Violent Women Theme Week – Page 2

Patty Jenkins’ ‘Monster’: Shouldering the Double Burden of Masculinity and Femininity

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.

This guest post by Katherine Parker-Hay appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When film explores the lives of women who kill, the audience is well-versed in where to locate their corruption: femininity. Think Fatal Attraction’s Alex (1987), Gone Girl’s Amy (2014), the woman shaped alien of Under the Skin (2013). If these figures are evil it is because they choose to act out in ways that contradict traditional views of women. As such they linger on the outside of what is knowable. Again and again, the audience is asked to make intelligible these creatures that don’t quite belong to this world but, as they never quite belong to us, unravelling the secrets of their inner selves is a task that – no doubt intentionally – will forever elude. Patty Jenkins’s Monster is therefore refreshing, bemusing even, because it doesn’t resort to this logic. It refuses this well-worn trope of a female killer whose mysterious inner core we are all so relentlessly on the tail of.

Monster is based on the real life story of Aileen Wuornos, a homeless serial killer who received the death sentence after murdering seven men that picked her up as a prostitute. Wuornos is an enigmatic figure that haunts the public imagination as “America’s first female serial killer” but, rather than rehashing the trope of a mysterious/failed femininity, Jenkins locates Lee’s (Charlize Theron) violence in the fact that she is under pressure to perform both classic femininity and classic masculinity at the same time. Coerced by girlfriend Selby (Christina Ricci), Lee has to be both sole provider and an object endlessly open to exploitation. This pressure is too great for one person. Jenkins’ film charts the excruciating process of Lee crumbling, unable hold the most toxic attributes of both genders together in one body.

The final murder: unable to contain both

Lee finds herself falling for a woman unexpectedly when she stumbles into what happens to be a gay bar and is approached by a naïve and wide-eyed Selby. In the scenes that follow we witness a spellbinding vacuum of roles and Lee, dizzy with first-time desire, soon promises to offer more than she can realistically provide. After a first kiss on the roller skate rink, we quickly cut to the street where the couple are in a hurried embrace behind buildings. Selby has to stop Lee in her tracks, warning that they should find somewhere less public to continue. After offering a nearby yard as a realistic option Lee quickly backtracks, realising that to be with Selby she needs to be ready promise the world. This is an ominous sign of what is to come. Willing to shoulder the burden of classic masculinity, Lee promises to do whatever necessary and they arrange to meet the following evening.

As this scene of erotic discovery transitions into the next, we witness Lee tumbling along the full spectrum of gender – from classic masculinity (unshakable provider, picking up the bill) to classic femininity (vulnerable, able to draw out chivalry from all those around). With the musical score sweeping in to capture the heights of her elation, Lee quite literally spins into the next scene; we roll with her: music still playing from the night before, we see her “hooking” with newfound determination. Her face is steely, ready to take on any role that she might need to in order to accommodate her newfound desires and stay true to her promise. Charlie Shipley makes the point that the musical score of this film doesn’t merely heighten tension as traditionally understood – pop music comes from the world of the characters themselves and marks points where their fantasy lives begin to stretch the bounds of what is ordinarily possible. This certainly appears the case for the poignant transition between these two scenes. In order to surmount the impossible heights of classic masculinity that are now laid at her feet, Lee gathers momentum to beyond herself in an embrace of the hyper-feminine.

Steely with determination: “They had no idea what I could discipline myself to”

Lee understands how to tap into conventional femininity in order to make money. Importantly though, this femininity is not hers in the sense of being derived from some inner core – Lee is able to tune into well-worn tropes circulating society more widely, indeed she is an expert reader of these formulas and draws together a perfect damsel in distress narrative to solicit clients. Her routine is to walk the highway as if a vulnerable hitchhiker and, once inside the cars, she tells of how she is trying to make enough money to get back to her children. She then shows the driver a picture of the kids, his cue to make the chivalrous proposal of an exchange of sex for money. Lee has an exact understanding of how stylised femininity works and pounces upon it, knowing that this is just about the only means, for a woman of her class with dreams as big as hers, to get the money she needs. Hyper-femininity is simply an act that she has trained herself into and this has nothing to do with a mysterious essence that the reader has to bend over backwards in order to comprehend. “The thing no one ever realised about me, or believed, was that I could learn,” she reflects later in the film, “I could train myself into anything.”

However, as the film progresses it becomes clear that Selby is not content living within their means and, at the same time, Lee’s clients are not satisfied by a performance of vulnerability on Lee’s own terms. The men who pick her up are not interested in sexual intercourse alone. They feel entitled to titillating performances of conventional femininity and what’s more they expect her to improvise this free of charge. In one scene we see Lee and a client sitting in the front seats of a car and to Lee’s distress the man is delaying undressing. He badgers her: “Do you have a wet pussy?” Lee looks away and answers with a compliant, “Yeah sure.” “Do you like fucking?” he persists and, unable to draw out the right level of enthusiasm, he says, incredulous, “Jesus Christ, you’d think nobody ever talked dirty to you before.” Lee reassures him with all the energy she can muster: “I just like to settle first you know.” She is unable to keep going to these lengths, yet she is equally unable to disappoint Selby who is waiting for her to return to their motel room cash-in-hand. It is the impossibility of embodying these polar extremes of gender expression that leaves Lee ensnared and desperate. Rather than admit defeat Lee chooses to act out with murderous violence, killing the men who pick her up so that she can take their money.

Roger Ebert has celebrated the way that Theron perfects body language to capture the persona of Lee, writing that the character “doesn’t know how to occupy her body.” As the film goes on, Lee increasingly struggles to hold things together and this discomfort is evoked with every flinch, with every time she meets another’s eye for just that little bit too long. Lee is uncomfortable in her own skin and unable to endure being pulled in both directions. Monster shows a body increasingly stretched, pulled apart by a toxic clash of roles.

Interview: unable to act naturally

Through the character of Lee, Jenkins achieves a dazzlingly fresh approach to women and violence on screen. Watching one woman try and contain so much, trying to be so many different people just to get by, is what makes this film so fascinating. 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. This is a woman who kills because she is required to embody what so many of us cannot even handle the half of. She takes on all of it, and this proves to be much too much.

Katherine Parker-Hay has a BA in English from Goldsmiths University of London and an MA in Women’s Studies from University of Oxford. She writes on queer theory, women’s cultural output, temporality, and comic serials.

Feminist Fangs: The Activist Symbolism of Violent Vampire Women

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.

This guest post by Melissa-Kelly Franklin appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

The apocryphal notion that women are intrinsically sensitive, gentle and maternal is an old one, so we rarely see aggressive women in film and television unless they’re either trying to protect themselves or are seriously unhinged. Sara Century writes that female characters are “so often victims, but even when they’re violent criminals, that violence is either quickly punished, or it’s normalised and reduced by audiences and creators alike.” It would seem that even the notion that women could stray so far from their natures as to be capable of serious violence is utterly inconceivable outside the context of self-preservation, or the protection of children. Well-trodden is the trope that a woman would do absolutely anything to protect her child; so violent acts by women can be easily explained away with the justification that their maternal instincts are kicking in, thereby restoring women to their place in the “natural order.” Similarly, rape-revenge is often used as a catalyst for driving women to violence, using rape as a means of pushing a character to her extreme, thereby asserting that only horrific trauma can compel a woman to act outside of socially constructed notions of gender. Neither of these reasons are shallow or unjustified – and I’d much rather see a female character take control, retaliate and fight back, than see her as a passive victim. However, what these more commonplace depictions of violent women do, is silence other motivations which might see women as actively engaging in calculated acts of violence for personal and political reasons.

Portrayals of calculated violence by women are few and far between. Sure, there is the recently released Suffragette, which portrays the militant action of the London-based suffragette movement, but as others have highlighted, it’s taken a good 100 years for that to see the light of day; and other celebrated examples of female violence in films like Alien and Terminator see women forced into violence to protect themselves and their families. (Megan Kearns wrote an interesting piece for Bitch Flicks about Sarah Connor’s identity being inextricably tied to motherhood and her baby-making potential.) So whether she’s saving her biological children, or her wider human “family,” these violent women subliminally remind us that women’s role in society is as nurturer, protector and mother.

Two films that throw the proverbial spanner in the patriarchal works are the feminist vampire films Byzantium by Neil Jordan, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour. 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. Both films reflect the social anxieties surrounding such subversive women – the notion that violent women violate the very laws of nature – making these idealised givers of life quite literally, harbingers of death. The subversion of traditional gender constructs within these films depict women actively working outside social norms, effectively using violent women within the vampire genre as a symbol of feminist activism.

In Byzantium, Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) are a vampire mother and daughter duo living rough and on the run from a vampire brotherhood – all because Clara had the gall to disobey their sexist code forbidding women from creating more of their kind. As Katherine Murray discerningly points out, this is a rare vampire film where the vampire-protagonists are not rolling in cash or occupying vast estates, suggesting that we can easily attribute this to “the lack of opportunity they’ve had as women.” For over a century Clara and Eleanor have been relentlessly pursued by the brotherhood with the intention of killing the “aberration” that is Eleanor, thus restoring the status quo within their previously exclusive invitation-only boys club. Jordan introduces us to Clara and Eleanor’s desperate situation in a high-octane chase at the start of the film, which culminates in Clara’s capture. Believing he is close to finally achieving their aim, one of Clara’s assailants tells her, “I feel a great peace. As if order is about to be restored.” From the outset the film establishes an Us vs Them dichotomy, emphasising how everyone who chooses to function outside of patriarchal gender constructs is inevitably punished. Clara’s response? She shuts him up by taking off his head.

It appears throughout the film that Clara’s prevailing motivation is to protect the life of her daughter, making her one of the “violent mother” character types, but her acts of violence clearly go beyond protecting her daughter. Clara and Eleanor are targeted because they dared to violate the sacred code of the vampire brotherhood (a not even thinly veiled allusion to patriarchy) and the balance of power must be restored. The brotherhood is not actively seeking Clara’s death, rather they want to destroy the product of her disobedience – the reminder that Clara is the loose cannon that refuses to conform to their arbitrary gender rules. In their world, women are even denied the intrinsically feminine power to reproduce, as “women aren’t permitted to create.” While it is resoundingly clear that Clara would go to any lengths to protect her daughter, she is also driven by the desire for freedom so they can live unfettered by social rules which say they cannot do, say or share the same privileges that men enjoy. Clara’s deeply felt respect for individuality, freedom and personhood is made poignantly clear at the end of the film, when she acknowledges that Eleanor should make her own way in the world and discover her identity apart from being a daughter.

The boys gather to chat about whether Clara (Gemma Arterton) should be allowed to join their vampire club

Clara’s targeted attacks against patriarchy aren’t limited to members of the vampire brotherhood. The exploitation and persecution of women is also seen in the human world of the film. Desperate and struggling women are seen throughout the first half of the film, from the lone, drugged girl that Eleanor discovers barely conscious on a park bench, to the sex-worker being taunted by promises of a cigarette by the pimp in the amusement park. Clara sees an opportunity to gather together these women and free them from the power of the odious pimp, by first seducing him, then killing him. Clara’s rescue of the girls may well be self-motivated, but by taking them out of the hands of the pimp and into her matriarchy at the Byzantium hotel, she provides them with a safer, cleaner and fairer environment in which to work. And in case we didn’t get that this act of violence was done for a good cause, she croons to his corpse, “the world will be a better place without you.”

While we might laud Clara’s vigilantism, we feel conflicted in our admiration for her badass defiance of convention in the high-tension scene where she kills Eleanor’s teacher. We struggle more with this kill than previous ones, as the teacher is well-intentioned, inspires his students and is genuinely concerned for Eleanor’s welfare. It’s clear that Clara undertakes this execution to keep their secret and preserve their liberty, but the way she relishes her torturous performance leading up to the kill is chilling. We get a brief insight into why Clara isn’t about to take any risks on letting this man live. She tells him that once “I made a fatal error. I was merciful.” That mercy lead to the rape of her daughter, and her punishment for saving her is to be pursued for over a century by a brotherhood that seeks their destruction. While the murder is not justifiable, it’s understandable that Clara would have some serious issues trusting educated white men in positions of authority, and would not give pause to eliminating the threat. This scene reveals the desperation and degradation of the individual – and the wider repercussions – when denied all agency and personhood.

On the hunt: Clara’s first kill as a newborn vampire

Female agency – or lack thereof – is a similarly prevalent theme in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Like Clara and Eleanor of Byzantium, the women in Amirpour’s film are searching for a way to free themselves from patriarchal oppression. Sex-worker Atti (Mozhan Marno) saves every cent and dreams of escaping Bad City to explore the places marked out on the huge map on her wall, and even the more privileged daughter of a wealthy family feels the need to conform to conventional beauty standards by having a nose-job. Only the Girl (i.e. the vampire protagonist played by Sheila Vand) moves freely about the city, addressing oppression with her own form of violent justice. The title of the film effectively draws on the inherent vulnerability ascribed to a lone woman at night in order to subvert our expectations of the narrative. In this film, the girl walking home alone is not the potential victim, but rather, the predator. In a nail-biting, but darkly comic illustration of this idea, the Girl meets a sweet, good-looking young man named Arash (Arash Marandi), drugged up from a party and dressed as Dracula. In his stupor he assures her that he wont hurt her, and in delicious moment of dramatic irony, we know that the Girl may well hurt him. Fortunately for Arash, something about his lost-kitten like vulnerability touches her, and a romantic connection between them develops.

Will she or won’t she? The Girl takes Arash home after finding him lost and alone one night

The Girl’s acts of violence are never gratuitous. Her first kill of the film is the pimp, Saeed, whom she witnesses taunt Atti and refuse to pay her, forcing her perform oral sex as an inducement. The Girl observes from a distance with eerie, omnipotent stillness. When Saeed later takes the Girl home and attempts to get physical with her (his seductive dance moves are met with a subtle eye-roll from the Girl which is just priceless), she attacks him, drinks him dry and steals his valuables to give to Atti later. As Ren Jender suggests, this vampire is a vigilante who stalks the streets of Bad City satiating her hunger only on exploitative men who mistreat desperate women.

Later in the film we see Arash’s drug-riddled father visit Atti. He watches her dance sensually, then insists that they share some drugs. When she refuses adamantly, making it clear she doesn’t want any of Hossein’s kind of “good time,” he decides to enforce the ‘fun’. In a moment looking disturbingly like a potential rape, he whips off his belt, binds Atti’s hands and violates her by forcibly injecting the drugs. While stalking the streets nearby, the Girl’s hypersensitive instincts alert her to Atti’s situation, and she swoops in like an avenging angel to show Hossein once and for all that no means no.

There is one terrifyingly menacing scene when the Girl probes a little boy with questions, asking if he is good. “Don’t lie” she hisses, terrorising him with the threat of taking out his eyes if he’s ever bad. It’s an easy conclusion to draw that by ‘good’ she means not growing up to become like the exploitative men of Bad City. The threatened eye-gouging punishment is a clear symbol of her preventing him from ever seeing, and thereby objectifying women. While there is no physical violence in this moment, the mere threat of it is enough to achieve her aim. The Girl is the stuff of misogynists’ nightmares.

“I’ll be watching,” the Girl warns the Street Urchin, and she always is

Both Byzantium and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night suggest that action against sexism and misogyny should be targeted and dramatic. Society has always deemed violent women as creatures to be feared, as by eschewing established gender structures they are unpredictable and uncontrollable, violating the supposedly natural laws that define their femininity. That’s not to say these films encourage bloody, criminal violence, rather they advocate the rejection of restrictive social constructs of femininity in redressing gender imbalance, using violent women characters as a potent symbol of feminist activism.

Melissa–Kelly Franklin is an international filmmaker, writer and actress collaborating in London, Bristol and Berlin. She holds an honours degree in English Literature and History, with one film soon to be released and another cooking in pre-production. Updates about her work can be found at melissa-kellyfranklin.tumblr.com and she occasionally tweets at @MelissaKelly_F.

Slashing Gender Assumptions: The Female Killer, Unmasked

This guest post by Kate Blair appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Serial killer movies tend to follow a similar trope: An anonymous and monstrous killer stabs and disembowels his way through a panoply of victims until he faces off against one final, sweaty, and bloodied girl who escapes his clutches. At this point, the killer’s true identity is revealed, and he is overthrown – at least until the sequel. While we don’t necessarily know anything about the killer, we tend to assume this nameless menace is male. However, movies like Deep Red and Friday the 13th subvert viewer expectations when we ultimately find out the killer is not a man at all, but a woman – and a middle-aged one at that. Friday’s Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) and the less celebrated Marta (Clara Calamai) from Deep Red reset the paradigm of the slasher genre and raise many interesting questions about gender as they do so.

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. That’s why the gotcha-like reveal is also what makes these films so powerful. In shock, viewers think, “Why?” Then, after a moment’s reflection we think, “Why not?”

In one sense, female killers onscreen demonstrate women are just as capable of performing monstrosities as men are. Human beings frequently surrender to our darkest instincts. Women, of course, are no different. The murders these particular women commit are deeply disturbing, demonstrating women can be every bit as ruthless and dangerous as men – not just victims, but perpetrators as well.

Furthermore, female killers go against all the traits women are assumed to possess, such as passivity and weakness, and upend viewer expectations about femininity. We simply don’t expect murder from women, especially not the kind involving penetration and mutilation. It’s frightening, but at the same time, as a female viewer this moment is powerful because it’s rare for us to see ourselves reflected in such a persona.

There are a few widely accepted interpretations of slasher films (for these purposes, I’m considering Deep Red a slasher as well). As with all horror movies, critics focus on the audience’s response to the action on screen, which is often physical in addition to being emotional. In other words, the main reason audiences enjoy horror so deeply is that we get to enjoy watching victims being maimed in increasingly creative ways while our own entrails remain intact.

Slasher movies, especially Friday the 13th and Deep Red, also give viewers a chance to explore the fluidity of gender identity. Theorists like Linda Williams and Carol Clover contend slasher films allow the assumed male audience members to put themselves in the position of the female victim and empathize with her. Williams acknowledges female viewers obtain pleasure from of watching these movies as well, specifically in reacting to (and acting out) femininity.

These writers have also argued the main appeal of slasher films is the final girl who rises up and defeats her tormentor. She becomes increasingly resourceful and evades death, emerging unscathed from a massacre. Through this experience, she gains the active agency typically reserved for men on film. When women watch horror movies, we dabble in masculine traits by identifying with this final girl. However, it’s rare that we get to try on the role of killer.

Viewers, both male and female, identify with the victims on screen, but there are moments where we also experience the killer’s perspective. These films are set up so there are sequences where subjective camera work places us in the point of view of the murderer. In Friday the 13th we see the counselors as their stalker sees them, stabbing and slicing with careful deliberacy. In Deep Red, viewers also witness brutal acts through the killer’s eyes. In one instance, the anonymous figure simultaneously drowns a victim and scalds her face with hot water.

We assume this perspective is male, not only because of the actions being committed, but also because viewers always assume a male point of view in cinema, whether or not we realize it. The camera’s gaze looks, the female body is looked at. In some ways, it would be a shock to find we had been seeing through the eyes of a woman, no matter what she was doing. In this case, it’s even more unexpected.

For Dario Argento in particular, violent women are a bit of a fixation, even dating back to his first film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The killer in this classic giallo also turns out to be a woman. A previous victim of a violent crime, a gallery owner named Monica becomes a psychotic killer after coming in contact with a piece of art depicting a similar event. Rather than reliving the memory of her victimhood, she instead identifies with the knife-wielding killer and goes on to commit similar acts.

Deep Red also sets up a question of gender roles early on by invoking a screwball comedy-like sparring between Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) and Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), the journalist he works with to solve the case. She has some masculine characteristics; he has some feminine ones. He is a sensitive artist (a pianist), and she is a career woman. He notes it’s a simple fact that men are stronger than women. In response, she challenges him to arm wrestle. She wins twice, and naturally, he accuses of her of cheating. Despite these power plays with his accomplice, it never seems to cross his mind that his invisible sparring partner, the killer, might also be a woman.

In Deep Red and Friday the 13th, Mrs. Voorhees and Marta both make an appearance before they are unveiled as the killers, but neither of them is suspect. Both appear harmless to characters who cross their paths, which likely has something to do with the fact that both killers are middle-aged women. Daly even spots Marta at the scene of the crime, but believes what he saw was only a painting. He is distressed when it seems to disappear. She shows up again some time later when Daly goes to his friend’s apartment hoping to track him down. Instead he finds Marta, who also happens to be his friend’s mother. Daly later discovers “the painting” he saw was Marta’s reflection in the mirror – underlining the idea that he simply doesn’t see her at all.

In Friday the 13th, viewers don’t actually witness the iconic Mrs. Voorhees’ face until the final act, but we do see various campers’ reactions to her. In each case, the campers appear relieved to have come across her. The first victim, Annie (Robbi Morgan), late to her first shift in the kitchen, flashes a dopey grin as she asks for a lift to the camp ground. Similarly, after being barricaded in her cabin and terrorized by the psychopathic killer, Alice (Adrienne King) is deeply relieved when Mrs. Voorhees approaches. Alice even goes so far as to embrace her apparent savior. None of the campers seem the slight bit distressed by Mrs. Voorhees’ appearance. In a turtleneck with dyed, bobbed hair, Mrs. Voorhees appears a maternal figure, but the psychotic glint in her eyes reveals she’s anything but.

Mrs. Voorhees and Marta don’t look like we expect killers to look. As middle-aged women, they appear maternal – more likely to sit you down, feed you cookies and tell you everything will be all right. However, in this case, making assumptions based on appearance is particularly deadly. Older women are often overlooked. As murderesses, Marta and Mrs. Voorhees lend a sense of power and vitality to this demographic. These women seek their revenge on the youth who consider them obsolete, or nurturing figures who exist to support the young people’s story. To play an active role in their own narratives, these women take up the knife.

There are many enjoyable aspects of watching horror movies. Viewers get to toe that fine line of being scared and being exhilarated without fear of actual injury. We also get to float between identification with victims and killers. While we are in the safe space of cinematic imagination, it’s not wrong step out of the role of victim and instead, into that of a killer. As Monica discovers in Bird with the Crystal Plumage, being a victim (however resourceful) grows tiresome after a while. Simultaneously, as maternal figures, Mrs. Voorhees and Marta remind us that women don’t fade to the background with age, and male gender traits don’t belong to men alone.

It’s exhausting to be victimized – first babied and objectified, then cast aside when we are too old to be considered objects of lust. It’s frustrating to be perceived as passive rather than an active force, a person who makes her own choices, however evil they may be. Horror movies have always allowed women to explore their masculinity, and inhabiting the role of killer is an extension of that playfulness. Female killers like Marta and Mrs. Voorhees strike down gendered assumptions, one gruesome murder at a time.

Kate Blair enjoys writing about film and feminism. She currently resides in Chicago with her wife, cat, dog, and a bowl of pasta. You can find more of her scribblings on her blog Selective Viewing or follow her on Twitter @selective_kate

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

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.

This guest post by Mary Iannone appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

How do we recognize a superhero? The word itself implies strength, power, and, most often in today’s saturated market, traditional masculinity. Tony Stark builds dozens of stand-ins for his Iron Man persona, each bigger and more high-tech than the last. Steve Rogers dons red, white, and blue and acts as an all-American symbol of dominance. Thor, a literal god, fights with the power of lightning and an indestructible hammer which only he is worthy to yield. Where then, is there room for the feminine interpretation of superheroism? And why must there be such a sharp distinction between our heroes?

The heroic body is a necessary qualification for superhero status. Physical strength connotes capability. A victim can only trust a stranger who comes to their aid if the stranger looks like they are able to get the job done. Vigilante-type figures can only be accepted within their cities if they look the part and never fail to live up to that standard. This is why the superhero film is not yet inclusive of women – we have not yet accepted the physical strength of women as an equally valid type of heroism.

Within the popular Marvel universe of films, women must exhibit a form of violence that stands in opposition to that which is demonstrated by the traditional male superhero figure. Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, and Maria Hill do not wield immediately recognizable symbols such as those displayed by Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. Their style of violence relies not on external weapons but on their own bodies; Black Widow is introduced in Iron Man 2 as a physical powerhouse, taking down a hallway full of enemies in mere seconds using nothing but her body and a can of mace. 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.

Women in this universe do not get to display traditional modes of violence; the final act of heroism is always performed by a man. Not only do the men deal the final, killing blow, they perform acts of sacrifice that underscore their worth as a hero. In The Avengers, Tony Stark directs a missile away from New York City, fully expecting that he could die. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers confronts the Winter Soldier in the third act’s final battle. In Age of Ultron, Quicksilver sacrifices himself for the team.

In all of these scenarios, Black Widow is part of the action, but is relegated to a supporting role, never getting a huge moment of heroic sacrifice or a moment that causes the audience to burst into applause. She is an integral part of the success of the Avengers team. She tricks Loki into telling her his plan and she closes the portal allowing the alien invaders into Manhattan. But the flashy heroics – Stark’s self-sacrifice, Thor’s battle with the Hulk, and the Hulk’s takedown of Loki – are left to the men. Black Widow is the one who is initially attacked by the Hulk; Thor steps in to save her, leaving her huddled in fear. On one hand, Black Widow does not simply erase her emotions and the potential trauma that this encounter has caused. She is able to remain a hero while still allowing herself to feel victimized. But simultaneously, it devalues her place in the hierarchy of the group and makes her dependent upon a male savior.

It is implied that women are unable to handle the truly horrific violence; Betty Ross is shielded from the Hulk, and both Iron Man 3’s Maya Hansen and Age of Ultron’s Scarlet Witch have a change of heart before the final showdown. Pepper Potts, while not a part of the Avengers team, is still only traditionally violent – using a weapon to take down Aldrich Killian – after she has been injected with Extremis in Iron Man 3. The insinuation is that women can only be physically violent or deal the killing blow when under the influence of a destructive force. Pepper even expresses surprise at her own strength, gasping, “Oh my god…that was really violent!” After Killian’s death, Tony Stark vows to “fix” Pepper – in other words, to return her to her healthier (read: less aggressive) self.

Women in the Marvel Universe can only be directly violent when working on the side of good. Female villains are scarce to begin with, and even then are mostly an assistant to evil rather than the mastermind. Heroes are meant to be idolized; they are set on a plane above true human empathy. But these villains, even with their impossible powers, are still able to be identified with, even in a perverse way. The emotions of anger, resentment, and spite are more potent, and therefore more readily accessible to the layman, than the hero’s complex burden of responsibility and strict adherence to a moral code. But when the villains are female, these negative emotions are perceived not as coolly subversive but as simple complaints. Thus, their violence becomes caustic and reactionary, a nuisance to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

The coding of female superhero violence as less physically destructive than that of their male counterparts reminds audiences that this environment of all-out war is still not a space that is inclusive of women. Each of the title characters is a white, heterosexual, handsome male who acts as an icon of masculinity. The superhero genre reflects many of the same cinematic tropes as the classic war genre; this has left little room for the representation of female superheroes. But at the same time, the multifaceted methods of violence exhibited by these female characters make them the most feared within this universe.

As the Marvel phases continue, Black Widow is joined by Maria Hill and, later, Scarlet Witch. With each addition, our female characters turn more and more towards psychological violence as their most destructive weapon. Black Widow allows herself to be captured in the beginning of The Avengers, giving her male adversaries a sense of dominance before knocking them all out. But she escapes in the superhero genre’s stereotypically “female” way; she does not kill, she only incapacitates. Most notably, she does so in a way that exhibits her entire body. Scarlet Witch looks physically unimposing, but has the power to incapacitate the entire team with one theatrical movement of her hands.

This style of violence is meant to destabilize the enemy – to lull them into a sense of victory before knocking their legs out from under them (often literally). By presenting less of an immediate physical threat, they have access to a wider range of psychological violence against their enemies. Scarlet Witch’s hallucinatory attack against the Avengers in Age of Ultron sends the team into hiding; her potential personal destruction weighs more heavily on the Avengers than Ultron’s plans of world domination.

So why is it that we are still waiting for a female-fronted superhero film? When removed from the team atmosphere and pushed into a leadership role, the characterization of female superheroes seems to falter. It’s time for a female superhero who kicks ass, ends the fight, makes sacrifices, and gets the big cheers.

Mary Iannone holds a Master’s Degree in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, where she studied genre film, Hollywood archetypes, and pop culture’s representations of mental illness. Follow her on Twitter at @mianno.

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

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.

Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Imperator Furiosa and the five wives look down upon the Citadel

This guest post by Cate Young appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

“Strong female character.”

It’s a phrase we hear over and over in pop culture, usually in reference to a female character in an action movie who has lots of guns. “Strong female characters” know how to fight, know how to use weapons and they best all the boys in confrontation. “Strong Female Characters” are effectively measured by their capacity for violence and their competence in the theatre of war.

But what does it mean when we equate strength with violence on a cultural level, and especially in relation to women’s place in society?

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.

The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future desert wasteland where women have been reduced to various forms of slavery and their value is determined by what their bodies can produce. Whether it be breastmilk or babies, women’s position in this world is determined by their physical utility to the oppressive system they occupy. Furiosa is the notable exception, an Imperator who has presumably worked her way up the ranks of Immortan Joe’s highly patriarchal and hyper-masculine cultish new social order.

From the very beginning of the film we see how the women of this world conspicuously and determinedly avoid violence. We are introduced to the Five Wives initially through their absence; they have run away with Imperator Furiosa leaving behind a message for their captor Immortan Joe.

“Our Babies Will Not Be Warlords.” The Five Wives not only want to opt out of the violent system but also ensure that the system does not continue

These simple messages convey two main points: that the Wives are aware of their entitlement to freedom due to their inherent human dignity, and that they acknowledge that eliminating violence not only starts with them, but extends into preventing violence in the next generation. Their first act of resistance is a direct hit against the very violence that allows the oppressive system of this world to maintain itself; removing their future children from the violence of Immortan’s world.

“We Are Not Things.” Miss Giddy defends the Wives’ right to freedom

Later in the film, we see the Wives sidestep violence once again when the War Boy Nux attacks Furiosa as she is driving the War Rig. Furiosa initially wants to kill Nux, but the Wives tell her that there will be “no unnecessary killing” as Nux is brainwashed and “kamakrazee.” Essentially, the Wives know that even though Nux seeks to do them harm, he is simply a product of a violently oppressive system that positions violence as the way to salvation in Valhalla. He is a natural result of this system and a reflection of the fate they are trying to avoid for their own children, and they elect to toss him out of the Rig instead.

This conscious avoidance of violence is replicated in what I think is one of the most powerful scenes in the film: Splendid the Angharad, heavily pregnant with Immortan’s child, uses her body as a shield to protect Furiosa from Immortan’s bullets.

Splendid the Angharad as anti-patriarchal human shield

As I wrote in my initial review of the film:

She literally uses her body, the site of which has undoubtedly been home to rape and assault at the hands of Immortan Joe, (and now a constant reminder of such) as a weapon against him. She uses her increased patriarchal “value” against the very man who rules the patriarchal system of their world. To me, that was a powerful scene because it showed that even as her body had been used against her will to perpetuate a system that enslaved her, The Splendid Angharad did not view herself as property, but as an equal human being, capable of more than breeding warlords. Furiosa’s escape with the Wives was not so much a rescue as a partnership. She and the Wives worked together to achieve shared liberation in The Green Place.

The scene was a clever subversion of the hyper-violence of the film. Angharad’s body, a site of much violence, is used to prevent more of the same, as the other Wives cling to her to keep her safe. It shows that the Wives understand their relative position in this society, the role that ritual violence plays, and their ability to use it to their advantage.

Soon after this scene, Angharad dies, having fallen from the Rig. Furiosa and the Wives are devastated but know they must press-on. After Furiosa asks Toast The Knowing to the match their remaining bullets with their corresponding guns and she informs her that they have very little ammunition left, Dag and Cheedo note that Angharad used to call the bullets “anti-seed”:

“Plant one and watch something die.”

This relates thematically to the violence done upon the very earth on which they live by the men of the world. With reliance on guns and ammunition, the men have “killed the world” and now nothing grows. The state of the earth mirrors the violence that is done to the women and their bodies. It is fitting then that the women who are seeking salvation in “The Green Place” (that they later discover is barren) and are kept by Immortan as “breeders” due to the world’s low fertility would have very little “anti-seed” available to them.

The green place of Furiosa’s youth is now a barren swamp wasteland

When we are finally introduced to the Vuvalini, Furiosa’s previous clan of “Many Mothers” we discover that The Green Place has been decimated and that they are the last members of the clan to survive. These women however, many of them in their senior years are hardened to the world and perfectly acknowledge and understand that violence is sometimes necessary to achieve liberation.

The Vuvalini understand that violence is sometimes needed to achieve liberation

In confrontation with the War Boys and Immortan Joe during their journey back to the Citadel, the Vuvalini defend themselves and the Five Wives from attack on all fronts as the men descend upon them. While many of them fall, their bravery and willingness to sacrifice themselves in some ways mirrors the blind devotion that the War Boys show to Immortan Joe. The difference here is that they die in service to a liberatory ideal and not a cult of personality. The Vuvalini’s advanced age also serves to upturn our cultural notions of what strength entails. Even in the problematic context of strong women as violent, this rarely if ever includes the old. By being portrayed as capable and willing even in their age, the film redefines strength to encompass women who do not usually fall under this umbrella. Even better, it affords the Vuvalini, (including the Keeper of Seeds, and therefore life, strength, youth and vitality) the courtesy of demonstrating that their strength runs deeper than physical violence.

Finally, in the very last act of violence that we see a woman commit in the film, Furiosa confronts Immortan Joe and rips his breathing apparatus away, killing him and removing large chunks of his face. As one of the only acts of violence that can conceivably be perceived as revenge, Furiosa not only kills Immortan, but physically removes his face and thereby his identity, much in the same way that his violence against the Five Wives removed theirs.

Furiosa denies Immortan his identity through violence

It’s fitting that not only does Furiosa kill Immortan, but in light of the desolation of The Green Place she remembers from her youth, she takes up residence with the Wives in the Citadel at the end of the film. She essentially seeks to invert the history of the centre of this world’s violence by making it the centre of redemption instead. With access to clean water and greenery, she can reestablish the environmental richness of her youth, not just for her, but for all of the oppressed citizens of Immortan’s regime.

The Milking Mothers once again provide sustenance to the citizens of Immortan’s oppressive regime

In the end, these “strong female characters” are allowed to avoid violence as much as possible, engaging only as a last resort, and still emerge victorious.

They are allowed to divorce strength from the violence that we assume is inherent to that characteristic, and in the process highlight many of the problems with this larger cultural assumption.

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

‘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.

Sugar, Spice, and Things Not Nice: Violent Girlhood in ‘Violet & Daisy’

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.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Violet & Daisy is written and directed by Geoffrey Fletcher (Oscar-winner for Precious) and stars Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan as the title characters. The stylized Tarantino-esque film, inspired by Thelma and Louise, oscillates between genres. Mostly, it is a coming-of-age story of two teenage assassins, with a play-like structure, scenes with heavy dialogue occurring one room between the girls and the man they’ve been sent to kill, played by James Gandolfini. The snafu is that they grow to care for him, making it hard to get the job done. And they need the money to buy dresses from their favorite celebrity line, Barbie Sunday.

Violet & Daisy subverts the notion that girls are not a part of such nastiness–the mafia, crime organizations, robberies, and murder. Fletcher magnifies the girlish and childlike imagery to challenge the viewer on this. It is clear from the poster–two girls holding bright cherry red lollipops, and the tagline “Too much sugar can kill you”–that the film will be fetishizing juvenile images.

These images run rampant throughout the film: blowing bubblegum, playing patty cake, yo-yo tricks, dressing as uniformed schoolgirls. One scene shows them lusting after the oatmeal cookies Gandolfini’s character bakes. They gulp down glasses of milk and reveal their milk mustaches. 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.

Violet and Daisy use their girlhood to their advantage; the men around them underestimate their skill or cannot fathom their participation in such acts. The girls often sneak past the cops right under their noses. After a hit, they throw their nun disguises in the trash and round the corner in new matching gym outfits, playing swords with sticks (another child image). When Violet is in a store after a shoot-up, the cop questions her as a witness. Violet taunts him by asking, “What makes you think a girl can’t be in on it?” The cop obliterated any idea of her involvement because of her sex and young appearance. The rival gang that is also after Gandolfini’s character, dangerous and hardboiled men, mock Violet and her boss. They joke that he must have been too deep into the economic depression to “send a cunt like you to do a man’s job.” We have male characters erasing or overlooking Violet and Daisy’s actions because of their sex and gender, assuming that it defines their capabilities. Violet and Daisy prove themselves to be more than capable of their job, taking it seriously and referring to themselves as “career women.”

Violet and Daisy are primarily detached from their hits, usually murdering men who have committed a crime or a grievance against their boss. However, there is one instance of vengeance violence. It is revealed, through Daisy’s initial misunderstanding then realization, that Violet was raped by the rival male gang- all significantly older men. Violet does end up murdering these characters- though out of mere circumstance rather than seeking them out in order to enact revenge. They are also after Gandolfini’s character, coming to his home and threatening him and Daisy. Violet saves the day by sneaking up behind them and shooting them all. The film does not frame incredible emphasis on this aspect of vengeance, for she seems to be enjoy inflicting death no matter who it is. This unnecessary trope could have easily been left out of the narrative, there are other ways to establish a rival group of assassins. However, I do appreciate that there was no exploitative flashback scene depicting the act.

We are disturbed by women who commit violence; they violate our culture mores and assert their independence and agency in threatening ways. Our disturbance is greater when it is a young girl, expected to be pedestals of purity and unwavering goodness. This is evident in the film’s R MPAA rating, for not only violence but “disturbing behavior.” Naturally, their fear is manifested in these child-like young women who gleefully and willingly glorify murder. One scene features the girls stepping on dead bodies, exclaiming joyfully time for the “internal bleeding dance!” The most violent scene features Alexis Bleldel wielding a fire extinguisher as a weapon, the blood splattering on screen as we hear the thunk of metal hitting bodies. However, most of the violence–even the ramifications of the fire extinguisher–is off-screen. Thus the idea of young women doing this is just as disturbing as viewing it.

Yet while some may be disturbed by violence in girlhood performance, we have seen other similar characters on screen. We turn to Natalie Portman’s performance in The Professional and Chloe Moretz in Kick Ass. In The Professional, do we accept the world-weary child, who dares Leon to sniper shoot the passerby, because she evokes adulthood via mannerisms? Hit Girl from Kick Ass seems to be played for farcical shock, and is far more violent than anything seen in Violet and Daisy. Audience members marvel that an 11 year old girl, who should be playing with Barbie dolls, is instead calling men cunts, stabbing swords through their chests and cutting off their legs. A.O. Scott’s New York Times review of Violet & Daisy scolds it for “hav[ing] nothing to respond to beyond the spectacle of girls with guns.” While I do not think Violet & Daisy is nearly as exploitative as Sucker Punch, we must consider its elements. Sucker Punch reads as a masturbatory fantasy of girls wielding guns and swords as a means of giving themselves agency and vengeance over the men who exploit them. The main character, Baby Doll, also appropriates girlish imagery, creating this strange eternal child who is taken advantage of repeatedly in highly sexual ways. It is a spectacle in every way imaginable, but I do not think Violet & Daisy fetishizes violence nearly as much, for the plot is centered on tripping up their physical ruthlessness by forming a genuine emotional connection with their victim.

Violet & Daisy is a film that plays with its genre and is hard to read. Is it a fantasy? Or a commentary on violence? Should we take it seriously? One thing is clear- it deliberately engages with child-like motifs to challenge our views about girlhood, depicting young girls as capable agents enacting violent acts. Child or childlike assassins have been used in film before to comment on both societal terrors and curiosities. Looking at Violet & Daisy, I feel that it uses child-like imagery to amplify our cultural fear of violent women, as evident by the men who underestimate their mental and physical capabilities. A woman wielding a gun is terrifying, but a young girl wielding one is even more so, and Fletcher augments that taboo by pervading the film with childlike imagery.

Caroline Madden has a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory and is currently an MA Cinema Studies student at Savannah College of Art and Design. She writes about film at Geek Juice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

Children: The Great Qualifier of Female Violence

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.

This guest post by Katherine Fusciardi appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies are often used in the discussion on the Rape Revenge genre of films. However, Kill Bill is actually one of the movies that falls under that genre, but doesn’t actually have much to do with rape revenge. Kill Bill’s “The Bride” character is an example of when other reasons for revenge are presented, when a woman is allowed to be violent for reasons other than seeking vengeance for a sexual assault. Aside from avenging her dead fiancé, the bride also seeks vengeance for the death of her child. Through further examination of well-liked violent female characters in popular media a pattern appears. Violent women can be loved as characters, as long as their reason for violence is sound in the mind of the viewer. Rape revenge is one of those acceptable reasons, another is the violent loss of a child.

As stated in Tammy Oler’s “The Brave Ones,”

“Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2 and The Brave One are notable not just because they are among the most commercially successful films about revenge ever made, but also because they don’t use rape as their starting point” (Oler 34).

Beatrix Kiddo, “the bride,” makes it very clear that she is after revenge for her fiancé and child. When she confronts Vernita Green she claims she will not attack while Vernita is near her own child, but makes it clear she will still kill Vernita.

“No, to get even, even-Steven… I would have to kill you… go up to Nikki’s room, kill her… then wait for your husband, the good Dr. Bell, to come home and kill him. That would be even, Vernita. That’d be about square” (Kill Bill).

Beatrix goes back on this promise when Vernita attacks, resulting in Vernita’s daughter witnessing the whole incident. Given that this is the first fight the viewer sees Beatrix in, it shapes her character. Beatrix’s response to the situation shows how cold she can be expected to be. She tells the little girl,

“It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I’m sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it coming. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting” (Kill Bill).

With that amount of motivation behind Beatrix’s revenge, the rationale for her violence should be covered. However, even Oler’s article admitted that despite the different reasons for revenge presented, there is still a sexualizing to that female character, such as the rape seen in the first Kill Bill movie, in which Beatrix wakes up from her coma to find that she has been raped repeatedly in her sleep. Tammy Oler questioned whether that was necessary or not:

“Is it because it heightens the sense of victimization or because we believe that rape, real or otherwise, is the only believable crime that prompts women to such anger and violence?” (Oler 34)

A proper response to that question can be found by delving into other popular violent female characters, such as Carol and Michonne from the hit AMC television series The Walking Dead. In the beginning of the series the viewers are introduced to Carol Peletier, a housewife trying to survive the zombie apocalypse with her abusive husband and their daughter Sophia. When the abusive husband dies in season one there is the expectation that Carol will be able to develop more as a character without her husband around to push her back down. However, that development doesn’t happen. It isn’t until her daughter dies in season two that the viewer sees any change in Carol’s character.

At the beginning of season two, Sophia, Carol’s daughter, goes missing after a “walker” (zombie) attack. Sophia is not confirmed dead until she is found as a walker at the end of season two, episode seven: “Pretty Much Dead Already.” In episode eight, “Nebraska” Carol says,

“That’s not my little girl. It’s some other… thing. My Sophia was lost in the woods. All this time, I thought. But she didn’t go hungry. She didn’t cry herself to sleep. She didn’t try to find her way back. Sophia died a long time ago” (The Walking Dead S2EP8)

when asked to attend her child’s funeral. This attitude is the first indication of the transformation Carol will undergo.

In season four of The Walking Dead Carol is asked to take two girls, Lizzie and Mika, under her protection by their dying father. As part of their education the girls are required to learn the proper way to kill walkers and are instructed to never call Carol “Mom.” When asked by Lizzie why Carol’s daughter wasn’t there anymore Carol responds “She didn’t have a mean bone in her body” (The Walking Dead S4EP14) and insists that the girls learn a lesson from that, which is to do whatever it takes to survive; kill walkers and kill people. Killing people is something Carol had recently come to terms with, killing two influenza infected members of their group to protect the rest.

When it becomes apparent Lizzie has become mentally disturbed, and refuses to kill walkers because she believes they are good, Carol labels Lizzie as weak and begins grooming Mika, the younger sister, to be the tougher survivor. However, in that same episode, Lizzie murders her little sister in order to turn her into a walker. Once Carol realizes Lizzie will never be able to live among people again, Carol shoots Lizzie and never speaks about either girl ever again.

Though out the series the viewers are also introduced to a new character, Michonne. Michonne is a katana wielding woman that instantly became a show favorite. When Michonne was introduced into the series in season three she was accompanied by two jawless, armless walkers kept chained to her person. Later in the season she reveals that the two walkers were her boyfriend and his friend. Her boyfriend was also the father of her child, which died after the apocalypse began. She blamed those two men, whom she found undead along with the child in their camp, for the death of her son. When telling the story of her son’s death, Michonne describes going on a supply run and returning to her camp only to find her son dead and both men bitten. “They were high when it happened,” she said, “And they were bit. I could have stopped it, could of killed them, but I let them turn” (The Walking Dead, S4EP16). To punish them, and herself, even after death she mutilated their walker bodies so they would no longer be a threat and kept them chained to her at all times. This was her way of ensuring that neither of the men would find rest. “It was insane. It was sick. It felt like what I deserved” (S4EP16).

The popularity of these characters shows that the masses can accept the motivation of violent women for more than rape revenge. So, why is rape revenge is still considered the go-to reason for female violence? In a paper written and presented by Ruby Tapia at the Visual Culture Gathering, the issues of race and feminism as they relate to Kill Bill are discussed. The paper uses quotes from Quentin Tarantino to explain his motivation. As stated earlier, the rape scene in Kill Bill changes the motivation of the character and introduces rape-revenge as a fall back reasoning for Beatrix’s violence. To Tarantino it was his way of addressing issues he saw n society:

“Once I got this idea in my mind, I couldn’t get it out. It would be a lot easier if I didn’t go down that road, but then that would be cowardice to me. Because there have been reports about, you know, comatose patients being raped” (Ruby Tapia, Quentin Tarantino 33).

The conversation continues with Tarantino describing an obsession with the idea, and described it as the spice that would get viewers addicted to his film. To which Tapia had to say, “Thus, buried so deep inside the filmic narrative as Tarantino might suggest, is the rape fantasy turned real” (34).

Taken straight from Tarantino, we can see that the rape scene was never meant to be a factor into Beatrix’s motivation. It was simply thrown in out of Tarantino’s whim, as both a nod to feminism and a lure for his movie. With that in mind, it means the rape scene has zero meaning to the plot. Rape revenge has nothing to do with Kill Bill, outside of that one scene.

Rape revenge ceases to the only viable motivation for violent women when these three popular characters are analyzed. Beatrix Kiddo was not seeking revenge for her rape, she was seeking revenge for her fiancé and child. From The Walking Dead, neither Carol nor Michonne was raped. They became violent following the violent losses of their children. The reasoning behind the violent acts committed by these women does bring to mind a different issue. 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.

Works Cited

Oler, Tammy. “The Brave Ones.” Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture Winter, 2009, 30-34. Print.

Kill Bill Vol. 1. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Perf. Uma Thurman, David Carradine. Miramax Films, 2003 DVD.

Tapia, Ruby. “Volumes of Transnational Vengeance: Fixing Race and Feminism on the Way to Kill Bill.” Visual Arts Research Vol. 32. No 2 (2006): 32-37. Print.

“Nebraska.” The Walking Dead Season Two. Exec. Producer Frank Durabont. Perf. Mellissa McBride. AMC, 2011. DVD.

“A.” The Walking Dead Season Four. Exec. Producer Frank Durabont. Perf. Danai Gurira. AMC, 2013. DVD.

Katherine Fusciardi is a senior in the English program at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Katherine created the student organization known as SCAR (Student Campaign Against Rape) and is currently using her position as president to increase awareness, action, and support on her campus.

‘Stoker’–Family Secrets, Frozen Bodies, and Female Orgasms

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.

This guest post by Julie Mills appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Turning 18 is a big deal for any teenager. It’s a huge milestone on the rough road to adulthood, a time of change and discovering one’s true self. For India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), it is so much more. Her whole world is about to be turned upside down.

Right from the beginning, Stoker pulls you into India’s own special microcosm, which is as captivating as it is haunting. This girl is highly intelligent, but introverted and socially awkward, and it is hinted that she has a mild autism spectrum disorder. She is playful and ever curious to feel, to experience, to know everything. She has been raised in a privileged, protective environment and is quiet, shy, and innocent–innocent as a baby predator before she has made her first kill.

India surrounded by her shoe collection. She gets a new pair every year for her birthday.

India has just lost her father, and the arrival of her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), who seems to appear out of nowhere and whom neither India nor her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) have ever met before, throws her life off balance even further.

Uncle Charlie is handsome, charming, and creepy as hell. He has “danger” written all over him, and Evelyn falls for him right away, seeing in him a younger version of her late husband. While expertly weaving his web of charms around his sister-in-law, Charlie also immediately starts to subtly influence his niece, deliberately provoking her and testing her reactions, following her every move with his piercing blue eyes. His moving in with India and her mother sets off a new dynamic that might have been a love triangle, but turns out to be more of a three-way power struggle.

A rare moment of intimacy between mother and daughter.

India’s relationship with her mother is distant at the best of times. In focusing all his attention on their daughter, India’s late father had severely neglected his wife Evelyn, who has turned lonely and bitter over the years. There is hardly a scene with her in it where she is not holding on to a glass of wine as if it were a lifeline. Her husband’s death might have finally provided an opportunity for the two women to bond, but their intense jealousy over Charlie threatens to drive them even further apart.

Stoker was Hollywood actor Wentworth Miller’s stunning debut as a script writer, as well as the first English-language work of South Korean director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), which explains why in some places the film comes across as a little rough around the edges, but on the whole is fresh and highly intriguing. As with Tideland, Pan’s Labyrinth, or Hannah, to truly appreciate the story you must allow yourself to take on the lead character’s unique perspective, to lay aside your judgment and morality and simply enjoy the disturbing yet engrossing visual ride. Just don’t expect an orgy of violence or bloodbath as can be found in some of Park’s previous movies. This is a psychological thriller, not an action movie. The pace is slow, peeling away layer by layer of deceit and building the suspense gradually like a Hitchcock film (the name “Uncle Charlie” is actually a reference to Shadow of a Doubt).

Who knew how much sexual tension can be in a piano duet?

Among other portrayals of violent women, Stoker stands out because there aren’t many stories about female psychopaths around, and because India’s attraction to violence is closely intertwined with her budding sexuality. 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.

What bothered me most about the story was the fact that in the beginning India is presented as passive like a stereotypical female, waiting and longing to be rescued. Apparently she has to rely on male assistance and guidance in order to discover and awaken her full potential. Her father had, not unlike the father of TV’s Dexter, been systematically grooming her all her life, training her to deal with any “bad” feelings by keeping her isolated and taking her hunting regularly, teaching her that “sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse.” And after his death his brother Charlie takes over, leading India in a completely different direction, but still exerting control over her.

This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, even in the story’s universe, because India’s dark urges are presented as an inherent part of her nature (her uncle mentions the two of them sharing the same blood), yet have remained inexplicably inert. If her violent impulses had been so strong as to warrant the long lasting control by her father, she wouldn’t have needed her uncle’s encouragement to be set free, and vice versa. In contrast, Charles had discovered his lust for killing on his own, when he was just a boy. Also, when her uncle gives India her first pair of high-heeled shoes that somehow instantly completes India’s transformation into womanhood, which feels like a weird variant of the makeover trope.

BAM.

Personally, for me the most gratifying parts are when India resists Charlie and questions what she has been told, even while she is becoming increasingly infatuated with him. She sets off to seek out her own answers, going through her late father’s things and uncovering dark secrets both her father and her uncle had been keeping from her. In the end, the student surpasses the teacher. India breaks free of her uncle’s control and acts out of her own volition, leaving her old life behind.

I would just love a sequel to this, to see the story escalate from here, preferably in the style of Natural Born Killers or The Devil’s Rejects. Unleashed, India is glorious. She is a true psychopath, hurting people and killing without remorse, simply for her own pleasure. She was neither forced to become violent to fight for survival, nor is she looking for retribution for something that has been done to her in the past. It’s just in her nature.

At first glance this appears to be a classical story about a dangerous predator seducing and corrupting the innocent. But maybe India was never innocent to begin with. Maybe she was simply inexperienced.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJWrXKoTpL0″]

Julie Mills is in the process of throwing away a perfectly fine, well-paying career to become a full-time writer. At the moment she is working on her first NaNoWriMo project, which is about a female serial killer. You can find her on Twitter @_Julie_M_

TV and Classic Literature: Is ‘The 100’ like ‘Lord of the Flies’?

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.

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

A group of delinquent teenagers are dropped (literally) on an uninhabited hostile land and left to fend for themselves–sounds just like my GCSE English required reading Lord of the Flies, right? And, I mean spoilers, but that book doesn’t turn out great in the end; there’s fascism and death and the simulated rape of a pig, so we all know leaving teenagers on their own in survival mode doesn’t have the best track record. Sure enough, within the first 15 minutes of the first episode of the CW’s The 100, guards are pulling these teens from their cells and forcibly tagging them while there’s talk of executions, shooting them in a spaceship to Earth, and then Murphy and Wells get into a fist fight. The pilot episode of the show plays very much into what is expected- the teen boys are into violence and rebellion, the girls are giddy objects of desire or the nagging voice of reason. But then you keep watching, and the unexpected complexity of the show becomes apparent.

William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies, talked about his time teaching at a boy’s school as an inspiration for his novel–he saw in his young pupils the capacity for being brutal little shits (I’m paraphrasing him here), and as the thin veneer of society is removed from his characters’ lives, so too are the restraints on their innate animalistic nature. The 100, however, focuses less on the propensity for evil away from society, and more on violence as a direct product of the society they’ve grown up in; when Clarke insists in Season One that Murphy be brought to justice for killing Wells, the response is “float him,” language used to describe capital punishment on The Ark. A swift and harsh system of justice on their old satellite home is arguably about survival by reducing population, but to these teens the death on the ground seems even more justified than floating people for the smallest of crimes. But the floating on the Ark, and the hanging on the ground have another crucial difference centred around physicality, violence, and distance. The literal and figurative difference in distance between pressing a button to open an airlock, versus watching someone blooded and gasping on the end of a rope you tied, versus stabbing someone with a knife, gives an ambiguity to violence and the way it is viewed on screen.

Violence on a basic level has unavoidable connotations of great physical force, fighting and hurting directly, but I would argue that this idea should be expanded out to include instances of harm and death doled out at a distance. The sacrificial death of the 300 citizens on the Ark might not have been in combat, but it is a vital act of violence by the Council, which further continued The 100’s breakdown of good vs bad characterisations on the show. In turn, the finale of Season Two sees Clarke’s own desperate act of violence, in a direct mirroring of her mother’s decision the previous season, to kill off a population for the good of “her people.” The show has an impressive amount of women in leadership roles, and much of its exploration of violence is around the lengths they will go to ensure the survival of their individual communities. In the world of The 100, which seems to be implicitly a world which has moved beyond modern sexism, this is removed from gender… but as viewers now, in a world which very much still has issues with gender inequality, these make for complex women with strong and uncompromising characterisation. They are allowed to make decisions which affect the plot as well as their own emotional state and relationships.

The violence of women in The 100 is different from most female violence on screen in that it is not itself sexualised or derived from the sexual. There are no skintight leather outfits (as seen in movies like Sucker Punch), no sexual violence (every rape revenge film ever…also Sucker Punch), no girls fighting over a boy. 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. Her willingness to fight is not solely centred around a Father figure or the excuse of “oh, I have three brothers” to answer the question of where this unladylike behaviour stems from, as seen in films like Hanna and Kick-Ass, but instead comes from her own anger. This individualistic anger at her history with the oppressive authority of The Ark manifests itself in a breakdown of social loyalties to her Sky People and a willingness to attach her communal identity to the Grounders.

Octavia’s identity is somewhat extraordinary, because of the immediate violence that ensues when different cultures and societies typically cross paths; from Jasper’s spearing at the end of the pilot, to the use of Grounder blood to sustain the lives on Mount Weather, the very act of creating a cohesive society seems to rely on the demonising and destruction of all others. In Lord of the Flies, the human deaths begin after the group splits themselves up into “tribes,” creating an artificial but all too real divide. Similarly, in The 100, after it is revealed that Wells was not killed by Grounders, Bellamy insists that they lie to the others, to give them a common enemy. Although at this point we are still looking to Clarke as the earnest moral compass (“The people have a right to know”), it quickly becomes obvious that this cookie cutter idea of fairness is a naivety that they can’t afford, when she inadvertently starts a murderous mob. When she boldly proclaims, “We don’t decide who lives and dies,” as if it’s her manifesto, we as an audience imagine that this is the best path forward and cheer her breaking away from the oppressive regime of The Ark. But the writers refuse such an easy way out and deny her the ability to shy away from making the harsh decisions needed in a leadership role as the world they inhabit becomes increasingly hostile. Clarke starts as a supporter of absolute morality, viewing violence as a destructive chaotic force, but her voice of reason quickly breaks down as her superior sense of morality is revealed to do more harm than good. Clarke’s first act as leader is to banish Murphy from their camp, marking him as other, essentially sentencing him to a de facto death, and ultimately becoming the start of her journey into a grey moral leadership that seems unavoidable in the world of the show.

While the visceral and hypnotic nature of the hunting and killing in Lord of the Flies is graphically horrifying in its violence, the reality of the “distanced death” in The 100 is equally disturbing. In the Season 2 finale, Clarke forces herself to watch through security footage as her actions kill every inhabitant of Mount Weather, and through tear-streaked eyes keeps watching the scene as she says “let’s go get our people.” For her, as with so many other acts of violence in both the real and fictional world, it was a terrible decision but for the “right reasons,” because it was to protect her people, her family, her loved ones. However, the edge of bitterness that permeates Eliza Taylor’s delivery of that line suggests a growing understanding in Clarke of the arbitrary nature of these divides, particularly with the cross-population romances, Octavia’s acceptance into Grounder culture, the rift between The 100 and the Ark adults, and her own relationship with Lexa. As she walks through the room of corpses and hears Jasper’s voice crack as he asks her “what did you do […] if you’d have just given me one more minute,” you can see the mirroring of the Ark culling from the previous season, and the toll it is going to take on her. One major criticism of Golding’s novel is the “cop-out” ending where the boys are rescued from the island just as the story reaches its bloody climax, but Season 3 of The 100, at least for Clarke, looks to be ultimately concerned with aftermath. The psychological backlash that Clarke experiences after her role in the massacre will undoubtedly shape her story arc next season as she journeys off alone.

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

‘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.

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.

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.

‘Girlhood’: Observed But Not Seen

‘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.

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

When Boyhood was making its victory lap through critics’ circles and award ceremonies, I wasn’t the only person who thought, “I want a film called Girlhood.” We all got our wish near the beginning of this year when the out writer-director of Water Lilies and Tomboy, Céline Sciamma, gave us the art house US release Girlhood about a French, Black teenager, Marieme (Karidja Touré). The English title isn’t an exact translation of the original French Bande de Filles (“Group of Girls”) which was in production long before Boyhood was released–and perhaps even before that film was called Boyhood: the original title was 12 Years. Still, I was eager to see Sciamma’s film–until I read about its “bleak” ending and some talk from women of color that they found the writer-director’s take on Marieme’s life lacking. When the film played at my local art house as a revival months after its first run, I went to see it. I’m glad I did, but now I understand both reactions: the effusive praise and the cringing.

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. Marieme and the rest of the team all live in the same neighborhood so after the game they walk home together with each saying “Good night” to the rest as she leaves the group to go home. Marieme is the only one left at the end, making her way up to her family’s apartment, where we see that she and her sister, who is a couple of years younger than she is, (Marieme is 15 or 16 at the beginning of the film) are the ones raising their much younger sister, cooking her meals and doing the dishes while their mother works. Their older brother is a physically abusive, petty dictator who kicks Marieme out of the living room when he comes home, so he can have the computer soccer game she was playing to himself.

Marieme finds out that she is flunking out of school and an unsympathetic counselor won’t listen to her excuses, or allow her to redeem herself. Dejected, she leaves, then just outside the school meets up with a group of three girls about her age, also not attending classes, who invite her to go to Paris with them (the film seems to mostly take place in the Parisian suburbs). At first she turns them down but when she notices the attention they receive from a group of local boys (including a friend of her brother’s she’s attracted to) she decides to go to Paris with the other girls after all.

In the city the girls unapologetically take up space, whether blasting music and teaching each other dance routines in a crowded metro car (with the white passengers turning their backs on them, pretending not to notice) or shaming and shoving a white clothing store clerk who profiles them. Marieme is entranced and becomes a permanent part of the group. She exchanges her long braids for the long straight weave/wig similar to that of the leader of the group Lady (Assa Sylla) and intimidates one of her former football teammates into giving her money that the group pool into a night in a motel room (with extra for food and booze). While she’s partying with her friends her brother calls, but Lady, while taking a bath, instructs her not to answer. She tells Marieme, “You do what you want.” When Marieme repeats the words back to Lady, she says she should look in her bag for a gift, a necklace that spells out “Vic.” “As in ‘victory,'” Lady tells her. We later find out “Lady” isn’t her real name either: it’s “Sophie.”

In another highlight the girls lip sync to “Diamonds” (the Sia Furler song sung by Rihanna) while in the room, wearing the new dresses they’ve shoplifted, dancing (shot stunningly by cinematographer Crystel Fournier) like they are in their own music video. But the high life never lasts–afterward when Marieme, now known as “Vic” returns to the apartment her brother chokes her, telling her to never ignore his calls again.

By this time Vic’s nearly silent mother knows that she is out of school and has arranged for her to join her at her job cleaning hotel rooms. We see the defeated expression on Vic’s face as she scrubs a bathroom sink but aren’t prepared when, at the end of the shift, Vic grabs the supervisor’s hand, as in a handshake but squeezes and twists it until the supervisor agrees to tell her mother that she doesn’t have a position for Vic after all.

We’re used to seeing teenaged protagonists, especially those who suffer physical abuse at home, turn to petty crime and violence in film, but they’re rarely girls: the only other unapologetically violent, girl-protagonist that comes readily to mind is Reese Witherspoon’s Vanessa in 1996’s Freeway. We see Lady and the others in the group call out insults to other groups of Black girls which sometimes leads to nothing and sometimes culminates in scheduled fights (complete with a crowd of spectators filming the event with their phones). One of these fights leads to a humiliating defeat for Lady and the chance for Vic to avenge it. In Vic’s fight, she not only takes off the other girl’s shirt, as the girl did to Lady, she takes out her switchblade and cuts off the girl’s bra as well. When she comes home, her brother, who apparently saw the fight on YouTube, instead of hitting her (as he usually does when he calls her into a room) invites her to play computer soccer with him.

When Vic sees her younger sister with a group of other girls her age robbing a woman’s purse she ‘s upset. On the train ride home she implies she too will swear off stealing and fighting–only to find her brother waiting for her in the apartment with a beat-down, angry that she’s had sex with his friend (this boyfriend is one of the only Black men or boys in the film who is presented as more than a cardboard thug).

Sciamma is at her best when the girls are alone together (including an early funny scene between Marieme and her slightly younger sister) and also as in her earlier films when her characters seem to be exploring their sexual orientation and gender expression. Unlike every other woman or girl character in a movie, when Vic is in a dress and high heels it’s only until she can change into sweats and sneakers. At one point she wears her hair in short cornrows and binds her breasts, to protect herself as a woman alone on the street, but she continues to wear her “disguise” when she is at home as well. The scenes when she talks to Lady in the bathtub as well as a later dance with a sex worker/roommate have a sexual tension to them that Vic’s scenes with her boyfriend (even as she, just before they have sex together for the first time, objectifies his bare ass) don’t equal.

But during other scenes I felt Sciamma was observing these girls as a sociologist or tourist might, as opposed to truly seeing and understanding them or giving their scenes the same nuance the white male director of Our Song gave to the girls of color who were his main characters. The sometimes careless cinematography doesn’t help; although Touré is photographed beautifully in most of the first part of the film (she’s never lovelier than when, in the presence of the boy she likes, she looks down and smiles) in some latter parts she’s poorly lit (a persistent problem of white photographers and cinematographers with dark skinned actresses/subjects), so we can’t clearly make out her features.

Other reviews made me dread a downer ending. Needlessly degrading or deeming “hopeless” a woman or girl character is one of the biggest clichés writers, especially male ones, have at their disposal and I’m not the only woman who is sick of it. But the last shot of Vic isn’t any more hopeless than the one of another, very famous teenaged protagonist in French film who had also gotten into a lot of trouble, Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. And unlike him, Vic wears a look of determination on her face as she walks purposefully away from us.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.