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‘Sons of Anarchy’: Female Violence, Feminist Care

At the end of season 6, Gemma violently clashes the spheres of power. She’s in the kitchen. She’s using an iron, and a carving fork. Using tools of the feminine sphere, she brutally murders Tara, because she fears that Tara is about to take control and dismantle the club—the life, the style of mothering and living—that she brought home with her so many years ago.

Mothers of Anarchy

This repost by Leigh Kolb originally appeared at And Philosophy and appears now as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Sons of Anarchy revolves around the chaotic yet highly methodical world of a motorcycle club and the forces around them—from law enforcement and crooked cops to gangs and organized crime rings. The entire series focuses on politics, power, violence, and authority in incredibly masculine spaces.

However, these are sons. And to be a son is not only to be a son of a father—the cornerstone for so many monomyths in Western literature—but also to be a son of a mother. While Sons of Anarchy was ostensibly about Jax’s atonement with his dead father and monstrous father figure (thus the countless accurate comparisons to Hamlet), who really is “anarchy” in this world?

If we look at the definition of anarchy— “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority”—and focus in on the word “nonrecognition,” we can think about how throughout Sons of Anarchy, Gemma has been an authority figure in the domestic sphere—”fiercely” mothering her biological and nonbiological sons (she references wanting to have had a dozen sons in the final season, and really, she managed to do so through the MC), cooking meals, managing paperwork, and tending to children, all in the feminine sphere. Though she cannot ride, she and is seen as the ultimate “old lady.” She has power, and the men of SAMCRO, on some level, fear her.

Gemma’s violence

Her true authority, however, is not recognized. From the beginning, we understand her power in Charming. She ran off when she was a teenager, and, as Wayne Unser says, came back “ten years later with a baby and a motorcycle club.” There is implied ownership here; the club is Gemma’s. In reality, Gemma herself can be seen as embodying and perpetuating anarchy—in that she is an authority figure, but not recognized as such. The masculine sphere—the bikes, the guns, the gavel, the long table (hello, phalluses)—is seen as powerful. Violence, politics, gun deals, drug deals, more violence: masculine. Powerful.

Anarchy is then truly unleashed; both parts of the definition resound throughout the final season. Jax’s authority is misguided (some might say absent) as he leads the club down a path of disorder and destruction. Because no one—not Jax, not Unser, not Sheriff Jarry—could recognize Gemma’s capabilities for brutality., Her authority, or rather her control of the situation, is left unchecked for most of the season. Had Abel not overheard her confess, she may well have gotten away with it. The Sons all underestimate the capabilities of women.

Tara cannot escape Gemma

In “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” Peggy Kornegger points out that

“Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t. Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an ‘impossible dream.’”

This anarchy dichotomy is at the heart of the central conflict of Sons of Anarchy: the “malevolent” club that Clay and Gemma wanted versus the “impossible dream” club that John Teller and Jax wanted. We now know that John Teller’s death was at his own hand (albeit somewhat forced), when he realized that the former was the fate of SAMCRO. As Jax rose up the ranks of SAMCRO leadership, he wasn’t just fighting Clay’s philosophy of anarchy—he was also fighting Gemma’s. After Jax killed Clay, the fight wasn’t over, even though he initially thought it was. But the club wasn’t his. Anarchy was his mother.

As Tara plots and schemes to get herself and her sons away from the world Gemma had created and helped sustain, Gemma sees her as a threat, and resorts to fully embodying that destructive, violent anarchy that could uphold the status quo.

Because she has operated within this culture of masculine violence, Gemma adopts the patriarchal problem-solver of violent destruction. Since Tara is a threat to the malevolent anarchy that Clay and Gemma desired, she—in Gemma’s mind—had to be eliminated. Whereas Tara worked with other women as she was trying to make her plans to escape Charming with Abel and Thomas, Gemma consistently alienated herself from other women.

In “Socialism, Anarchism And Feminism,” by Carol Ehrlich, she says that the “debate over ‘strong women’” is closely related to leadership, and summarizes radical feminists’ position to include the following:

“1. Women have been kept down because they are isolated from each other and are paired off with men in relationships of dominance and submission. 2. Men will not liberate women; women must liberate themselves. This cannot happen if each woman tries to liberate herself alone. Thus, women must work together on a model of mutual aid. 3. ‘Sisterhood is powerful,’ but women cannot be sisters if they recapitulate masculine patterns of dominance and submission.”

Tara could have checked off all of those goals easily; she was of a new generation of old ladies. Gemma, on the other hand, isolates herself, acts alone, and in attempting to be dominant and in control, adopts masculine ways of doing so. Clay, as a harbinger of evil, wanted Tara dead. But the other Sons accepted and respected her. Her role wasn’t club mother, it was club healer. The power that she held—that she could and did save Sons’ lives (and Abel’s life in the series pilot)—was a restorative power that ran counter to what Gemma offered. And the more Tara worked with other women, the more of a threat she became to Gemma and the club.

Gemma embodies Sigmund Freud’s “masculinity complex,” which posits that girls identify with their fathers but eventually must assume female social roles. Gemma’s mother, Rose, died of the same heart defect that Gemma has and that her son Thomas died from. Gemma remembers Rose in a conflicted way, and says in season 7 that she thinks Rose had never wanted to be a mother. Gemma, by contrast, says that all she ever wanted to do was to be a mother (to sons).

Her father, Nate, was a pastor. She speaks of him with love and admiration, and one can easily see (just as easily as critics have seen the Oedipal parallels with Jax and Gemma) her own Electra complex—the Jungian theory that girls identify with and have a fixation with their fathers. While Nate leads a church and congregants, Gemma leads an outlaw club and outlaws—her dozen sons are different kinds of apostles.

In Sigmund Freud’s lecture, “Femininity,” he says,

“A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relationship to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex.”

In making Jax believe the Chinese killed Tara, Gemma is both preserving herself and continuing—whether consciously or not—the legacy that Clay would have wanted: destruction, violence, and chaos. She wants her son to live out her ambitions, to fully give himself up to the anarchy of her rebellious desires.

Tara’s rebellion—that Gemma could not seem to get over—is the antithesis of Gemma’s. Tara left Charming as a teenager, leaving Jax and the club because she wanted to escape. She became a talented doctor, and later returned to Charming. When she wanted to “transfer to her son(s) the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself”—escaping Charming and the grasp of SAMCRO, Gemma sees this desire as running counter to her own ambition for her son and grandsons: to stay in Charming, and to stay in the MC.

Wendy and Tara collaborate

Both Tara and Gemma are underestimated by the men, in terms of the lengths they will go to in order to preserve their desires for their lives and their sons. Because women aren’t included in the ultra-violent, masculine club scene (and are instead relegated to being porn stars, escorts, or old ladies—all very “private” roles), Tara’s plots shock Jax. Gemma brutally killing Tara is out of the realm of possibility for feminine force.

Freud added in the aforementioned lecture:

“There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. Suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favors the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been divested inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine.”

Gemma almost got away with murder because the expectation of women is that they are nonviolent and are not aggressive. Specifically, the brutal way she killed Tara was, according to law enforcement and Jax, in keeping with gang violence because it was so horrifying and malicious. When Gemma and Juice convince Jax that it was one of Lin’s men who killed Tara, Jax kills him in the same way Tara was killed, thinking he was enacting just revenge. He was, instead, simply doing as his mother taught him.

Showrunner Kurt Sutter said, “This is a story about the queen and the prince.” It seemed as if Jax had been trying to reconcile with his father and father figure all of these years; instead, we realize he needs to reconcile with his mother. When he finally realizes this, it’s too late—Gemma has killed Tara, Juice killed Eli to protect her, and they lied and set off a series of massacres and gang violence. Everyone immediately believed Lin’s crew was responsible for Tara’s death, because it looked like brutal gang violence—certainly not something a woman could do. There was no Mayhem vote for Gemma, because she isn’t at the table. However, even in her final moments, Gemma gives Jax permission to kill her, because she knows it must be done. She’s mothering—and controlling—until the very end.

As Hannah Arendt points out in On Violence, “Violence can always destroy power. Out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.” As soon as Gemma kills Tara, her power starts rapidly declining. A conglomeration of Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, Gemma vacillates between justifying her actions and apologizing for them (but mostly justifying). As soon as she sets the stage for Jax to enact revenge upon the Chinese, his rage and misplaced revenge—without the understanding or agreement of the club—makes him less and less powerful. In the last episode, as he ties up all of his loose ends (see: killing everyone), he is losing power. By the end, he gives up himself, and his power—just like his father did—and commits suicide. Violence robs Gemma and Jax both of their power, their dignity, and their lives.

So who—and what—wins in this modern Shakespearean tale? Certainly not those who rely on a sense of vengeful justice and violence to ride through this life. In a patriarchal framework of understanding, these actions are seen as desirable and just. Instead, we must work toward a feminist ethic of care. Feminist psychologist and philosopher Carol Gilligan defines a feminist ethic of care as

“an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.”

Gilligan’s research has shown that traditionally “feminine” approaches to care are about more than the individual—connectedness and care override a sense of individualism and justice. In Sons of Anarchy, the characters who most exemplify this care ethic are Nero and Wendy, who, at the end, are riding together to parent their children—biological and non—far away from Charming. They are friends, not lovers, and their goals are not for themselves, but for the safety of one another and their sons—sons who they desperately want to keep away from the individualistic, vengeful anarchy they were coming to know. Nero and Wendy are coincidentally both recovering addicts. In their recovery—from the literal and figurative drugs of their past—they care more deeply about one another and those around them than they care about their individual desires.

Wendy’s eventual ethic of care

Tara desired this kind of care for her sons, but couldn’t attain it in her lifetime because of the pull of Gemma and Jax’s patriarchal anarchy. After Gemma’s death, Jax is freed to fulfill Tara’s wishes, and legally makes Wendy the boys’ mother. As in so many Shakespearean dramas, women must die so that men will learn. However, what remains constant throughout Sons of Anarchy is that when the masculine ideals dissolve, and individuals cry, love, and care (exemplified in Tig and Venus’s powerful love scene in “Faith and Despondency”), intimacy and growth are possible.

Wendy and Nero escape with their sons, embodying the feminist ethic of care

As Nero and Wendy leave Charming, it’s clear that this, then, is the preferred way to ride—not “all alone,” as Jax does—but all together. Gemma stands by her way of mothering until the end. She’s distrustful and dismissive of teachers and school (whereas Wendy is passionate about Abel attending school), and she covertly gives Abel his grandfather’s SON ring, which he wears at the end of the finale. Jax, however, sees the dire need for care, not anarchy. “It’s not too late for my boys,” he says. “They will never know this life of chaos.” Ultimately, Jax is a tragic hero because he realizes that care, not justice, will heal and raise his children.

The feminism of Sons of Anarchy has been not only its complex, three-dimensional female characters and Gemma’s role as the rare female antihero, but also its tragic depiction of the end game of violent, individualistic patriarchy. Wrapped up in the tragedy of masculine justice and violent revenge, Sons of Anarchy lifts up of the feminist ethic of care.

Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri, where she teaches composition, journalism, and literature. She wrote “Mothers of Anarchy: Power, Control, and Care in the Feminine Sphere,” for Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy, and recapped the final season of Sons of Anarchy at Vulture. She is an editor and staff writer at Bitch Flicks, where she has written about the feminism of Sons of Anarchy.

Kalinda Sharma Is My Favorite Queer Uncanny Star

Though based in downtown Chicago, there is a paucity of people of color in the show, and those who do make appearances seem to be present for only short amounts of time, save for one: Kalinda Sharma. She is an independent private investigator for the firm Lockhart and Gardner, and is a supporting character in the series’ narrative. Played by actress Archie Panjabi, the role of Kalinda Sharma is one that is groundbreaking in terms of thinking about queer South Asian bodies onscreen in the American imaginary.

This guest post by Rosie Kar appears as part of our theme week on Asian Womanhood in Pop Culture.

In fall 2009, CBS premiered its Sunday evening courtroom drama, The Good Wife. Currently on its fourth season, the show and its cast has garnered numerous awards, including Golden Globes, Emmys, Peabody Awards, Screen Actors Guild awards, and Television Critics Association awards, among others. The premise of the show came about after producer Michelle King took note of the number of American politicians embroiled in very public sex scandals, and their wives standing beside them. Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, and Rod Blagojevich, among countless others, were engaged in fraudulent activity while in office, often having extramarital affairs with stoic wives beside them in public appearances.

In The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick, played by Julianna Margulies, is an associate attorney at Lockhart and Gardner, returning to a corporate environment after fifteen years of staying at home and raising two children. Her husband is Peter Florrick, disgraced State’s Attorney, who was put in prison on charges of political corruption, as well as engaging in extramarital sexual affairs with sex workers. The narrative of the series is centered on Alicia, and the ways in which she navigates being in the storm’s eye of scandal, working as the sole breadwinner for a time to support herself and her two children with Peter, and rising up the career ranks at the firm.

Driven by compelling story arcs and strong performances by ensemble cast members, The Good Wife has been hailed as one of the best dramas on television. Though based in downtown Chicago, there is a paucity of people of color in the show, and those who do make appearances seem to be present for only short amounts of time, save for one: Kalinda Sharma. She is an independent private investigator for the firm Lockhart and Gardner, and is a supporting character in the series’ narrative. Played by actress Archie Panjabi, the role of Kalinda Sharma is one that is groundbreaking in terms of thinking about queer South Asian bodies onscreen in the American imaginary. Television shows us what is happening and recodes what is in the popular, transmitting it into the home for consumption. Kalinda Sharma performs the behavior of civilized productivity, but her styling as a queer figure seeks to trouble heteronormative, heteropatriarchal notions of stability. Kalinda does not conform to what Jasbir Puar terms the assemblage of the “monster-terrorist-fag”[1]; but rather, she is a different kind of triangulation: A South Asian American, queer, female. Kalinda is what Eve Oishi determines as a “Bad Asian. Bad as in “badass.” Bad as in anyone…who talks candidly about sex and desire. Bad Asians are inherently threatening to hegemonic systems.”[2]

She is a secondary character, and her narratives take a backseat to larger arcs, but I am proposing that Kalinda embodies a queer uncanniness. This raises uncomfortable and necessary questions and discussions around gender and sexuality within the South Asian American community. Kalinda Sharma is the first and only representation of an openly queer South Asian woman on television in the American public at this time. What are the costs of her representation? What does she do to trouble the American psyche? How does she puncture notions of civilized productivity while simultaneously reinforcing them? How is her power as an American citizen questioned and informed? Kalinda might be an example of what Gayatri Gopinath deems “queer articulations of diaspora as they emerge in the home.” [3] Her darkness signifies Otherness, uncertainty, immigration, and uncertainty, but with it, carries a powerful depth. A standout figure in the series, she is likeable, sarcastic, and beautiful, but she troubles the American Dream, as a powerful, combative, intelligent queer woman of color. Perhaps, most curious of all, she is useful as a commodity to the institutional corporate structure by which she is employed. In spite of her use value, she commands respect, but questions around her sexuality and secretive past are central forces of her narrative arc. She is a dark threat to the safety and security of those around her; as a private investigator, her job is uncovering secrets. Her body, labor, and performances become ways to critique and undercut the various discourses of modesty, sexual morality, and purity that are culturally fixed onto her by hegemonic South Asian diasporic and nationalist ideologies. Kalinda, as an uncanny figure, is inextricably bound up with creative, and generative uncertainties about her sexual identity. She inhabits the role of the detective for hire, a liminal figure that can cross boundaries without question, and the audience is afforded the pleasures of South Asian femininity and beauty being questioned onscreen, with her queerness as fodder for titillation.

Nicholas Royle points to the significance of the relationship between that which is queer and the uncanny, arguing that “the emergence of ‘queer’ as a cultural, philosophical and political phenomenon, at the end of the twentieth century, figures as a formidable example of the contemporary ‘place’ and significance of the uncanny. The uncanny is queer. And the queer is uncanny.”[4]

Kalinda might inhabit the old specter of the tired dragon lady trope, deemed an uncanny sidekick to protagonist and scorned wife, Alicia Florrick. She is known for her knee high vinyl stiletto boots, sharp wit, quick tongue, questionable ethics, and sexual ambiguity. While the audience is not given any specific information about Kalinda’s past, it is treated to snippets of information, and queries about her past have elicited enough interest via social media and blogospheres to warrant her own hashtag on twitter: #KalindasPast. Panjabi’s performances have earned her rave reviews, a prominent place in the series opening credits as part of the main cast, countless nominations and an Emmy Award in 2010, for her role as an “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.”

But however productive it may seem to have Kalinda Sharma as a major player in a primetime network drama, there are drawbacks. She is evacuated from her culture, with little to no mention of her identity in any way, and she appears to exist in a racial vacuum In the first season, her ethnic identity is confirmed by a brothel owning madam as “East Indian,” who haughtily inquires about Sharma’s “availability” to work as a sex worker, as the exotic Other was in high demand by the madam’s clientele. In the episode “Mock,” Alicia Florrick must represent one Simran Verma (played by seasoned actress Sarita Chaudhury), a South Asian woman living in the U.S. for 27 years, who may be deported after paying a corrupt lawyer $8,000 to secure a green card that never came through. Requesting Kalinda’s help on the case, Alicia says to Kalinda that she thought she would be more sympathetic to Verma’s situation. Kalinda asks “why? My parents came here legally.” It is revealed that she does not speak Hindi. She states at the end of season two: “I have no friends… and I never have to confide in anybody.” (Season 2, Episode 22: “Getting Off.”)

Friendless Kalinda may serve as a dark double, an uncanny foil to Alicia Florrick, as the troubling queer brown woman. Alicia Florrick is the Georgetown educated, beautiful good white wife, the televisual embodiment of Freud’s “heimlich.” Freud argues that when concerned with works of art, “aesthetics…in general, prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive, and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature, with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, rather than with the opposite feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion.”[5] In Freud’s interrogation of the word, the “heimlich” is etymologically rooted in “heim,” or home, but heimlich has a double meaning. The first meaning is related to that which is intimate, familiar, domestic, and comfortable. The second meaning is related to that which is private, secluded, hidden, and elusive. The perspectives are such that while “heimlich” is evocative of a certain privileged perspective, from inside the space of comfort, it is also alluding to the impenetrability of that which is hidden, those places of privacy, security, and secrecy. That which is unheimlich collides with the second meaning of heimlich. Unheimlich then, is descriptive of that which sinister, eerie, strange, and oddly familiar, shoring up images of discomfort. Freud states that the discomfort in the sensing of uncanniness is because what was once familiar has somehow become strange, not because it is new or unfamiliar. He cites Schelling, arguing “unheimlich is that what ought to have remained hidden, but has nonetheless come to light.”[6]

Seemingly “light,” Alicia is inherently likable, a protagonist that is endearing to the audience, who sympathizes with her plight. A scorned, but privileged woman, she struggles to maintain strong and meaningful connections with her children, raising them in the best manner she knows how. She is also forced to play the role of the good wife, performing forgiveness of her husband’s faults, so that he may be re-elected to public office. Forty-something years old, dark haired, pale skinned, classically beautiful, and slender, she is always donned in professional office attire, in shades of black, blue, red, and purple. Her sleeves are long, her collars are tightly buttoned, her skirts are knee length and longer, hiding her body. Alicia’s aesthetics are such that she fits in with hegemonic images of heteronormative, corporate America. With few friends, she is the breadwinner of the Florrick household, slowly inching up her firm’s echelon. Publicly, she has not had any romantic liaisons with anyone than her husband, is mindful of her conduct when appearing in court, as well as beside her husband. We see glimpses of the darknesses that plague Alicia, who always seems to carefully negotiate and navigate her way through life. Alicia is friendly, hospitable, well-liked at work, often seen in domestic arenas, and serves as a peacekeeper, and is a source of comfort. She is also plagued by silent suffering.

We might say that Alicia Florrick, to the American public, embodies both definitions of Freud’s conceptualization of the heimlich. On the one hand, she is “homey,” comforting, likeable, and familiar. On the other hand, she is very much a private person, withholding information. In the dialectical sense of that which is heimlich, Alicia, a middle class, bourgeois subject, can also be understood to be holding information back from herself, her husband, her children, and her public. The only ones privy to her private discomforts are the audience members.

Kalinda Sharma, however, is evocative of the uncanny, she is that “class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”[7] She may be painted as a djinn, native informant, sexual and racial Other, dark double, collapsed into the body of a queer South Asian American woman. Like Alicia, Kalinda is always dressed in muted but expensive clothing in jewel tones, dark shades of red, blue, purple, green, and black. She wears micromini skirts, leather jackets in every color, and her signature accessories are thigh high black patent leather stiletto boots, and either a bat or a gun, evoking fantasies of a phallus wielding dominatrix.

The camera loves her, drinking in her golden brown skin, black hair, big dark eyes, rimmed in kohl, pouty mouth lipsticked in a vampy shade of maroon. She is a beautiful woman, and the audience is treated to low lit beauty shots when she is onscreen, with her face taking up the entire frame. We often see her in dark places, like underground parking garages, closed offices, and at twilight. Kalinda takes no nonsense from anyone, utilizing her sharp tongue, and will do whatever it takes to get the information she needs for her bosses, no matter the means. Unlike the dark female figures present in narratives by South Asian American authors,[8] Kalinda is already assimilated, as a second generation American. But her aesthetics and behavior are different from the majority.

There is a clear emphasis on how color provokes a sense of her foreignness. She is the opposite of Alicia Florrick, and as such, becomes her best friend, her confidant, and perhaps eventual lover. Kalinda is prone to sarcasm, never fearful of expressing her disdain and reticence for situations, deflecting inquiries about her personal life back onto the offending party. Unlike Alicia Florrick, an outwardly likable character, Kalinda harbors secrets, and is deeply “heartless, insensitive, with self-preservation as [her] number one concern.”[9] as described by a former scorned female lover. While Alicia Florrick is either in her home, at her office, with her children, or alone in her bedroom, Kalinda is, terrifyingly, everywhere as well as nowhere. Her behavior thwarts belonging; she is the “unknown, unfamiliar,… the “unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” As the highly paid private investigator for Lockhart Gardner, Kalinda’s labor as the unheimlich foil to the protagonist is made manifest in her work. She gets ahold of information that is supposed to be kept secret. Her private life, too, is kept closely guarded, but is inadvertently revealed, week by week, and the secrets that are exposed are unsavory.

Kalinda conjures up the ultimate fantasy of civilized productivity. She is everywhere, has access to information through unknown means, gets coded and classified documents for cases through medical examiners, and has connections to Chicago’s police department. She is often put on surveillance detail, able to observe and record the activities of nefarious characters. Like every good, model South Asian American, she is technologically savvy, performing the role of the Asian geek, hacker, encrypter, decrypter, photographer, and computer programmer. She is something of a superhero, climbing walls, breaking into apartments, obtaining information legally and illegally. She defies proprietary codes of proper female behavior, openly using her sexuality to achieve her goals. She embodies the seductive dragon lady, capable of emasculation, with her gun or baseball bat as a phallus. She may be a secondary character, but Kalinda Sharma has the uncanny ability to tantalize almost everyone in her midst.

Her bosses, colleagues, and informants want to sleep with her, both men and women. Kalinda becomes good friends with Alicia, but the fact that she slept with Alicia’s husband is the penultimate secret that would destroy their relationship, and Kalinda, unsuccessfully, does everything in her power to keep that information private. It is ultimately revealed that she does not differentiate between men and women, choosing instead to be “flexible.” In coded terms, then, Kalinda as the uncanny marks the return of the repressed, that information and behavior that Alicia Florrick cannot engage in.

Kalinda’s “darkness” also functions in terms of specific cultural labor, alluding to discourses around ethnicity and race, which are inextricably intertwined with discussions around citizenship and Americanness. Literary and visual metaphors around darkness are laced with feelings of discomfort around the unknown, impure, threatening, mysterious, and dangerous. Manicheanism deploys binaries sutured with darkness and light, and this tradition of dichotomous thinking still continues. Under the British Raj, a specific kind of temporal aesthetic racialization occurred, and darkness was something to be avoided. Historical prejudices and violences against those having dark skin in South Asia were not sanitized; British and South Asians alike linked darkness with desirability, class, caste, religious ideology, and intersectional privileges. The saying goes, “White is right”; those wanting to capitalize on a supposedly superior class status, as part of the elite, disavowed interactions with subaltern indigenous people.

The discourses around skin color has had lasting legacies, still experienced today, in conversations around beauty, behavior, arranged matrimonial arrangements (where young women are implored to stay out of the sun). There is capital generated by lightening creams like “Fair and Lovely,” or “Fair and Handsome” for the face and most recently, the vaginas, of brown women.[10] Advertisements for marriage in the back pages of South Asian newspapers, as well as websites like Shaadi.com and BharatMatrimony.com have sections where skin shade preferences can be selected. There is a greater desirability linked to light brown skin, versus darker brown skin. While Kalinda’s skin color is never mentioned outright, her body is marked in the ways that she is framed in the camera, and juxtaposed against Alicia’s whiteness is a stark contrast.

Kalinda might be the queer stain of darkness on sanctified white womanhood. When seen together, they are often seated at a bar, drinking shots of tequila, and having quiet, deeply moving discussions. In “Nine Hours” (Season 2, Episode 9), the firm must work quickly to get a last minute appeal for a death row inmate, and Kalinda works from Alicia’s home. The two are seated on Alicia’s bed, drinking beers. In every scene with Kalinda socializing, alcohol is in her hands. Kalinda has a secretive past, known as Leela Tahiri to some, and does not speak of her childhood. Her upbringing in a middle class neighborhood with doctor émigré parents is a fabrication. We do not know who she is, but what we do know is that she is secretive, with dark skin, dark clothes, a dark personality, and points toward a darkening of the American Dream.

While her labor is useful to her place of employment, secrecy shrouds the specifics of Kalinda’s quotidian life. We are given glimpses into this, but only under certain conditions. Conversations around Kalinda’s sexuality and lifestyle are the hooks that drive her narrative arc. The most onscreen time given to Kalinda is when these discussions are taking place. In season two, episode six, entitled “Poisoned Pill,” Blake Calamar, a fellow investigator, Kalinda’s rival, and potential male love interest, is blatant about looking into Kalinda’s past, and asks about her sexual orientation:

Blake: They just rated Chicago law firms on their diversity and hiring gays and lesbians and transgenders, whatever. Anyway, Lockhart, Gardner & Bond did not do well. Even though I know, for a fact, that we have gay associates who just aren’t acknowledging that they’re gay. Now, in this day and age, why would someone not be upfront about their sexual orientation?

Kalinda: Are you coming out?

Blake: It’s better not to keep secrets…’cause then, people don’t go looking.

In season two, episode 14, “Net Worth,” we see Kalinda with federal investigator, Lana Delaney, who has tried to seduce her sexually, as well as professionally, wanting her to come work for the FBI. In a low lit scene, with both women taking up equal parts of the camera frame, and a discussion about Kalinda’s sexual proclivities:

Lana: Why do you like men?

Kalinda: Why do I like men?

Lana: Yes, sex with men. Why do you like it?

Kalinda: I don’t distinguish.

Lana: You don’t have a preference?

Kalinda: Uh…

Lana: You were saying?

Kalinda: I was saying Italian, Mexican, Thai — why does one choose one food over the other?

Lana: Because sex is not food.

Kalinda: Because of love.

Lana: Or intimacy. Don’t you want intimacy?

Kalinda: No. [glares angrily at Lana.]

Lana: [Phone rings] I have to get that.

Kalinda: Then you’re going to need your foot back.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Archie Panjabi argues that Kalinda is “never looked at as somebody who’s bisexual or ethnic,”[11] but this does not resonate with the popularity the character has garnered on the show. Kalinda’s skin color and sexual orientation are precisely two markers of her appeal; she is indeed multifaceted, but her lack of transparency and guarded secrecy about her life and sexual preferences are the draw of her narrative arcs. She is troubling to the norm, both men and women desire to get to know her, and bed her.

At the end of season three, Kalinda’s queerness is confirmed. She sits with Alicia at a bar, and Alicia asks her if she is gay. Kalinda replies, “I’m not gay. I’m…flexible.” She has been indicted by a grand jury for illegal activities, and is under heavy surveillance by the FBI, CIA, and IRS, for tax evasion. Though she is an independent, brave woman, she is under the thumb of many regulatory agencies. Her employers, both past and current, think that too many sources leak classified information to her, and freely comment upon her ethics, and question the ways in which she gets her jobs done. She may testify against her employers, turn evidence in, or get indicted and become part of the prison industrial complex. If she testifies, and does rat out sources, she may be killed by the city’s top meth dealer. The feeling conveyed by Kalinda is one of uncertainty, discomfort, and unchecked desire. Actively resisting old narratives of “good South Asianness,” Kalinda’s story continues beyond conventional conclusions, and this is productive, because it suggests a different outcome for her life, outside the realm of the “good Asian woman.” She must face dangers that other citizens may not need to process; those who do not look like the official face of a queer national corpus are subjected to harsher modes of policing. She is not an entirely negative portrayal of Indian women, but some might argue that parts of her construction might shore up colonial ideologies. She may, in fact, be the product of a fantasy-riddled colonial hangover.

[1] Puar, Jasbir and Rai, Amit. “Monster-Terrorist-Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text, 72 (Volume 20, Number 3), pp. 117-148. Duke University Press, Fall 2002

[2] Oishi, Eve. “Bad Asians: New Film and Video by Queer Asian American Artists,” p. 221

[3] Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 23.

[4] Royle, Nicholas. “Supplement: The Sandman.” The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003. p. 42

[5] Freud, “The Uncanny,” Studies in Parapsychology, p. 20

[6] Ibid, 28.

[7] Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” in Studies in Parapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963. p. 20

[8] Present most notably in works by Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani.

[9] As described by Kalinda’s former girlfriend, Donna, in Season Two, Episode 6, “Poisoned Pill.”

[10] http://jezebel.com/5900928/your-vagina-isnt-just-too-big-too-floppy-and-too-hairyits-also-too-brown

[11] Lacob, Jace. “The Good Wife: Archie Panjabi Talks About Playing Kalinda.” The Daily Beast. 14 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Feb. 2011

Dr. Rosie Kar is a writer, poet, teacher, photographer, and social justice advocate. She teaches courses on popular culture and gender and sexuality, in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University, Long Beach, and in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

‘Sons of Anarchy’: Female Violence, Feminist Care

Mothers of Anarchy

This post by Leigh Kolb originally appeared at And Philosophy and is cross-posted with permission.

Gemma’s violence

Tara cannot escape Gemma

In “Anarchism: The Feminist Connection,” Peggy Kornegger points out that

“Anarchism has been maligned and misinterpreted for so long that maybe the most important thing to begin with is an explanation of what it is and isn’t. Probably the most prevalent stereotype of the anarchist is a malevolent-looking man hiding a lighted bomb beneath a black cape, ready to destroy or assassinate everything and everybody in his path. This image engenders fear and revulsion in most people, regardless of their politics; consequently, anarchism is dismissed as ugly, violent, and extreme. Another misconception is the anarchist as impractical idealist, dealing in useless, Utopian abstractions and out of touch with concrete reality. The result: anarchism is once again dismissed, this time as an ‘impossible dream.’”

“1. Women have been kept down because they are isolated from each other and are paired off with men in relationships of dominance and submission. 2. Men will not liberate women; women must liberate themselves. This cannot happen if each woman tries to liberate herself alone. Thus, women must work together on a model of mutual aid. 3. ‘Sisterhood is powerful,’ but women cannot be sisters if they recapitulate masculine patterns of dominance and submission.”

In Sigmund Freud’s lecture, “Femininity,” he says,

“A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relationship to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex.”

Wendy and Tara collaborate

Freud added in the aforementioned lecture:

“There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. Suppression of women’s aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favors the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been divested inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine.”

“an ethic of resistance to the injustices inherent in patriarchy (the association of care and caring with women rather than with humans, the feminization of care work, the rendering of care as subsidiary to justice—a matter of special obligations or interpersonal relationships). A feminist ethic of care guides the historic struggle to free democracy from patriarchy; it is the ethic of a democratic society, it transcends the gender binaries and hierarchies that structure patriarchal institutions and cultures. An ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society.”

Wendy’s eventual ethic of care

Wendy and Nero escape with their sons, embodying the feminist ethic of care

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The Allure of the Female Ghost in ‘Ringu’

Horror. It’s a genre that ignites different reactions: excitement, disgust, fear or indifference. Who would have thought that an inanimate object – and the female ghost that comes with it (free of charge) – could be so frightening? The enigma of the monstrous female can be found throughout history in literature, movies, and contemporary pop-culture. An array of female monsters are waddling around in our hazy pop-culture memories. Think of the witch, vampire, psychopath, and the scorned ghost. The term “ghost girl” has now even levitated itself to our cultural lexicon.

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

The Japanese horror genre gained popularity since the fifties, thanks to a group of visionary directors such as Masaki Kobayashi (Kaidan), Nobuo Nakagawa (Ghost Story of Yotsuya) and Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba). These directors usually brought adaptations of traditional Japanese stories, but they were not afraid to experiment with other genres or even psychedelic influences. The crux is that the appeal of the Japanese horror movie lies in the fact that the genre constantly renews itself, while ensuring to remain faithful to its roots.

In 1998, a new creative and commercial momentum took place thanks to Ringu (Ring), an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Koji Suzuki. The story has some elements from the 18^th-century Japanese ghost story Bancho Sarayashiki. Director Hideo Nakata managed to visualize a clever but vulnerable heroine, and themes were subtle interwoven by using the power of the media to portray the heroine’s fears. Ringu, an unusually oppressive movie, became a blockbuster, followed by the inevitable sequels, American remake, a television series, and a series of comic books.

Ringu follows the storyline of the TV journalist Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) who investigates a bizarre rumor: her niece Tomoko and three of her friends apparently died after seeing a videotape. Reiko hears stories that the videotape kills the people after they have watched it, and they all die in the exact the same way. Reiko investigates the story, finds the videotape, and ends up watching it herself. Soon after, Reiko receives a phone call with the news that she has only one week to live. What follows is a race against the clock, in which Reiko tries to figure out the origin of the videotape. Her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) tries to help her break the curse and find the true story behind the cursed videotape and the connection with a psychic who died 30 years ago and her child Sadako.

Reiko has to make a though choice. To watch or not to watch.

Why are we so enthralled with female monsters? In The Monstrous Feminine, cultural critic Barbara Creed refers to Freud’s controversial theory of castration anxiety – children notice the difference between boys and girls aka penis or vagina, boys are of the opinion that something is taken away from girls, and this makes them worried – in dreams, myths, and in movies this fear translates to the symbolic loss of a phallic symbol. It can be a sword, a motorcycle, or car. When you flip the coin, the vagina is portrayed in a less favorable way. All too often the vagina is depicted as a dangerous – monstrous – hole to be avoided at all costs. This is described as the “vagina dentata,” the symbolic representation of a vagina with teeth, making the Freudian castration anxiety tangible within the story. In popular culture, the vagina dentata can for example be seen as the eye of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings or the desert monster Sarlacc in the Star Wars trilogy.

Creed also connects the creation of female monsters with abjection. She refers to Julia Kristeva who defines abjection as that which crosses borders, positions, rules and identity, system and all that disturbs the peace. In other words, anything beyond the strict limits of the phallic order and that aims to disturb the order. The abject not only crosses borders but draws the existence of limits itself into question, and thus the existence of the phallic order. This abjection is strongly related to the patriarchal vision of femininity. Creed describes horror movies where the monster is portrayed as abject as an “attempt to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the mother and all that her universe signifies.”

For this reason, there are many movies that don’t have a male but a female monster. Abjection includes everything that we consider to be dirty. It’s what we learn as a child that is seen as bad and what we need to suppress. In particular, bodily secretions such as blood, urine, mucus, and pus. The horror genre plays with this fear of the abject and wants to break taboos. In Ringu, Sadako, the female ghost is portrayed as a lurchy and dirty, rotting dead girl with long, dark hair that obscures much of her face, dressed in white, and her fingernails are broken and bloody. Yuck.

We find Freud’s idea of castration anxiety also within the psychoanalytic film theory in terms of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey argues that cinema ideally is meant for the male audience: “The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. ” The problem lies in the fact that the woman is just a lust object on the screen, but that the male viewer meanwhile still has that (irrational) fear of the woman.

In Japanese horror movies, they flip the script, and more often than not the focus is only on the eyes. This is also the case in Ringu. For a long time we do not even see the eyes of Sadako, and the tension builds up until the moment when we get to see them. In general, people blink around 15 times per minute. Ghosts don’t blink. They seemingly stare with an endless gaze ahead. But there’s another ambiguity. Sadako’s eyes show no sign of life; they are merely hollow, black orbs. At the same time they seem to register all the movement in her environment, and her looks are purposeful and deadly. It’s almost like the gaze of Medusa. In that sense, Sadako’s Medusa’s gaze is projected from the male gaze. The woman stares back at the man. In Ringu, it’s the woman who actually kills with her looks. Ryuji symbolizes the male voyeur and gets punished. The fear of the man is a reality here.

Throughout the movie, director Nakata leaves room for your own imagination and strengthens the feeling of uneasiness that the story evokes. To be quite honest, on paper, the plot for the story line is at first sight not scary at all. The strength of Ringu lies in its absence and not particularly the gore that is visible on the screen. The hard, screeching and metallic, non-diegetic sounds, ups the creepiness of the movie. The editing, camera angles and lighting, lift the mediocre plot to the next level. The videotape – a seemingly innocent inanimate object (!) – of Sadako stands symbol for the mass media and for the pernicious influence they have on society. After all, only the people who watch the videotape die.

Ringu keeps your attention because – let’s be real here – the female ghost is a fascinating entity. All too often the source of their pain has nothing to do with the supernatural, but it’s a painful residue of their human lives. Sadako wanted vengeance, but her vengeance was randomly destructive. This makes her all the more powerful. You can see this in Kabuki and Noh theater also known as Oiwa, in which the spirit of a woman returns to her husband, who poisoned her. Unlike the average monsters in other horror movies, ghosts can think, feel, and they have a certain consciousness. Sadako holds the power to haunt us in our dreams. Yikes.

Ringu gave our pop-culture some of the most indelible images. The movie came out in 1998, and since then a variety of female ghosts have graced our screens. It would be interesting to see how this genre can renew itself over and over again. Let’s see what the future of horror brings.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JruLV_Wjkp4″]

Giselle Defares loves television shows like Äkte Människor and The Fades; movies like The Fall, The Invader, High Fidelity. See her tumblr here.