This course examines representations of victimized women in the action-adventure film.  We will be interrogating the relationship between these popular cultural representations and American philosophical and legal structures.  Using films such as Con Air, Straw Dog, and Closet Land, we pose questions such as: 

• Are there ways in which the sexually violated female body and the sexually violent man are necessary terms against which the hero defines himself?
• What are the differences between the highly visible cultural representations of rape that mobilize the male hero narrative and the virtually invisible reality of rape?
• What is the relation between the relative absence of women's criminal and civil prosecutions of rape and the relative prevalence of representations of rape in popular culture? 
• How is it that, while real women often have no legal recourse against their rapists, the story of women's rape is so central to male action adventure/hero plots? 
• What are the conditions of representation that culturally relegate women to "body" and invalidate them as credible speakers?
• What does it mean to be able to speak, to have access to the symbolic "word" and thus the authority of "truth" and "law"?
• How do the bifurcations between male/mind/rational and female/body/irrational structure Western culture and contribute to social systems in which women who report rape are disbelieved while representations of women's rape are standard narrative fare? 

• Klaus Thiewelt's Male Fantasies
• Freud's work on hysteria
• Page duBois' Torture and Truth
• Kate Millett's The Politics of Cruelty
• Karen Shelby's "Simone de Beauvoir and the Algerian War" http://weber.ucsd.edu/~kshelby/APSA99.pdf
• "The Structure of War" and "The Structure of Torture" from Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and UnMaking of the World.
• United Nations High Commission on Refugees

Image courtesy of Elisa Kay Sparks, Clemson University: http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~sparks/flc/flchtml.html