Abstract: »My own intellectual inquiry brought me to develop the idea of imagined rape and revenge scenarios as a restorative practice. Starting from a conceptual quest on the ethic of revenge, I arrive to question carceral feminism as a social issue and as an invalid answer to rape, or as Levine and Meiners (2020) put it: “the recognition of the shared ideologies that undergird state violence and interpersonal gender violence and the official and cultural conflation of vengeance with justice” (p. 2859). Embracing revenge in a fictional scenario is not a response to rape but part of a healing practice. In fact, the ethic of revenge resides in, and enables, a feminist restorative practice as a way for the protection of self and communities. Rape revenge enactment and restorative practice implement and complete each other.
Restorative practice is a path for prevention and reparation that is “certainly out of step with feminist theories that prioritize a state response to gender-based harms and see retributive punishment as an essential component of that response” (Goodmark 2018, 373). In this vein, how can a violent and cruel revenge scenario be considered a restorative remedy? This seemingly contradicting statement is resolved by the idea that a violent but fictional scenario serves as a discrete outlet for anger, fear, sadness. Pairing these two contrasting coping methods, rape-revenge and restorative practice - is a way of acknowledging the complexity of social relationships, taking into account the phenomenology of rape, and dissolving dichotomous divisions of victim and perpetrator. Moving the focus and shifting the paradigm “from justice as retribution to justice as healing, from conviction to accountability, punishment to repair, and rehabilitation to transformation” (Levine and Meiners 2020, 2825).
To illustrate the theoretical approach that sustains my ground, I will use the case study of the movie “Young Promising Woman” (2020). I will show that the ethic of rape and revenge doesn’t have to be seen as a way to repay in kind, but as an idea of forgiveness and compassion, as a restorative practice. Following the 2001 INCITE!/Critical Resistance’s call to “[m]ake connections between interpersonal violence and the violence inflicted by domestic state institutions”, my research addresses the question: what is the interconnection between rape, and revenge and abolitionist feminism?« (Source: Online Program)

Publication: Farina, Valeria. »Restorative Revenge: A Response to Sexual Violence. Exploring New Modes of Justice in Rape-Revenge Narratives.« Rape and Revenge: Rache-Kulturen und sexualisierte Gewalt in intermedialer Perspektive. Edited by Christine Künzel et al. Göttingen 2024: 279-295. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States | Film: American rape and revenge films / Promising Young Woman | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in the United States