion between Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (UK, 2003) and Patty Jenkins' independent feature film Monster (USA, 2003), both of which profess to offer the ‘real’ story of Aileen Wuornos, the woman called America's ‘first female serial killer’. The debate among critics about whether it is the documentary or the drama that has the most to offer is staged as a contest between reality and fiction. A close examination of this debate, however, reveals the extent to which the categories of reality and fiction are in fact interwoven, with interpretation of both films reliant not only on how they relate to actuality but how they relate to each other. This essay considers how the two films trade in images of Wuornos as monstrous other, and how that trade is revealing about the perceived status and relationship between documentary and dramatizations of real life and the kind of work these forms of fact-based representation are seen to perform in public culture. Of particular interest is the tension between reality and performance, as revealed through the media focus on the actress Charlize Theron's transformation into Wuornos in Monster