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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 is situated as a study of rural central New York, among a post-Vietnam generation, and under the force of land grabs following the United States farm crisis of the 1970s–1980s “consolidation” of farmlands into Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). This study unfolds these surroundings of this particular rural society and environment through critical theory and socioanalysis focused on a mute narrative of reified (thingified) species and beings. From a student of sociology this chapter is a response to the conditions of academic character formation and how a particular local milieu constituted the affinities for investigating society with the environment of nonhumans as political.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

This chapter explores how coming into contact with the narratives of environmental victims helps to develop different forms of reflexivity useful for imagining and confronting environmental crises. The generation and sharing of environmental data and of visual and narrative experiences of lived environmental harms by ‘ordinary people’ amounts to more than merely supplying robust data to fellow citizens, scientists and decision-makers. It is also a proactive claim for social and environmental justice, especially when these people are silenced or even criminalised. While forms of civic monitoring can be regarded as a contribution to environmental governance, they have instead often been labelled as ‘subversive’ or illegal practices. In this contribution, the authors explore how ‘green’ activist criminology may help in the challenge to have these voices enabled and listened. The challenge has to be taken up by developing an active listening attitude towards the voices of people (‘folk voices’) affected by/exposed to environmental harms, enhancing visual imagination and complexity about the contested notion of the environmental victim, together with new ways of taking care and a new paradigm of the ‘active victim’. In the conclusion, the authors acknowledge the potential of an art-based inquiry that is inclusive of civic imaginaries and knowledge. However, they also stress that cultural barriers and ideologies may hamper this potential. Critical attitude and integrity of any scientific approach should be sought and preserved.

The herstory of Black women in South Africa is one of sexualised forms of political, physical and psychological violence. A herstory of violence, oppression, exploitation, victimisation, imprisonment and police brutality. The apartheid government used violence to control women, their bodies, their religious and spiritual experiences. The feeling of disregard for African women is echoed in an interview with Mhlophe, a South African author, playwright and actress, when she talks about the Battle of Blood River and emphasises how there is no mention of women. ‘Did those men have no sisters, no mothers who helped them? Our history is very unbalanced’ (August, 1990, p. 332).