Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years

Hannah Hamad explores and contextualises how UK film culture became a focal point for feminist campaigning during the Yorkshire Ripper years (1975-1981). She illuminates an important part of the history of the UK women’s liberation movement as it intersects with the cultural history of film. Drawing on original archive research, and on interviews with participants, Hamad provides a new account of the relationship between film and feminism in the UK at that time, arguing that the Ripper attacks - and the toxic cultures of masculinity that enabled them - are key contexts in relation to which this relationship must be understood.

Hamad interrogates a range of film culture phenomena related to the Ripper years that differently emerged from this context and its aftermath. These span the cycle of ‘women in danger’ films to which feminist activists reacted with outrage, to attempts by Hollywood to capitalise on the topicality of the murders by producing feature films about them, and British filmmaking that responded to this context through feminist registers, including Richard Woolley’s Brothers and Sisters and Leeds Animation Workshop’s Give Us a Smile.