The Shame of Male Acolytes: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Through Rape-Revenge

Abstract

This chapter introduces protagonists in the contemporary rape-revenge genre who—due to their contrasting gendered experiences—bring a very different relationship to shame, rape, and revenge to that of the female victim-avengers in the films examined so far. This chapter addresses the construction of male victims of rape, how they experience its shaming, and how they respond, in three recent Australian rape-revenge films: Acolytes (Jon Hewitt, 2008), The Book of Revelation (Ana Kokkinos, 2006), and Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, 2011). As with Descent, these films display variations on classic rape-revenge films that challenge the conventions and assumptions of the genre—they provide another “oppositional gaze,” but this time on an axis of gender rather than of race. Where Descent (Talia Lugacy, 2007) challenged the ubiquitous whiteness of the (sympathetic) rape victim in popular culture and the racist idea that women of color are unrapable, the films addressed in this chapter challenge the idea that only women are rapable. These films cast male victims as the protagonists, a role almost universally reserved for the young white female victims in the genre up until the mid- to late 1990s (with Deliverance¹ [John Boorman, 1972] being the prominent exception to the rule prior to this). The dynamic of female victim/male perpetrator has been taken for granted, not only as a fundamental convention of the classic rape-revenge genre, but also frequently within feminist theory and literature on rape.