Post-Procedural Form and Rape Ambiance: Policing Sexual Violence in Mare of Easttown

Mare of Easttown figures a social environment that is both city and family at once, making it impossible to disentangle stranger rape and forms of acquaintance, date, or intimate partner rape-and therefore to locate the problem of rape as one of crimes to be solved by the police; or of ordinary heterosexuality, requiring more radical cultural transformation. Completing filming after the summer 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the role of the police is further compromised in Mare of Easttown. I read the show's episodic anxieties-its increasingly unrealistic plot developments that push at the borders of each episode in order to keep them open-as managing these ambivalences: between stranger and intimate rape; between crime and the family; between the public and the private; between trust in law enforcement and critique.

Automated summary

"Mare of Easttown" portrays the complex social environment that blurs the boundaries between stranger rape and acquaintance rape, raising questions about the role of the police in solving crimes and the need for cultural transformation. The show's anxieties reflect the tensions between stranger and intimate rape, crime and family, public and private, and trust in law enforcement and critique.