A critical multimodal analysis of the representation of rape in pornographic novels published between 1970-1990
Vol.17,No.2(2024)
Discourse and Interaction
Rape remains a current and frequent topic in media products such as advertisements, films and television series, in social networks such as Twitter, Instagram and in new virtual spaces such as the metaverse. As Brownmiller (1975: 13) claimed, examining the
history of rape may help us “learn what we need to know about our current condition”. Doing so may entail the study of representations of rape in pornographic novels published between 1970-1990, a period that partly coincided with the Second Wave of Feminism (1960-1980s) and the Golden Age of Porn (1969-1984). In such a context, book cover design was not merely an art, but a crucial factor in attracting potential customers. Building up upon Brownmiller’s assertion, this paper provides a multimodal analysis of 51 covers which contain the lemma RAPE, published between 1976 and 1990. The analysis adopted a social semiotic approach (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) in conjunction with the principles of Feminist critical film analysis (Mulvey 1975) to document how rape scene fantasies were portrayed in the covers. Exploring these representations can help us understand many of the still prevalent myths surrounding rape nowadays, which perpetuate violent misogynistic behavior as a form of entertainment for their audience.
rape; pornographic novels; cover design; multimodal analysis
Carmen Gregori-Signes
University of Valencia
Carmen Gregori-Signes is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Valencia, since 1991, and a member of IULMA (Instituto Universitario de Lenguas Modernas) since 2005. She completed an MA at the University of Nottingham and has been a visiting scholar at several universities (Birmingham University, Iowa University, Cambridge University, Queen Mary University, George Mason University, Middlebury College). Her research interests include corpus linguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis,
pragmatics and applied linguistics. Currently, a great deal of her research is devoted to the analysis of media language using corpus linguistics methodologies.
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