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Feminism and the Abomination of Violence
Abstract
One of the foremost tasks of feminism is the exposure of, and struggle against, violence toward women. In the twenty-first century this violence shows no sign of decreasing. In this essay the author argues that because the discourse on violence has tended to be appropriated by radical feminist thinking–violence is not only, but also exclusively, what men do to women–the question of violence, as part of psychic reality, has become something that feminism repudiates. Continuing her ongoing engagement with psychoanalysis and feminism, she explores two women thinkers who placed violence at the core of their life's work–Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein–both of whom track the complex relation between violence in the world and in the mind. How might their understanding of violence be theorized for modern feminism?
This article proposes that returning Denise Riley’s work on (and troubling of) the category of “women” offers a feminist theorizing and politics that remains both critical and relevant to the political present. It argues that reading Riley again, alongside other anti-essentialist feminist thinkers, reveals the distinctiveness, force, and capaciousness of her project, which lay in her attention to historicity, form, language, and affect. It is precisely the poetics of Riley’s feminist thought that sustain the critical orientation that must animate feminism’s utopian desires.
This article concerns the interrelations of epistemic and physical gendered violence in two award-winning contemporary Irish novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) and Milkman (2018) by Eimear McBride and Anna Burns, respectively. It argues that patriarchal naming power which defines women as sexual objects is inextricable from the physical violence featured in both texts. Using theories of violence and naming, it examines how, faced with a climate of constant and submerged sexual threat, “middle sister” (as the narrator is called) and “Girl” (the protagonist of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing) attempt to appropriate dominant patriarchal narratives to retain subjectivity in the face of violence. While “middle sister” comes to recognize and articulate the violence done to her, Girl’s internalization of violence leads to the annihilation of both self and body.
The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018 - edited by Peter Boxall June 2019
In this response to Jacqueline Rose's essay “Feminism and the Abomination of Violence,” originally given orally at Cultural Critique's 2015 symposium, “The State of Things,” the author looks back at the sensational trial of Carl Andre, who stood accused of murdering his wife, Ana Mendieta, to think about the problem of knowledge and doubt for history. The author uses the occasion of an Andre retrospective at Dia:Beacon (2014–15), as well as protests of the retrospective, to test Rose's challenge to fight back against war, domestic violence, rape, and oppression, through thought, in what “a mind–the life of the mind no less–can do with its own history.” The essay addresses violence against women through the lens of feminism and the nexus of knowledge and power.
A commentary on David Marriott's essay “Corpsing; or, The Matter of Black Life,” originally given orally at Cultural Critique's “The State of Things” symposium, which focused on Marriott's reading of Aimé Césaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon, three figures so crucial to the immediate postwar debates about negritude, poetry, and black consciousness in the aftermath of war and the emergence of struggles for decolonization, in order to address “the state of things here and now.” The facts of racist violence destroying lives, lives lived as black lives–that is, as lives that must be so named and thus lived as such because of white racism–have been central to American literary as well as political history for more than a century.
