A pack of youths, male and female, made their way through Philadelphia’s Center City, a hub of fine dining and entertainment troubled in recent years by sporadic violence. People were attacked at random. Maria was shopping for a wedding dress with her cousin Cecelia and had stopped at a Walnut St. café for a break. Suddenly, a young man who jumped onto a chair outside reached through the open restaurant window and took Cecelia’s cell phone from their table. Maria was the first to run after him, but she was brought up short—punched in the face by another young woman. Cecelia recalls the girl’s threatening words, “What are you going to do, whore?” Frightened, Cecelia and Maria ran away. 1Based on Dave Davies, “Center City Wrestles with Teen Violence and Its Image”RAFFAELLA: Through the half-open door, I see Mama looking at Papa sleeping. The axe is next to her. Suddenly I know what she’s going to do. And I want her to do it. I almost screamed, “Stop!” But a part of me wants him to die, for all the fights, and his fingers poking me, pawing me. Mama raises the axe. I am happy and excited because … Mama hit him once! He moves a little. Twice! He makes a sound. Three times! … Mama drops the axe and turns her back on him. She thinks it’s over. I see his arm come up, reaching toward her. Or do I? I don’t know anymore. I run into the room. Pick up the axe. Hit him on his head where he’s bleeding, on his arm that he’s stretching out toward us. Again and again. (Screaming.) Stop it! Don’t ever touch me again. You hear? Never touch me again! Ahhhh. (howling, Raffaella raises her arms. … The impulse to axe Pietro has taken over her body.) 2Frank Canino, The Angelina Project
These two incidents show women committing violence in almost opposite contexts. The first is reported by a journalist as news coverage of a contemporary event. The young woman initiating the violence is, presumably, a teenager and US citizen in a domestic city. The setting is public, the action unprovoked, its source indeterminable. She assaults a stranger, hurling insults, trying to start a fight, yet probably doing no lasting damage. Although perhaps angry and spurred by other peers in her group, she appears in control of herself and enjoying her participation in the gang-like rampage. The second are the words of a playwright given to a woman who is revealing her past to her own daughter, remembering herself and her mother as Italian immigrants to Canada. The setting of the violence is private, in the bedroom of their home. The mother and daughter assault their alcoholic husband and father, who physically abused his wife and sexually molested his daughter for years. He had also demanded that his wife prostitute herself to support the family, threatening to kill her at the end of the day if she did not. The only language comes from the daughter, breaking her silence to vent her rage against her persecutor, who probably could no longer hear her. Desperate to find a way out of her hell, she is almost on the brink of insanity. The end result to the victim is death. Although the second incident comes from a work of art, it was based on a true story researched by the playwright. I chose these two examples because they represent the extraordinary range of violence enacted by women in cultural and artistic theatres.
This book explores the nexus of theatre, gender studies, and psychology/sociology to consider the dialectical relationships between what “actually” happens in our world when women engage in violence, how the events and their reception intercept with cultural understandings of gender, the development of plays about violent women, and how their productions actually or potentially impact audiences. This art can be part of a socially aware production of meaning that asks us to consider both the reality of women’s violence, how it is, and what parameters, what multiplicities of possibility, should exist for its enactment in life and live theatre—an art form that uses human beings in action as its primary medium. Such production can be part of a necessary counter-cultural education for its audiences.
Violence has been gendered, but we need to work to degender and demystify it, so it is not normatively the right of men, the demonization of women, or the sexualization of either. Then we could reveal the dangers and consequences of destructively dominant and vengeful modes of violence, while valuing prosocial modes that use physical force in the service of self-defense, protection of others, and justice. Actions should be evaluated not on the basis of the perpetrator’s sex but on their motivations, contexts, and outcomes. Responsible theatre has the power to impact the perception and employment of violence in the world, prompting reflection on what choices we make regarding the use of force. And that could allow us to move toward greater individual as well as collective well-being and peace.
Violence comes in many forms and from a great variety of impulses. Slavoj Žižek’s Violence: Six Sideways Reflections identifies three modes of violence: subjective, objective, and symbolic. Subjective violence is what we normally perceive as violence, when there is a visible agent enacting it. That is merely the end point, however. Objective violence, hereafter referred to as structural or systemic violence, is often invisible, involving, for instance, the exploitations and oppressions essential to the workings of capitalism. It includes the violence of “poverty, hunger, social exclusion, and humiliation.” 3 We ignore structural and symbolic violence to our peril, Žižek argues, for they provide the groundswell from which subjective violence emerges. 4 Although symbolic violence is beyond the scope of this work, systemic causes for personal violence have often been ignored in the media 5 and cultural imagination. In a clever revision of second-wave feminism’s formulation, Sharon Friedman brings this point home: “The personal is inseparable from the social.” 6 This book focuses on subjective violence prompted primarily by psychological and sociological forces. Although no universal explanations exist for violence, 7 patterns can often be perceived.
Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined further delineates different kinds of violence based on the needs they fulfill: predation, dominance, revenge, sadism, and ideology (for example, jihad). Making analogies with the animal kingdom, Pinker sees predation as not a true category of human violence, because it is not typically destructive in its aim and involves no hatred or anger. His second two categories are the ones that this book will explore in more detail. Interestingly, he argues that the pursuit of dominance is sometimes based on a need for protection and leads more to posturing in order to secure one’s position in the social hierarchy than to actual physical fights. Although he identifies social dominance as masculine, 8 this kind of aggression can arise among women as well, especially in certain ethnic and socioeconomic contexts. Revenge can also function as a deterrent against future violence and serve a moralistic function for a perpetrator in pursuit of justice. This kind of “self-help” justice is particularly prevalent among the lower classes, which for various reasons often do not use the legal system to right their wrongs. 9 However, there are certainly perpetrators endowed with wealth and social status. Violence is often promoted by some identifiable conditions but knows no boundaries.
Not much analysis of this kind makes it into discussions about women and violence. The work of feminists over the past 50 years has significantly improved the quality of women’s lives across the globe and broadened, in some ways, conceptions of female identity. But despite heroic efforts, women are still routinely constricted and judged by cultural norms that evidence the desperate need to control females’ use of force. Conversely, society also wants to believe in women’s essential goodness and innocence. This begs the question: if they are innately good, then why do they need to be so controlled? Historically, the ideal promulgated by particularly upper-class Whites meant a young woman’s arenas of physical, psychological, and moral/spiritual contact were severely limited almost exclusively to the domestic sphere. She was supposed to pass from the protection of her father to the protection of her husband, since women were considered the property of men. This ensured she would never exist independently beyond their circumscription, never live in a space where she might be vulnerable to “harm,” (read “devaluation”) defined most specifically as the loss of her honor/virginity. She was not to allow even the sun to have contact with her skin and leave its darkening mark. She was not to handle things that might show any wear on her hands—the more pristine, the more valuable she was.
Perhaps prompting those mores was an anxiety concerning what these women might otherwise do. Caesar Lombroso’s The Female Offender (1895) led the field of criminal anthropology toward a view of Victorian womanhood based on fear of female deviance that would evolve into criminality if not tightly controlled. Lynda Hart writes: “The exemplary characteristics of [Lombroso’s] culture’s idea of Victorian white womanhood—piety, maternity, absence of sexual desire, weakness, and underdeveloped intelligence—keep the ‘latent’ criminality of all women in check. When any of these traits are in abeyance, ‘the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.’” 10 Female identity here is innate and deterministic, requiring careful control to prevent an outburst of monstrous women. Beyond fears concerning their acquisition of knowledge, experience, strength, sexual freedom, and equality, how horrific for women to use either their bodies or some weapon to inflict harm on either their supposed protectors or their children, those whom they were supposed to protect. Yet men were not only permitted but also virtually encouraged to use violence in...