Introduction to the special issue: Genres of Rape and Putting Rape Into Genre: Sexual Violence and TV After #MeToo

Abstract

This introduction to the “Rape, Genre, and TV after #MeToo” special issue articulates the importance of genre for understanding shifting affective and political norms related to sexual violence. Recent TV from the U.S. and the U.K. has worked to expand the public’s understanding of what counts in the genre of rape, bringing into view less discussed harms like nonconsensual condom removal. At the same time, public discussions of rape have put pressure on the conventions of genres, including the genres explored in this special issue: the procedural, stand-up comedy, the Western, and the situation comedy.

Art after the Untreatable: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Violence, and the Ethics of Looking in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You

“…I May Destroy You refuses to satisfy at the level of form, perhaps because the work of healing from trauma, like any analysis (whether of analysand or text), is an unending process. Building on Berlant's concept of the "affective contract", Michael Dango observes that I May Destroy You's "generic promiscuity", and its cycling through horror, comedy, and melodrama, "is one symptom that the affective contract around sexual violence is constantly revised, updated, and amended" [12]. And, as Dango writes elsewhere, Coel was one of many show runners in 2020 in search of the "right emotional genre for rape."…”

“…Emerging scholarship on I May Destroy You has examined the series' portrayal of the stages of trauma and grief in the wake of sexual assault, its intersectional depiction of the labor of believability in its main character's attempts at legal redress, the show's subversion of rape television, and its resistance to genre, among other analyses [9][10][11][12]. In contrast to "most British and American television" that "uses assault scenes to pigeonhole victims before they get to be anything else", Caetlin Benson-Allott observes that I May Destroy You reinvents rape television by presenting its main characters-Arabella (Michaela Coel), Terry (Weruche Opia), and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), each of whom experience sexual assault in the show-as loving, strong, hilarious, suffering, complex people first [9] (p. 101).…”