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Grave (English title: Raw), the 2016 feature film debut from French writer/director Julia Ducournau, is a body horror that explores cannibalism in a contemporary setting. A vegetarian student, Justine, develops cannibalistic desires after she is forced to eat rabbit kidneys in a hazing ritual at a veterinarian school.

This film portrays the female cannibal as having lost control of her bodily impulses. Justine displays a loss of cognition that results in involuntary actions when confronted with raw flesh. One can observe parallels in this portrayal and that featured in earlier films Dans ma peau (In my Skin, 2002, dir. Marina de Van) and Trouble Every Day (2001, dir. Claire Denis). These two films are identified with the early twenty-first-century French ‘cinema of the body’ trend, which involves disturbing and horrific portrayals of alienated protagonists, sexual debasement and transgressive urges.

In my exploration of the mind/body divide featured in Grave, I’ll argue that the film moves away from portrayals of the cannibal in the two earlier films, as we now observe a female protagonist who is actively engaged in meaningful relationships with others. As such, Justine seeks connection rather than disconnection from those around her, with varying levels of success.

This chapter explores the presentation of women's violence in Tamil mega serials. Tamil mega serials are produced in India and aired six days a week on satellite television channels. The story revolves around households with extended families living together and issues affecting women such as family well-being, motherhood and fertility. Women mostly take the role of the main protagonist and antagonist in Tamil serials. This chapter analyses the presentation of violence in 10 episodes of Chandralekha, a Tamil mega serial. Perpetrators of violence in Tamil serials are mainly female antagonists and other characters supporting the antagonists. The rivalry between the protagonist and antagonist centres around the struggle for property or the love of or marriage with a man. The type of violence ranges from mild to severe kinds of physical violence, and non-physical violence. The presentation of violence in Tamil serials reflects gender inequality in society. The meaning of some forms of violence in mega serials is closely related to the traditional gender roles and notion of traditional femininity in society.

Across different research fields, it is increasingly acknowledged that gender is not a binary variable and goes beyond the male–female dichotomy. At the same time, gender is a prominent social cue that affects evaluations and interactions among individuals. Thus, gender can impact social processes on many levels in complex ways. Meetings provide arenas where key social processes unfold that are relevant to the organization. Understanding which role gender takes in this context is therefore central to organizations as well as meeting research. This chapter provides a critical review of research to date on social influence in meetings, specifically zooming in on the role of gender. The authors conducted a multi-step systematic literature review and identified 43 studies across a wide area of disciplines (e.g., psychology, communication, and management). The authors put special emphasis on the methodologies employed across this work since a comprehensive understanding of the applied methods is core for a synthesis of research results. Through the analysis, the authors pinpoint six variables – individual gender, sex role orientation, gender composition, gender salience, contextual factors such as task type and organizational settings, and the construction of gender as a social concept – that are directly related to gender and which represent factors that are critical for the role of gender in the meeting context. Thereby, this chapter aims to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of gender during workplace meetings. The authors conclude by highlighting methodological and managerial recommendations and suggest avenues for future research.

Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.

This chapter offers feminist perspectives on the violence exercised by female avengers in popular audiovisual products about narcotrafficking from Mexico and Colombia. Through the case studies of the narcotelenovela Rosario Tijeras (RCN Televisión, 2010) and the B movie Sanguinarios del M1 (Alonso Ortiz Lara, 2011), we explore how recent Latin American narco-narratives rearticulate the ‘rape-revenge’ film. Following Valencia's conceptualisation of necroempowerment (2012), we argue that female characters respond to rape with ruthless methods in an effort to regain agency. We combine existing literature in feminist film studies with postcolonial readings of the specificities of rape-revenge in the narco-universe where the violence these heroines use as retaliation is already the norm for their male counterparts. A close reading of revenge sequences underscores how vengeance can constitute a cathartic outlet for enraged female characters, challenging stereotypes of feminine passiveness and subverting gender hierarchies. However, it also perpetuates a patriarchal order based on toxic ideals of individual power achieved through bloody methods. We examine how empowerment can entrap female protagonists and serve to differentiate the types of violence that each gender has access to, and we discuss the problematic representation of rape as a transformative moment necessary for women to later become powerful.

This chapter offers a case study of the distinctive political activism in Taiwanese metal by analysing the intertextuality of Just Not Meant to Be (還君明珠) (2015) by Crescent Lament (恆月三途). From the perspective of a cultural insider, the author examine the socio-cultural dynamics underlying this activism and explain how Taiwanese metal attempts to tackle the troubled past of Taiwan. The author brings attention to Just Not Meant to Be's commentary about the activism it takes part in, and reflect on problematics inherent to political activism in Taiwanese metal. Finally, the author explicates the problematics in the context of metal subculture in general. Pivotal throughout this chapter are the questions: Why does Taiwanese metal replicate forms of domination it seeks to counter? What can metal subculture in general learn from Taiwanese metal and its political activism?

Alien franchise protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) returns in the series' second film instalment, Aliens (1986), as ‘a full-fledged hard-body hero’ (Gallardo & Smith, 2004) to assist in the rescue of a group of colonists from an Alien invasion. As each of the rescue team's male officers are killed or proven incompetent or traitorous, Ripley quickly steps forward as the surviving group's leader and principal strategist, forming a strong emotional attachment to the colonists' only surviving child and providing structure and stability to the remaining soldiers. Her heroism is defined by her maternal leadership of the group; as the most sensible and competent member, she prioritizes the group's needs above her own. Ripley's full embodiment of motherhood amplifies her machoism and maternal control over the surviving group, allowing her to reconquer her fears of the Alien species and protect her adopted child when she is kidnapped and nearly killed by the Alien Queen. This chapter thus traces Ellen Ripley's transformation from sceptical consultant to macho-mother and its importance to the franchise's overarching narrative, as well as the evolution of the macho-mother hero in more recent science fiction action films such as Mad Max Fury Road (2015) and The Cloverfield Paradox (2018).