Saturday 13 December 2008

"Superfree" rape club in Japan & Yoko Ono's "Rape"

This story is quite old by now, so evidently it had somehow passed me by. But given the footage of the accompanying gender studies class, I'm starting to wonder if any Japanese academics have published on this very disturbing phenomena. I can see possible connections to media studies "effects" type approaches as well, especially in light of the footage from the "Rapeman" anime featured in the report (which, incidentally, if memory serves me correctly, was the inspiration for the name Steve Albini chose for one of his groups once Big Black had dissolved).

By sheer coincidence I had just touched on this topic after reading the critique of Yoko Ono and John Lennon's short film Rape (1969) in Joan Hawkins' Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde , which is more concerned with the scopophilia of the cinematic apparatus. It is unclear to me though how a feminist film critic, even one generally receptive to Continental philosophy, would respond to a reading method such as this, which spends more time talking about Badiou's framework of the Truth-Event than the generative structure of patriarchy per se. However, given the brevity of this posting, I make no pretence to having unpacked the relevant stakes according to each theoretical position. In any case, here is the film in question:

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