‘At Its Heart, a Haunted Town’: Patriarchal Violence, Female Resistance, and Post-Trauma in Riverdale

This article explores thanatological themes in the CW drama Riverdale with attention to how the series employs death and its signifiers to construct a metaphor for patriarchal violence and its traumatic imprints. Focusing on three central female characters, it considers how Riverdale explores patriarchal violence and the trauma it produces both at the level of narrative and through experimentation with Gothic trappings, generic conventions, aesthetic sensibilities, non-diegetic effects, and allusions to other narratives of patriarchal violence. This analysis underscores how Riverdale discloses and navigates one of trauma's central paradoxes: the impossibility and the imperative of its representation. It considers also how the female body in Riverdale acts as a vehicle of resistance: a site where patriarchal violence is inscribed but might also be mobilized toward alternative forms of identity negotiation and interconnection, and toward arousing in the audience a desire to participate in the radical work of participatory witnessing.

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From Chudail to Devi: Analysing Death, Evil, and Monstrous Femininity in Bulbbul

Throughout India, particularly northern India, the chudail or the demon-woman is a dominant figure in popular mythical imagination. Depicted as a woman with scruffy long hair and backwards-turned feet, the chudail is the archetypal femme fatale. She is the ‘monstrous-feminine’, to borrow Barbara Creed’s (2007) term, the embodiment of death and evil. Opposed to popular belief, however, the construction of the chudail in Anvita Dutt’s movie Bulbbul (2020) permits the existence of ‘good’ chudails. Dutt’s movie, while adapting the chudail myth for a contemporary audience, explores the manner in which the female body becomes a site of patriarchal oppression. With close reference to the movie, this paper explores how death becomes the medium through which the oppressed woman finds a way to regain her social agency. The paper claims that the chudail’s act of inflicting death on its prey functions as a folkloric system of justice whereby evil is punished and the destitute offered divine sanctuary. The study will undertake an in-depth analysis of the death scenes in Bulbbul to show how the event of death translates into a metaphor for the consumption of evil.

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