ABSTRACT
In the mid-1960s, a group of civil rights exploitation films responded directly, if sensationally, to the interracial activism and reactionary white violence taking place in the Deep South. They also reveal a convergence between the civil rights and burgeoning feminist movements, before second-wave feminism, and an anti-feminist backlash overlapping anti-integration resistance. This is apparent in Murder in Mississippi (Mawra, 1965) and Girl on a Chain Gang’s (Gross, 1966) centering the rape of white women activists by white southern lawmen. The men position the assaults as revenge for the women’s activism and the (interracial) sexual freedoms they equate it with. Such configurations of intraracial sexual violence invert the southern rape complex, thus signaling how such policing, often sexualized violence was intersectionally utilized to keep white women and Black men (and women) in their “place,” historically and in the present. Yet like their villains, the films also deploy rape to anti-feminist (and white supremacist) ends, perpetuating women’s subordination within patriarchy by constructing them as feminine victims rather than feminist or political subjects. Ultimately, then, the films participate in such anti-feminisms, warning women and potential feminists and activists away from the political sphere as a dangerous space of sexual (and racial) violence.
