ABSTRACT
‘You look so beautiful tonight’, he says, gazing into her eyes. Instead of leaning towards him for a kiss, she stabs him in the neck with a fork. This scene, from television’s Battlestar Galactica (2003–9), makes sense primarily as a rape-revenge narrative, and exploring televisual representations of rape can tell us much about how our understandings of sex, gender and power are scripted through conventions and their subversion. Indeed, Tanya Horeck suggests that ‘representations of rape are one of the prime locations for determining popular ideas about femininity, feminism and post-feminism’ (2004: 8). In the study of television programmes, it is worth noting that industry context and commercial imperatives inevitably influence the ways sexuality and violence are represented, and Elana Levine notes that in the 1970s television ‘necessarily addressed the audience in ways that would be acceptable to advertisers fearful of controversy, to politicians fearful of public backlash, and to viewers fearful of radical challenges to their way of life’ (2007: 5). The same basic caveats still apply, despite gradual changes to popular thought and televisual representations.
