Violent Women – Bitch Flicks

Violent Women: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the Teeth by Belle Artiquez

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

Salt: A Refreshing Genderless Lens by Cameron Airen

Shieldmaidens: The Power and Pleasure of Women’s Violence on Vikings by Lisa Bolekaja

In Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies, Neal King and Martha McCaughey assert that “cultural standards still equate womanhood with kindness and nonviolence, manhood with strength and aggression.” Under the Victorian cult of true womanhood, womanly virtue was supposed to encompass piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Thank goodness writer/producer Michael Hirst ignored those virtues by creating two dynamic women warriors with his historical drama Vikings.

Emotional Violence, Kink, and The Duke of Burgundy by Rushaa Louise Hamid

In much of feminist literature from the past, kink is seen an act driven by patriarchy, with submissive women reproducing their oppressions in the bedroom and capitulating to gendered norms of women as silent and subservient. Even nowadays as the tide gradually changes, there is still a large amount of ire reserved for those who practice BDSM.

Violence and Morality in The 100 by Esther Nassaris

This act of mercy killing is the first of many moments when Clarke is forced to be violent for the good of others. It not only prompts an important change within herself – she loses her idealistic ways – but it prompts a change in the group dynamics. After this moment, Clarke begins to pull away from the co-leadership she and Bellamy had operated in and moves toward becoming the sole leader of the delinquents.

The Rising “Tough” Women in AMC’s The Walking Dead Season Five by Brooke Bennett

This season seems to present a large change in representational issues by including complex characters of color that we actually know something about and care for, presenting the couple of Aaron and Eric from the Alexandria community and self-pronounced lesbian Tara, and doing away with the innate equation of vagina equals do the laundry while the men go kill all the zombies.

Nine Pretty Great Lesbian Vampire Movies by Sara Century

Almost unfailingly exploitative in its portrayal of queer women, this specific sub-genre of film stands alone in a few ways, not the least of which being that the vampires, while murderous and ultimately doomed, are powerful, lonely women, often living their lives outside of society’s rules.

The Real Mother Russia: Modernising Murder and Betrayal in The Americans by Dan Jordan

The ideological battle between the FBI and KGB is thus a gendered one, as the national characters of Uncle Sam and Mother Russia are pitted against each other on a more even world stage.

Monster: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women by Danika Kimball

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Stoker–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms by Julie Mills

Her uncle’s imposing presence has awakened in her at the same time a lust for bloodshed and an intense sexual desire, and she promptly begins to experiment and seek out means with which to satisfy both.

Sons of Anarchy: Female Violence, Feminist Care by Leigh Kolb

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.

What’s in a Name: Anxiety About Violent Women in Monster, Teeth, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Colleen Clemens

The first college course I ever developed focuses on women and violence. Stemming from my interest in women who enact violence on and off the page, I wanted to ask students to think about our perceptions of women as “naturally” peaceful.

Hard Candy: The Razor Blade Hidden in an Apple-Cheeked Confection by Emma Kat Richardson

Hogtying and drugging Jeff is only the tip of Hayley’s sadistic iceberg: over the course of the next several hours, she subjects him to a series of tortures more at home in Guantanamo Bay than a sleepy suburban neighborhood, including spraying his screaming mouth with chemicals, temporarily suffocating him with cellophane, and attacking him with a taser in the shower.

High Tension: Rethinking Female Sexuality and Subjectivity Through Violence by Laura Minor

Rather than pander to the male gaze, Aja decides to reject these scopophilic pleasures in favour of championing female subjectivity, but he also chooses to reject heteronormativity by having the lesbian desires of Marie drive the plot of the film. Interestingly, it is these desires and subjective experiences that both initiate the use of violence and intensify the representation of violence throughout.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s Medea by Brigit McCone

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in Misery by Tessa Racked

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Girlhood: Observed But Not Seen by Ren Jender

Girlhood starts on a peak note: a slow-motion scene of what looks like Black men playing American tackle football on a field at night, wearing helmets, shoulder pads and mouth guards, so we don’t realize–until we notice the players’ breasts under their uniforms–that they are all girls.

Patty Jenkins’ Monster: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity by Katherine Parker-Hay

In this narrative we see masculinity float free from any ties to the male body, femininity float free from any easy connection to frailness – we see them meet in the one body of this working class woman to excruciating effect.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women by Melissa-Kelly Franklin

The acts of violence by the female protagonists are terrifying, swift, and socially subversive. They target misogynistic representatives of the patriarchal society that oppresses and silences women, taking them out one by one.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked by Kate Blair

To a certain extent, the reveal of woman as killer in both films comes across as a “gotcha” moment. After an hour or so of being scared out of your wits, it’s both surprising and puzzling to see a woman emerge as the killer. In the real world, most documented violent crimes are committed by men, but in a film, where anything can happen, there’s no reason to make this assumption.

“Did I Step on Your Moment?” The Seductive and Psychological Violence of Female Superheroes by Mary Iannone

This style of fighting codes our female superheroes as half menacing and half attractive – we are meant to be afraid of them, but also enticed by them. Their violence is inextricably linked to their sexuality.

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film by Laura Power

As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

“She Called Them Anti-Seed”: How the Women of Mad Max: Fury Road Divorce Violence from Strength by Cate Young

In Mad Max: Fury Road the “strong female characters” are notable specifically for their aversion to violence. The film portrays its women as emotionally strong people who engage in violence only in self-defense, and only against the system that oppresses them.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in Violet & Daisy by Caroline Madden

The character of Daisy personifies the film’s juxtaposition of violence and girlhood. Daisy loves cute animals and doesn’t understand Violet’s dirty jokes. The twist is even that she has not really killed anyone, thus remaining innocent of all crimes. The opening scene displays the most daring oppositional iconography — the young girls dress as nuns, the ultimate image of pure goodness, while having a shoot ‘em up with a gang.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence by Katherine Fusciardi

True, the rape revenge trope has been put at bay, but there is still a gender issue behind the remaining motivation. It focuses around the assumption of maternity being the all-encompassing passion. Until female characters can be violent for reasons that have nothing to do with their womanhood, there still isn’t complete equality in media.

How Spring Breakers Ungenders the Erotic and Transformative Power of Violence by Emma Houxbois

The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in Full Metal Jacket.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Violence Helps Our Heroines Have a Lovely Day by Sophie Hall

Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.

Puberty and the Creation of a Monster: Ginger Snaps by Kelly Piercy

Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out?

When Violence Is Excusable: Regina Mills and the Twisted Morality of Once Upon a Time by Emma Thomas

In the past, Regina’s path to control is lined with dark magic. Dark magic is fueled by her anger, and the two intersect endlessly until it is hard to tell whether Regina is controlling the anger, or the anger is controlling her. What is definitive is that the more her power grows the more violent she becomes. With the only person who offered her a loving future dead, there is no one to rein her in.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s Repulsion by Johanna Mackin

The eye we see in the film’s opening credits belongs to Carol and encapsulates her relationship to the internal and external worlds. To outside observers, Carol’s large, doe-like eyes are a signifier of her feminine allure, but, as is made palpable to the viewer, they also house her intense fear and constitute a deceptive barrier against the malignant traumas that disturb her internal world.

Death of the (Male) Author: Feminist Violence in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar by Sarah Smyth

How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy, and authority.

TV and Classic Literature: Is The 100 like Lord of the Flies? by Rowan Ellis

On the contrary, Octavia moves away from the explicit sexuality of her role in the pilot, and although her initial training is linked to Lincoln, she gravitates toward a warrior’s life to gain the respect of Indra. Although some critics have seen this as a drastic change in her characterisation, looking back at her first scene in the pilot, where she is held back by Bellamy while trying to attack the others for repeating rumours about her, it feels more like a development.

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s High Tension by Rebecca Willoughby

In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

From Ginger Snaps to Jennifer’s Body: The Contamination of Violent Women by Julia Patt

Thematically, Jennifer’s Body mirrors Ginger Snaps in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.

Timorous Killers: The Breach of Shyness in Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’

This guest post by Johanna Mackin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Carol, the demure and unassuming young beautician at the heart of Roman Polanski’s surrealistic thriller Repulsion begins to lose her grip on reality, she externalises a deep fear of men into acts of fatal violence. Some of cinema’s most symbolically layered female characters are seen to present patterns of shy and socially anxious behaviour that belie murderous impulses, but who are these timorous killers, and what archaic chains of fear are made manifest in the violent outbursts they are given to?

Carol (played by Catherine Deneuve), is irretrievable from her shyness. She looks down as she walks, her manner is subdued and often sullen, and she frequently appears lost in a world of her own. Her speaking voice is soft and she speaks little, her movement slowed by the burden of fear, and she passes across things so lightly and interacts with the world so delicately that she can barely be seen to leave a trace upon it. Her fragility and reservedness (which as we will see provide a crucial, if unsustainable, defence against threats to the self), are only breached when outside influences encroach more than the barely tolerable amount she has come to live with, and these cracks in her armoury, which give way to hallucinations of violent sexual abuse, culminate in a double androcide.

Pioneering object-relations psychoanalyst Melanie Klein expands Freudian notions of death instinct, identifying that “anxiety has its origin in the fear of death,” which she sees as an impervious truth for every human. For the infant, the ambiguity of the object world represents a deathly threat to the self that destruction is projected onto, turning it into an external representation of the death instinct, which is introjected as internalised self danger and then projected back out into the external world. Constantly mediating a fear of the outside and a fear from within, external dangers are thus intensified due to internal fear, but the introjection of this harmful danger also intensifies “the perpetual inner-danger situation.”

The threat posed to Carol’s ego by the men she comes into contact with therefore greatly exacerbates her internalised danger, and thus the fear of death, or death of the self, given that selfhood is the only conduit through which we live in the world. Of course, real and imaginary threats can demonstrate a similar impact upon the individual, and in Carol’s case she is presented with significant instances of both, from the direct misogyny of men encountered, to imagined cracks in the walls of her apartment worsening outside of her control.

Terror management theorists developed the idea that “we humans feel fully secure only if we consider ourselves valuable contributors to that world we live in,” the world of meaning we have created to defend against the anxieties of death. A sense of our value within the world (or “self esteem”) is established in our interactions with others, and the extent to which we are able to be successfully incorporated into the dominant worldview. Studies following this position have shown that it is through elevated self esteem that we can most easily evade the fear of death. Carol’s self esteem, already negligible at the start of the film, is systematically shattered throughout the course of its events as she is leered at, coerced into romantic situations against her will, and scolded for her demeanour by a succession of people. A fundamental paradox at Carol’s centre is that her aesthetic presentation makes her appear acceptable to society, while her turbulent sense of self is greatly at odds with one which can be enjoyed as a fear-abating continuation of the dominant ideology.

In an edifying essay about the impeachment of the commercial skin industry on the way we view our own bodies, authors Kenway and Bullen highlight a crucial link between the perfect body image, and the sociological pedagogy of a myth that anything which threatens it possesses an abject quality. Naturally, these prescribed notions of attractiveness impinge greatly upon a whole society. Failure to properly conform can be taboo or prey to a litany of prejudices; compliance, as noted in Carol’s case, can elicit unwanted attention and expectations. This is epitomised in her sister’s lover’s view of her, as both “the beautiful younger sister” and someone who “needs to see a doctor,” when her failure to meet his expectations of polite social interaction threatens the stability of his own tentatively compiled defences against death anxiety.

The events that precipitate Carol’s unravelling stem from her sister’s involvement with a married man and subsequent holiday. Carol is reliant upon the protective forces exerted by her sister’s presence, and when the barrier of their private apartment is punctured by an unwanted male (she throws his belongings away after hearing her sister having sex with him), her abject defences necessarily harden, so that what little self is left may not be stolen from her. When she is left alone in the house, she meditates upon a family photo, which is returned to for clarity of motive at the end of the film. It features Carol as a young girl, lingering defensively in the background and casting a hateful stare at a nameless patriarch on the right. The implication, reinforced when the photo appears again as the final shot of the film, is that Carol was sexually abused as a child, and this is what has prompted her intense mistrust of men and series of harrowing rape hallucinations.

This internally harmful repulsion felt toward men, which was engendered in Carol at such a young age, has been unable to heal owing to constraints of society and the continual reinforcement of negative patriarchal behaviours. Colin exerts his entitlement over her (despite voicing his recognition at one point that “it’s all so sordid”), eventually breaking down the door of her apartment through sexually agitated aggression. Her landlord attempts to repeat the abuse she suffered as a child, repelled only by a fatal outburst. Even less overt threats such as cat-calling in the street and sexualised derision from other men in conversation (“Cinderella,” “Little Miss Muffet”) belie a menacing claim to women’s bodies, which asserts that Carol’s fear is not at all unfounded.

Whilst, as Klein suggests, externalisations of fear are often our most powerful therapeutic defense against it (via artistic expression, for example), Carol’s freedom to communicate is so muted by those around her, who will not weather her extremes of anxiety, that it is impossible for her to manage this fear in a healthy way, and so it spills over (like the filled bathtub into which her first victim is decanted) as an even more abject threat to be internalised once more, intensifying her removal from reality. People project onto her a social conformity that her life experiences render her incapable of meeting. Her trance-like episodes are condemned by customers and colleagues at work; her desperately relied-upon sister curtly dismisses her deep paranoia; she is told to not “look so mis’” by a well-meaning friend. This projected impediment of ill-fitting normalcy onto Carol sends her deeper into herself, manifesting as a timidity which in turn fosters more hostility from the external world which, rather than providing a patient and therapeutic space for Carol to talk into, imposes desired behaviours onto her. Her main pursuer, Colin, purposefully ignores her silence and negative body language as he repeatedly makes unwanted advances upon her.

Speaking on the development of schizoid states and schizophrenia in children, object-relations therapist D W Winnicott offers that failure of good-enough active environmental adaptation, produces a psychotic distortion of the environment-individual set-up. Relationships produce loss of the sense of self, and the latter is only regained by return to isolation. Being isolated, however […involves…] more and more defensive organization in repudiation of environmental impingement

For Carol, who can be seen to present with an obviously schizophrenic symptomatology, the healthy development of understanding illusion in the external world is distorted, or interrupted by childhood abuse. An incorporation of illusion into the life of a healthy child is challenged as they grow up (think of the tooth fairy, for example), but in the case of Carol the distinction between objective and subjective reality was denied a healthy conclusion by forcing a defensive retreat into a secret, “truly incommunicable” inner world, far removed from external reality. Here her use of illusion takes on more psychotic properties, especially when under duress such as that of her sister’s departure.

Compounding Carol’s fear throughout the film is a plethora of memento mori, which bind events to a sense of impending death. The devouring cracks in the wall; the sounds of clocks ticking and bells tolling at moment of heightened trauma; and finally, the rabbit, a symbol for Carol’s own self death (this is alluded to in talk of her being “strung up” and “all shaking like a little frightened animal”). The rabbit rots away throughout the film, eventually thrown out by the landlord who is then killed after he abuses Carol, thus severing her final defence against the unburdenable traumas of the past and from which she is unable to recover.

Winnicott speaks of the individual as then being able to inhabit a “false self that seems satisfactory to the unwary observer” (however unconvincing, Carol’s prosaic job and her hesitant engagements in conversation with Colin support this). This false self defends fiercely against the core self, “although the schizophrenia is latent and will claim attention in the end.” He describes a loosely organised self in defence against paranoid anxieties as “defensive pathological introversion.” Continuously expelling and incorporating the impeachments upon her secret, incommunicado core, Carol sinks further into a world which is entirely abject and encroaches upon the borders of her existence. This catastrophic entropy and its fatal consequences result in Carol’s defences eventually shutting down altogether as she slips into a kind of catatonic state at the end of the film. Her subjectivity is silenced by society, being deemed unacceptable, and so she has no reasonable outlet but to kill. Others must die so that she does not suffer total self death.

Repulsion is just one representation of the explosive anxieties of women in film. Carrie is perhaps the most famous example of a “timorous killer,” but other notable examples of introverted women being pushed to murderous extremes include Sleepaway Camp, Ms 45, Sightseers, Antichrist, and A Question of Silence, to name a few that are well worth exploring.

What these characters also have in common is an ability to explode and subvert the damaging environments that contain them. Sometimes their murderous transgressions from shyness and anxiety provide them with a kind of psychotic catharsis, and sometimes the consequences present a more abysmal loss of self, but what is consistently gratifying is the symbolic employment of such characters to illuminate the negative effect of a dominant cultural ideology on individuals. In a world ridden with stringent and judgmental expectations, the symbol of the timorous killer should be celebrated as a resistance against cultural order.

Johanna Mackin has recently completed an MA in Contemporary Literature in Culture and currently spends her time coding and writing poetry (the boundaries of which are often blurred). You can find some of her poetry on Instagram, or follow her on Twitter @johannamackin

The Killer in/and the Girl: Alexandre Aja’s ‘High Tension’

But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), ‘High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Tensions are high between Alex and Marie, the two college-age women at the center of Alexandre Aja’s 2003 film, High Tension.

Violent women in films are seen mostly in two ways: the crazy villainess, characterized as an uncontrollable and unreasonable bitch who wreaks heaps of havoc on unsuspecting (if not always undeserving) folks in her path, and the strong, take-no-prisoners heroine who populates some action and science-fiction genre films, and who—as in the classic case of the Alien franchise’s leading lady, Ellen Ripley—reclaims the roles of motherhood and femininity, showing that it is completely possible for those qualities to exist in the same person.

High Tension is a confusing film when contextualized in these terms. Marie, with whom the viewer spends the most time, seems heroic and smart. Her friend Alex, on the other hand, is more traditional and mostly submissive: she retreats to the bosom of her family in rural France to study for exams with Marie, adores her younger brother and seems at ease with the unexciting pace of country living. Later, she appears to capitulate completely to the psycho-killer who invades her family’s home, while resourceful Marie searches for misplaced cordless telephones and succeeds in eluding the killer completely. Viewers see Marie as the Ripley-esque heroine as she endeavors throughout this brisk 90-minute film to save her friend from the clutches of a sadistic sexual predator, one who is shown early in the film to enjoy getting “head” from women’s decapitated heads. Nice pun, writers.

At least, that’s what you think until you get to the end. In the final few minutes, viewers learn that Marie is, in fact, the killer, who has butchered Alex’s family and abducted her due to a frighteningly intense girl crush. Alas. Marie’s close-cropped hair, healthy attitude toward masturbation, and ingenious strategies are now corrupted, since it’s clear that the filmmakers intended for her to be the villain. Not just a violent woman, but a woman who so deeply represses her desires that they literally manifest themselves as an ugly, dirty, stocky man in mechanic’s overalls, who is capable of brutally murdering an entire family to eliminate any signifiers of the world in which she feels…well, not herself.

This story has been told before. Aja and co-writer Gregory Levasseur riff heavily on another case of repression leading to violence: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In High Tension, we have le tueur—the Killer—in place of the Monster, who in Shelley’s novel can be read as Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger, that most famous of psychological devices used to illustrate the violence with which the repressed returns, doing all of the things the typical, well-socialized individual could never dream of doing. But where Victor utilizes the Monster to reject society’s expectations of him (including a traditional, heterosexual union with his adopted sister, Elizabeth), High Tension’s Marie creates le tueur because her desires do not fit within the normative world of the film.

The film’s tagline, “Hearts will bleed,” is a clear nod to this idea. This horror film is, at its core, a love story. Marie is somewhat of a party girl, encouraging her academically talented friend Alex to have a good time, but who also seems consistently left in the dust in favor of Alex’s male sexual conquests. Furthermore, Alex chastises Marie for “acting that way every time a guy tries to talk to you,” and suggesting that Marie will “end up alone” if she does not conform to stereotypical sexual and gender norms. The surroundings in which Alex hurls these ideas at Marie are also stridently traditional: the house in the country, where viewers see Mom hanging up laundry and Dad toiling in an at-home office opposite a glimmering computer screen. The farmhouse is pastoral Southern France in a microcosm—“like a doll’s house,” Marie asserts. Overtly perfect and totally unreal, at least in Marie’s experience.

The terribly hyperbolic rape van that le tueur pilots, and into which Alex is stashed after Marie/Le tueur murders Alex’s family is equally unrealistic, however. It’s laughable that Marie describes it only as “an old rusty truck” when she notifies the police about le tueur’s actions—before she and le tueur are explicitly linked—because it’s so much more. It’s clearly a murder-house on wheels, a Gothicized antique of a vehicle, a faded logo peeling off the side, and an ironic “head” trailer hitch blatantly displayed for all to see. Inside, le tueur has seemingly stashed many a female victim, whose pictures are pasted to the rearview mirror and whose blood cakes the walls and ceiling of the van’s rear compartment. “But those girls were alone,” Marie says as she tries to convince Alex they can escape the van. “There are two of us.” Indeed.

Though at the time of the film’s release, viewers might have been able to see some redeeming aspect in the pure fact of Marie’s true sexuality being represented (at least in the end) on screen, it’s impossible to see this film as progressive. While there’s no explicit representation of heteronormative desire on screen, Alex’s parents, her discussion of her own male partners, and her ultimate rejection of Marie serve this purpose. As such, the family’s dispatch at Marie’s hands illustrates the film’s destructive take on non-normative sexual preference. They literally can’t exist in the same space, even at the rural margins of society. Marie is in the end found to be monstrous, confined to an institution in handcuffs.

And yet. In those last moments, can viewers experience some sympathy for Marie? Imprisoned in an asylum and whispering “I won’t let anyone come between us anymore” over and over, Marie senses Alex on the other side of a two-way mirror and reaches for her. But rather than being tender, this movement is treated as the final, frightening jump-scare of the movie. Marie and her monstrous desire: condemned. Is this a cautionary tale, then? A warning, detailing just how deeply wrong it is for society to impose and police strict ideals of sexuality?

And those Frankensteinian scars on Marie’s face in those final shots, from her “rough with love” ordeal? Coincidence? I think not.

Rebecca L. Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodramas, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.

Nobody Puts Susan Cooper in the Basement: Melissa McCarthy and Skillful, Competent Violence in Film

This guest post by Laura Power appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

I love violent women. Maybe this is an odd thing to say; maybe it’s not. And I should qualify my statement by specifying that I love violent women in TV and film, not at my local grocery store. But oh, how I love a self-possessed Milla Jovovich stomping her thick-soled boot squarely into some thug’s gut, or a zinger-slinging Sarah Michelle Gellar tossing a spike straight through a vampire’s sternum.

But far too often it seems that filmmakers find violent women more acceptable when those women are either victims retaliating against violence (like in almost every horror movie ever made. ever.), psychopaths (Fatal Attraction; Basic Instinct; To Die For), or extorted to choose violence over death (Nikita). The spotlight rarely shines on women who are required to be violent during the course of their (lawful) day-to-day jobs, and who are not only competent, but who excel at those jobs. Yes, we have officers of the law Marge Gunderson (Fargo) and Clarice Starling (Silence of the Lambs); but Marge is part of a male-dominated ensemble, and Clarice is an agent-in-training who is used as a pawn and lied to by her male superior, and who relies on the help of a male criminal for clues and, in a way, mentorship.

Clarice can’t seem to shake Hannibal

But what happens when a woman is in a lawful profession, is competent, and is given the tools and information she needs to do her job? Well, this kind of woman hasn’t starred in many films, which is why the Paul Feig vehicle Spy starring Melissa McCarthy is such a…dare I say revolution?

As I considered Spy and the way McCarthy, playing CIA agent Susan Cooper, uses and responds to violence throughout the film, I asked myself if she truly was a new mold of a violent woman in film:

Is she being hunted? No.
Is she avenging a violence (physical, sexual) done against her? Nope.
Is she used for window dressing as men in the film kick ass? Not a chance.
Is she fully possessed of her faculties (i.e. no memory loss, mental illness)? She sure as hell is.

But I didn’t stop after I’d checked all of the boxes. I wanted to know what made Spy different from Feig’s other film featuring female law-enforcement agents, The Heat (2013). It isn’t just that Spy gives us a glamor—in McCarthy’s hair, makeup, and wardrobe (eventually), the decadent settings, and the European luxury. And it isn’t just that Spy takes its female lead very seriously—though it’s a comedy, Susan Cooper is self-aware and always in on the joke, never the joke itself. Spy is, however, different from The Heat—and from most other female-driven films—in how its main character uses violence in a competent, purposeful, and honest way.

Our first glimpse into Susan’s efficiency and…exuberance with violence is when the deputy director (Allison Janney) plays a decade-old video showing Cooper dive-rolling and shooting expertly through a training exercise. Cooper is fast and accurate, and although she seems embarrassed about the video, her supervisor is openly impressed.

Janney is another female actor I’d like to see kick some ass

Once Cooper’s mission starts, she takes step after step into more and more violence, and with each new challenge—a knife fight with a bomber in Paris; a quick-thinking trip-and-push in Rome; an in-flight spar with an armed flight attendant—she demonstrates both a willingness to be violent and a skillfulness to execute what needs to be done.

But Cooper’s best tricks start in Budapest, where she becomes more violent both physically as well as verbally. Cooper must lie to Rayna (Rose Byrne) to cover her identity, and, in the blink of an eye, she transforms into a filthy-mouthed bodyguard (“good gravy” replaced with “limp-dicked unicorn”). After this transition, Cooper’s quick-on-her-feet actions range from assaulting a man with her cell phone to making an impromptu decoy and smashing a fire extinguisher onto the heads of two bodyguards to escape capture.

Feig, as a director of female violence, and McCarthy, as the subject acting out this violence, shine in their respective roles, but they shine brightest during the beautifully choreographed fight between Cooper and a French female baddie in a green jumpsuit. The fight takes place in the kitchen of a nightclub, and Cooper uses dinner rolls, a baguette, frying pans, and finally a kitchen knife to attack and defend. As she dodges swings and blows, her reactions are sharp and athletic. Cooper grabs her opponent by the waist and brings her to ground like she is just a sack of rice; she plunges a knife into her opponent’s palm. And on the other side of the camera, Feig gives McCarthy the same treatment he gave Jude Law at the start of the movie when Law (playing CIA agent Bradley Fine), perfectly coifed and tuxedoed, does slow motion roundhouse kicks at plate-faced bodyguards. As McCarthy tousles with her own nemesis in the kitchen fight, Feig uses slow motion to let us savor the violence and bird’s eye shots to let us see the controlled swings of Cooper’s arms and legs as she fights. The violence is not slapstick. The violence is not played for laughs. The violence is just flat-out cinematically terrific.

One could make an argument that Susan Cooper must adopt a persona in order to explore this violence, and that it does not represent the “true” woman—the woman who bakes, has trouble getting the bartender’s attention, and might wear a “lumpy, pumpkin sack-dress” out to dinner. But I don’t agree with that argument. Cooper’s violence is not just a persona she wears in the field. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who follows the jumpsuit-wearing assassin into the kitchen, seeking out the conflict rather than hiding from it. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who head-butts Bradley Fine when she’s tied up in a dungeon. The “real” Susan Cooper is the woman who gets a field promotion because she has, in essence, saved the goddamned day.

Too long have men had the privilege of having so much fun (and looking so good) with violence in film. Let’s hope that more female directors pick up this mantle, and that more women are given the opportunity to shine as the centers of films where they can punch, kick, and shoot without the added context of victimhood or psychopathy. Give us more opportunities to be violent. Because, filmmakers, let’s be honest: it’s about time.

Laura Power teaches English composition and creative writing at a two-year college in Illinois. You can read more of her work at Cinefilles and Lake Projects and follow her on Twitter.

‘Sons of Anarchy’: Female Violence, Feminist Care

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.

‘Monster’: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. ‘Monster’ vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

This guest post by Danika Kimball appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

American film audiences love the idea of violence, especially in regard to justice. From Bruce Wayne’s masked forays as Batman, to Frank Underwood’s signature House of Cards sneer, pop culture and media landscapes are bombarded with the image of a vigilante bringing matters into their own hands to enact justice. But what is almost more widely revered is the concept of a woman taking matters into her own hands, as it defies societal norms on numerous levels.

We see this depiction in numerous films. To the audience’s delight, heroine Beatrix Kiddo takes vengeance on her abusers in the Kill Bill series, and Furiosa defiantly defends her right to redemption from evil doers in Mad Max: Fury Road. But sometimes, females who resort to violence aren’t celebrated, and there is perhaps no greater depiction of this than Charlize Theron’s embodiment of Aileen Wuornos in the widely acclaimed dramatic film, Monster.

Monster is a film based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, who was one of the first female serial killers in the United States. Wuornos, an impoverished former prostitute, was executed in Florida in October 2002 for the murder of six men, each of whom were her former customers. She was only the second woman in Florida and the tenth women in the United States to receive the death penalty since the landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision that restored capital punishment.

The film made an impact on most for its graphic depictions of murder, but upon re-watching the film 10 years later, the portrayal of Aileen’s life in Monster was a cruel visualization of the impacts of patriarchy, poverty, and the ways in which the criminal justice system fails violent women.

In the opening scenes of Monster, we see Aileen as an adult sitting under a busy highway overpass, replaying her life story. We see her as a young child, dreaming of being an icon like Marilyn Monroe, wealthy, loved, and the center of attention.

Her fantasy fades as she walks into a gay bar with the five dollars she had just earned from a John which she was determined to spend before she ended her life. It’s here she meets a woman named Selby, a person she would later devote to protect at any cost.

The pair eventually find solace in their shared loneliness and fall in love, which pushes Selby out of her compulsory heterosexuality. Aileen, finally having someone to care for, takes it upon herself to be a provider for Selby. The film follows Aileen’s struggle to support her newfound family, her efforts in making sure that Selby is happy, and the struggle to maintain her own dignity.

After being raped and brutalized by a client, Aileen kills him in self-defense, vowing to quit prostitution. She confesses her crime to Selby, as Selby has been angry with her for not supporting the two of them.

Aileen’s efforts to find a job prove to be difficult she has no marketable skills, and no job history outside of her years of prostitution. Any prospective employers reject her, some openly volatile, accosting her for wasting their time. We see throughout the film that everyone in Aileen’s life believe that no man will ever pay her for anything aside from her body.

With nowhere to turn, Aileen returns to a life of prostitution, each time killing and robbing her Johns more brutally than the last, as she is convinced they are all trying to harm her.

In this context, it becomes difficult for a viewer to see her actions as evil. Aileen’s actions almost appear to be rational, even moral decisions, when viewed through the lens of extreme gender and class oppression. We see this in her explanations to Selby later, where she implores that she is helping to protect the other women in the world, who might also be victimized these men. She says,

Who the fuck knows what God wants? People kill each other every day and for what? Hm? For politics, for religion, and THEY’RE HEROES! No, no… There’s a lot of shit I can’t do anymore, but killing’s not one of them. And letting those fucking bastards go out and rape someone else isn’t either!

Eventually Aileen’s murders catch up with her, and she is arrested at a biker bar. While speaking to Selby on the phone, Selby reveals incriminating information over the phone while the police are listening in. As her last display of protection, Aileen admits she committed the murders alone. During the subsequent trial, Selby testifies against her in the courtroom hearings. Aileen is executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

Part of what makes Monster so honest and relevant to feminists is the way that it recognizes and points to the patriarchal conditions in place that frame and constrain women’s choices, sometimes leading to a life of crime.

Throughout her life Aileen has been victimized, raped, and violence is a part of her day-to-day existence.

Emily Salisbury, a professor at Portland State University’s Criminology and Criminal Justice Program, suggests that patriarchal conditions are often a huge part of the reason for women’s participation in criminal activity and subsequent incarcerations. She remarks,

With the work of feminist scholars such as Mita Chesney Lynn, Kathleen Daly, Regina Arnold, Barbara Owen and many others, new ideas about female offending were established. The qualitative life history interviews that these scholars conducted with girls and women suggested that their lives leading up to criminal justice involvement were extremely complex and disadvantaged, with unique daily struggles…such as struggles with child abuse, depression, self-medicating behavior, self-hatred, parenting responsibilities, domestic violence and unhealthy intimate relationships. It’s argued that these problems create unique pathways to crime for women.

Many of the struggles listed are applicable to Aileen’s incarceration. In a documentary called Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, director Nick Broomfield speaks to the infamous murderer, where she expresses that if her life leading up to adulthood had been more ideal, she wouldn’t have entered a life of crime in the first place. Family members and close friends remark throughout the film that she was the product of homelessness, violence, abuse, prostitution, poverty, incest, rape, and mental illness.

Though on-screen depictions of violent women are portrayed as empowering, as is the case with vengeful Furiosa in Mad Max, or the cathartic revenge plot for Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill, Aileen Wuornos’ story tells a different story for violent women. Monster illustrates that all too often, violent women’s pasts are rifled with oppression, and in defending themselves, they face consequences from legal systems that have proven to fail them in the past. For Aileen, violent self-preservation ended in demise.

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

‘Salt’: A Refreshing Genderless Lens

This guest post by Cameron Airen appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Violent films with a female at their center tend to be viewed differently than violent films with a male lead. When a woman is in this role, it’s controversial. When a man is in the same type of role, it’s a part of who he is as a human being. We’ve become numb to the violence that men engage in onscreen. As a result, we don’t criticize it like we do when a woman is engaging in it. Also, female leads in violent films are usually represented differently than male leads in the same type of film. Because we are more accepting of violent films with male leads than with female leads, she needs to be constructed differently. Usually it’s her sex appeal that makes her more tolerable to conduct violence, fetishizing her in order to justify her acts. Or her sexual power is her weapon and she succeeds at getting what she wants with it. Or, she’s guided by a male partner almost the entire way through who seems to somehow “know the way” and it’s often the “right way.” She wouldn’t succeed without him. Somehow, we are unable to see her as an independent, powerful being just by her human self-without a man, without needing to be sexy, without needing to give sex in order to have more power.

The film Salt (2010) takes a different approach.

In many ways, Salt is the action film that feminists have dreamed of. Its female lead character, played by Angelina Jolie, does not depend on her being female. What Salt does well is eliminate gender from its focus. Most action films with a female lead are clearly marked by gender. Instead of her character being motivated by experiences that have happened to her because she’s a woman (like in Thelma and Louise or Kill Bill), she’s driven by non-gendered circumstances. In fact, Salt is never once referred to as being a woman/female in the film. She is only referred to as “Salt” or a spy. Whereas, in other films like Kill Bill, she is known as The Bride and is committed to take revenge based on what happened with her wedding and an unborn child. The Bride’s character, experiences, and revenge is all about gender. Even though the lead in Salt was originally meant for Tom Cruise and the film was slightly changed for a female, Salt isn’t characterized by gender. Salt crosses all kinds of gender lines, including going as a “male” disguise, towards the end of the film, to kill the president of the United States. Since Salt’s character isn’t motivated or marked by gender in a way that fuels the story, any gender could easily play her.

Despite its plot holes, Salt is a solid action film. Evelyn Salt is a CIA officer accused of being a Russian spy. One of the most interesting points of the film is how ambiguous her character is. We don’t know whose side she’s on and whether we should root for her or not. While the plot is confusing, it’s refreshing to have a female action lead whose intentions are ambiguous, as we are starting to see onscreen more today.

Salt has some of the best violent scenes seen in an action film. After Salt has been accused of being a Russian spy, she tries to escape the CIA building. Her colleagues try to trap her but she makes a bomb to blow down the doors and runs away. Have we ever seen a woman make a bomb in a film before? This might be a first for women in film and it’s no surprise that Jolie is the one to instigate it. Not only is Salt’s action unrestricted by a female lead but Jolie performed her own stunts.

After Salt escapes and scales a tall apartment building, she gets cornered by the CIA and jumps off of an overpass onto a moving semi truck driving on the highway. The film’s already frenetic pace ratchets up another notch and actually gets even better when Salt meets up with Orlov, the Russian man who trained her. At a barge, Orlov has her husband killed right in front of her eyes by her Russian comrades. Salt has to hide her tears and emotions so that her comrades don’t suspect her as being a traitor. Later, when alone with Orlov, she makes no hesitation in killing him with a broken liquor bottle, then goes on to wipe out the rest of the men on crew with a machine gun and hand grenades. Salt doesn’t stop there. She lets herself get arrested after appearing to kill the Russian president. Handcuffed in the back of a police car, she knocks out the officers next to her, then tasers the driver and tries to steer the car. At this point, we have no idea why Salt let herself get caught, but the action scenes keep you at the edge of your seat.

One of the best scenes in Salt is after Salt is placed in handcuffs once again, and is being escorted out of the White House up a flight of stairs. Winter, her colleague who betrayed her and orchestrated her husband’s kidnapping, is waiting for her at the top of the stairs with a pair of scissors in hand. When she approaches him, Salt manages to wrap her handcuffs around Winter’s neck as her body jumps over the stair railing and chokes him to death. The way she fearlessly snatches Winter’s neck with her chain and lets her body dangle from the top of a staircase with her face bloody from fighting Winter is a creative and incredible scene that I’ve never seen in a film before.

One of the more interesting parts that the film lacks is a sex scene. We don’t once see Jolie in her underwear or naked. In fact, she is fully clothed the entire time except in the very beginning scene when she’s being tortured in a non-sexual way. As much as I wanted to see a sex scene with Jolie, I was happy that the film didn’t actually have one. When do we ever not see a hot, steamy scene with the beautiful and sexy, Jolie? This film somehow got away with it and it’s a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t her sexuality that saved her. Typically, a woman is identified by her “sex,” but in Salt, she is simply a human being. Sexual or not, we don’t know. But, her “sex/gender” makes no difference and is not a signifying factor of her character or action. We rarely see a woman kick ass without sexualizing her in some way. It’s great when women can be sexual beings and kick ass onscreen, but they tend to be oversexualized in a way that guides their character.

My biggest criticism with Salt is that it lacks diversity. Even though there is a female lead and a main Black male character (who doesn’t get killed), the rest of the main cast is white and male. There are barely any other women in Salt besides Jolie. Sometimes, we think that diversity is achieved simply by having a female lead even if the rest of the cast is male. But, this is false, and it would have been an even better film if there were more women in it. What Salt succeeds in is by having a mostly genderless lens in terms of the main character, and not defining her by sex. Salt is a refreshing action film with a female lead who has some serious violent scenes that will make one hunger for more.

Cameron Airen is a queer feminist with a M.A. in Anthropology and Social Change. When she’s not getting her fix from watching women in violent action films, Cameron is working on creating a (mostly) vegan cookbook. She resides in Berkeley, Calif. You can follow her on Twitter @cameronairen.

“It is not fitting for her to be so manly and terrifying”: Catharsis and Female Chaos in Pasolini’s ‘Medea’

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film ‘Medea’ was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match.

This post by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Discussing Greek tragedy, the philosopher Aristotle calls for women, being “of lesser character,” to be given a fitting representations on stage that conform to his society’s ideas of typical womanliness, “for it is possible for a woman to be manly in character, but it is not fitting for her to be so manly or terrifying” (Poetics, 1454a). Ancient Athens was a democracy of free men, where slaves and women were silenced. Its epic tragedies were written and acted by men alone, though they might wear the mask of women. Why then, in a society that considered women to be lesser in character and unfitting of “manliness,” should there be so many examples of fierce and violent womanhood on its stage? Aeschylus had the murderous Clytemnestra, Sophocles the pitiless Elektra, and Euripides produced the infanticidal Medea as well as hoards of murderous Bacchae, female followers of Dionysos who tore The Bacchae‘s hero limb from limb. The answer, perhaps, lies in the role of men in Ancient Athens, who were expected to reject emotionalism in favor of logic, and sacrifice their personal interests in favor of the state. The women of Greek tragedy are powerful, therefore, not because women were powerful in real life, but because these fictionalized characters were powerfully and cathartically voicing the emotional and personal causes that the male spectators had been encouraged to suppress in themselves. Female chaos is male catharsis. To our eyes, the violent uprisings of women like Clytemnestra, Elektra or Medea might well seem “manly and terrifying,” but they equally rise up against the self-sacrificing duty to the state and the rationalizing art of “reason” that Athenian men had been trained to consider manly. The male spectator gets cathartic release through the woman’s chaotic voicing of emotional rage and personal vendetta, but can disown it as a feature of her femininity. The woman, in turn, becomes the negative space of male self-image, not an image in her own right.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea was created in the aftermath of Italian fascism, another masculine cult of personal self-sacrifice in the interests of the state. Utilizing the operatic charisma of the legendary Maria Callas in a non-singing role, he harnesses the pitiless woman as an agent of chaos, rebelling against the dictates of the masculine state that urges her husband to discard her, in favor of a politically advantageous match. Killing his hopes of heirs by murdering her own sons to spite their father, as well as killing his bride and her father, the King of Corinth, Medea murders Jason’s future in punishment for his disregard of her feminine powers as high priestess of a barbarian nature cult. In Euripides’ original, a chorus of women who identified with Medea’s pain, while being horrified by the bloodiness of her revenge, helped to give her context as an emblem of the rage of suppressed and discarded women under Ancient Athenian patriarchy. Pasolini instead delves into the original myth to offer a portrait of Medea’s barbarian homeland and its values as an agricultural society close to the old gods. Opening with the boy Jason being told that he is not the son of Chiron, his centaur foster father, Jason by is initiated by the centaur into a tangled mythology that defines his destiny to recover the golden fleece from distant lands, as a symbol of eternal nature of “power and order.” The centaur gives an enigmatic warning: “The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.” A warning to curb his own natural impulses, or to avoid taking the “natural submissiveness” of woman for granted? Jason is alerted that the word is not “naturally” so, but the creation of fickle gods who hate as much as love. With his training by the mythical Old Centaur in the isolation of nature, he is more equipped to negotiate the wild values of Medea than men raised in the city. Yet he is guided in adulthood by a desecrated New Centaur, who takes the form of an clothed man and preaches that the gods are dead. It is when he seeks to assume his place in the city, upon his return, that he will lose his respect for Medea’s primeval power, earning the hate of the high priestess and, perhaps, of her gods.

The two Chirons

Medea is introduced in close-up, face enigmatically blank, as she is surrounded both by cricket-chirping nature and by the droning chant of ritual human sacrifice. Her willingness to sacrifice human life is therefore linked to the pitilessness of Nature, that is the flipside of its nurture. Embodying values of nature and barbarism in woman, and political ambition in man, is a rather traditional gendering, but the Medea myth is unusual in showing the woman triumphant as cruel Nature reigning supreme, rather than destroyed as punishment for her “unnatural” violence. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end. Feeding corn with the blood of the sacrificial victim and bidding him be “reborn with the seed” can also be read as Pasolini’s allowing his barbarians to echo the symbolically cannibal sacrament and resurrection narrative by which the faithful wed themselves to the Roman Catholic church. Medea’s hands are ritually chained before she prays, representing her weddedness to the order of her society. She collapses at the sight of Jason. In this highly stylized interpretation, not a word needs to pass between them to convince Medea to rob the fleece, or to brutally dismember her own brother with an axe to distract her pursuers. Her violence is unmotivated, except by the logic of myth or ritual human sacrifice, for that is the binding logic of her world.

Crossing the water to the world of Greece, where the gods are dead, Medea wanders wildly in a state of spiritual catastrophe such as Jason had experienced when swapping the magical Old Centaur for the desecrated New. Medea vainly seeks “foundation” in this new world, pleading to hear the voices of Earth, Sun, grass and stone, just as Jason recognizes that the golden fleece has been drained of its power when taken to a foreign land without true faith, where promises are broken. In some degree, the ritual sacrifice of her sons is therefore Medea’s only way to restore her sacrificial power as priestess, more than a simple act of petty vengeance against her unfaithful husband. Imagining herself restored to her faith as granddaughter of the sun, Medea performs her violence in her old priestess robes with a smile of exultation at her empowerment, mingled with tears because “woman is a weak creature who cries easily.” She thus uses society’s expectations of woman’s weeping weakness as a mask to hide the gruesome seriousness of her real purpose. Medea’s power recalls those societies where the masculine power of kings and warlords existed in balance with the feminine power of a priestess class, such as the Akkadian state which gave us the world’s first recorded author, Sumeria’s high priestess Enheduanna. Women like Enheduanna are examples that can be cited to argue that the “ancient world” of a woman like Medea had channels of specifically feminine spiritual power lost in Judaeo-Christian traditions. In these older traditions, according to Pasolini’s vision, nurture and sacrifice are integrally linked, joined in the figure of the loving yet murderous woman who embraces with her eyes open and her knife ready. Medea’s violence may disturb us, but she serves as a warning that woman’s nature should not be coded by man’s convenience, nor ever taken for granted. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end.

[youtube_sc url=” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQ_Qi5Pzrw”]

Brigit McCone loves Maria Callas but isn’t that into opera. Go figure. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and wondering what was so great about that Onassis guy.

Call For Writers: Violent Women

In the month of Halloween, we’ll be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Our theme week for October 2015 will be Violent Women.

In the month of Halloween, we’ll aptly be examining tropes of women and violence. There are many permutations of violent women throughout history and throughout genres. In many cases, the viewer experiences the violence of female characters as empowering. Revenge and self-defense are frequent motivations for violence, which are often coded as justified, and audiences can bathe in the cathartic violence of Kill Bill‘s Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) taking vengeance on her rapist and those who betrayed her and left her for dead. We can cheer on Ripley in Aliens or Laurie Strode in Halloween because they are acting from the basic animal instinct of self-preservation.

Many women glory in the model presented by the physically capable, self-assured women of sci-fi and action genres like pre-apocalypse soldier and mother Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and secret agent extraordinaire Mallory Kane in Haywire. Films like these give women the opportunity to revel in strong female bodies and in women who take charge.

Sometimes, though, violent women are coded as frightening and unknowable. They violate cultural mores. They cannot be contained within society and must, therefore, be destroyed. The eponymous heroine of Carrie is a young, timid woman who comes of age and finds enormous power inside herself, but such a power cannot be controlled or understood; it has no other choice but to obliterate itself. The film Monster, represents Aileen Wuornos, a real-life woman who had every hard luck in life, as a woman who takes revenge too far until she’s an out-of-control serial killer who must be executed. On the other hand, through the desperate and violent shenanigans of its heroines, Thelma & Louise accuses the world itself of being an ill-equipped place for women who refuse to play by rules that only subjugate them.

What is the connection between femaleness and violence? Why do we sometimes accept some types of violent women but not others? What do these value judgments say about our society?

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, Oct. 23, by midnight.

Carrie

Under the Skin

Foxfire

The Matrix

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ginger Snaps

Basic Instinct

Foxy Brown

Battlestar Galactica

I Spit on Your Grave

The Exorcist

Underworld

American Horror Story

Game of Thrones

Hard Candy

Duke of Burgundy

Haywire

The 100

Jennifer’s Body

Single White Female

Misery

Mad Max: Fury Road

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Halloween

Alien

Sin City

Batman Returns

La Femme Nakita

Planet Terror

Aliens

Gone Girl

Friday the 13th

Kill Bill

Monster

Mommy Dearest

Thelma & Louise

Audition