Bailey Sincox

For Bailey Sincox, a PhD candidate in English, her project started with a fascination with female revenge as a genre in the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where a mother retaliates against the police for failing to solve the murder of her daughter. “I started finding something productive about using such films to reconsider genre in 16th and 17th century plays, which were also dramatizing women taking revenge,” she says, citing Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Taleas an example.  

Generic change is the emergence of new genres or transformation of existing ones. Sincox puts accounts of generic and political change into conversation, by using film and television representations of female revenge to unpack an early modern genre. “Critics have long recognized that revenge tragedy was one of the most commercially successful genres of the early modern period,” she says. “However, early modern plays have traditionally been classified under genres such as romance or comedy, even when they have more to do with revenge tragedy.”

Ultimately, Sincox argues that revenge tragedy as a genre does not fully encompass the experience and motivations of the female avengers she studies. “These female avengers are seeking justice, which does not fall neatly into the box of revenge tragedy,” she says. “The representation of a woman seeking justice is one that speaks to a perceived need in a society to symbolically satisfy some kind of lack. This could be a lack of justice for survival assaults, or lack of bodily autonomy for female-identified people.” 

 “There is a fruitful relationship between political change and art, especially dramatic art, which physically realizes these fantasies,” says Sincox. “Film and television representations such as Three Billboards are reconceptualizing the genre of female revenge in ways that speak to issues that have continuity across periods such as gender, justice, and citizenship.”