Research Seminar: ‘Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the 'Yorkshire Ripper' Years’

This talk explores and interrogates how and why film culture in the UK became a focal point for feminist activism and campaigning, responsive to the events and contexts of the 'Yorkshire Ripper' years

In November and December of 1980 cinemas across the UK that were then screening high-profile films like The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) and When a Stranger Calls (Fred Walton, 1979), were picketed, stormed and egg-bombed by assembled members of activist women’s groups such as Women Against Violence Against Women. Meanwhile, poster hoardings that advertised these films and others using depictions of women’s fear of men’s violence as key selling points were vandalised with graffiti and slogans like “Women Can Fight Too” and “This Violates Women.”

This direct action gave rise to the arrest and (in some cases) prosecution of many of these women on a range of trumped-up charges, and it was accompanied by local, national and international coverage in the news media and the film industry trade press. These women’s groups were protesting what they then understood to be film culture’s complicity in normalising imagery of violence against women in everyday spaces and places. And in ways that they believed contributed to fostering an environment that enabled the perpetuation of the continuing social problem of misogynist violence, which was at that time seen as being epitomised by the flashpoint status of the then ongoing ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ murders that had, by then, blighted the north of England for over five years.

Focussing in particular on elucidating and contextualising the cinema protests of 1980 on the one hand, and on a number of unmade and unseen early 1980s Hollywood film productions about the events and contexts of the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ attacks on the other, this talk investigates some of the ways in which UK film culture became a focal point for feminist campaigning during this time. Shining a light on an important part of UK women’s liberation movement history as it intersects with the cultural history of film, and drawing on archive research and interviews, it explores the relationship between film and feminism in Britain at that time, arguing that the so-called ‘Ripper’ attacks, and the cultures of masculinity that contributed to enabling them, are key contexts in relation to which this relationship must be understood.

Dr Hannah Hamad is Reader in Media and Communication at Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (New York and London: Routledge, 2014) and the forthcoming Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years (London: BFI/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025).