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Civil society enacts standards of civility in order to prevent


female rage the invitational strategy of the status quo not
only reify power structures but are deployed to silence and
punish marginalized groups. Civility acts as a tool for men to
police politics.
Lonzano-Reich & Cloud in 2009
Nina M. Lozano-Reich & Dana L. Cloud. The uncivil tongue: invitational rhetoric and
the problem of inequality Western Journal of Communication 73.2. April-June 2009.
societal standards of decorum have often been used
to silence groups and keep them in their place. Nowhere is this truer than in the
case of women, told to play nice with their oppressors (Ehrenreich & English, 2005). But
Bone et al. acknowledge that historically,

the authors contradict this position when they argue, When we adopt an invitational approach and are civil
[emphasis added], the potential for grief and violence is minimized (p. 457). Likewise, they write, Civility . . . can
be understood as an . . . integral component of democracy (p. 457). Based upon historical and contemporary

when theorizing as to how individuals should deal with


difficult situations, our authors call for adopting an invitational paradigm
grounded in civility is not only antithetical to the goals of invitational rhetoric, but
also in combating systems of oppression. Historically, dominant groups have repeatedly
enacted civilizing strategies to effectively silence and punish marginalized groups
examples, we reject these claims;

(e.g., labor; women and people of color; the poor; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender [LGBT] people).

19th-century notions of propriety and civility were used as cultural ideals to


place legal, political, and physical restrictions on women whereby relegating
women to the private sphere (Oravec, 2003). Antifeminists frequently appealed to
masculine norms of civilization to depict women as less civilized than men, less
able to contribute to the advancement of the race (Bederman, 1995, p. 121). Extending this
history, women of color have been silenced through civilizing strategies that deem
legitimately angry speech to be uppity or illiterate (Anzaldu a, 1999; hooks, 1989). It
has taken decades of critical feminist scholarship to resist politics of civility and
overcome oppressive stereotypes so that women of color can be viewed as
speaking subjects, and not as uncivilized subjects needing a firm hand. Similarly, LGBTQ
sexual practices have also been vulnerable to oppressive charges of indecorum. Culturally, dominant
sexual ethics and decorous community standards function to shame queer
individuals, and stigmatize nonnormative acts of sexuality (Morris & Sloop, 2006; Warner,
1999). One need only look to hate crimes enacted upon gays or immigrants, or acts of
femicide inflicted upon women who dare to speak out. Clearly, a move towards
civility in relation to oppressed groups may potentially increase grief and violence.
Bone et al. claim that civility fosters democracy. While voting is indeed civil, radical social change has
not occurred in voting booths, but results, instead, from democratic grassroots
tactics. Protestors inherently do not operate within the realm of decorum. Indeed,
political confrontations up to and including violence have been perennial resources
in struggles for justice (Kirkpatrick, 2008). The civility standard is detrimental to this
project. When measured by standards of civility, protesters are framed as wild and
riotous by dominant media, rendering their struggles illegitimate (Gitlin, 2003). In a postIndeed,

9=11 climate, moreover, uncivil protestors are equated with terrorists (and terrorists cannot be ascribed any
rationality whatsoever). Bederman (1995) asks whether conforming to mainstream standards of civility replaces

Discourses
of civilization have proven [to be] a slippery slope for those who dream of a more
just society (Bederman, 1995, p. 239). Likewise, Mayo (2002) argues that civility is a form of social
discrimination, for it is predicated on making distinctions that support accepted
practices and values, and entails enacting those distinctions to the detriment of the
purportedly uncivil (p. 82). In other words, we view Bone et al.s argument for invitational civility in
situations of conflict as potentially perpetuating discrimination in the name of
peace. Theorizing resistance to oppression requires attention to both invitation and
confrontation, along with criteria enabling critics to evaluate both modes. Consequently,
we believe it is irresponsible to displace more confrontational models for social change
in favor of a politics of civility that has been proven to leave those already
disempowered in a continued state of conformity, punishment, and/or
silence.
one kind of exclusion with another. This paradox holds except in cases of discourses among equals.

Physician assisted suicide makes death appear passive and


compliant exacerbating cultural stereotypes of femininity and
entrenching gender roles.
George 07 (Katrina, Lecturer, School of Law, University of Western Sydney, A
Woman's Choice? The Gendered Risks of Voluntary Euthanasia and PhysicianAssisted Suicide, Med Law Rev (2007) 15 (1): 1, lexis)
E. Assisted Death is a 'Feminine' Way to Suicide 1. Social Acceptability of 'Passive, Compliant' Female Suicides

Suicidologists suggest that the incidence of different types of suicidal acts is influenced
by their social and cultural acceptability.111 For example, non-fatal suicidal behaviour is
most acceptable and most common in young women; fatal suicidal behaviour is
most permissible and most frequent in elderly males .112 Med Law Rev (2007) 15 (1): 1 at 24
Overall, fatal (self-inflicted) suicidal behaviour in females is socially less acceptable than fatal suicidal behaviour in
males, and is less common.113 Canetto points to research indicating that this is because

self-inflicted

suicide subverts cultural stereotypes of femininity : women who take their own lives may be
perceived negatively because, by taking ownership of their body and control of their destiny, they challenge the

This is supported by the observations of


some feminist theorists that men are typically identified with active characteristics
and behaviours (tenacity, aggression, competitiveness) and women with passive behaviours
(obedience, responsiveness to approval, kindness, submission, willingness to be led), reinforcing male
power and female submission .115 Thus, one explanation of women's reasons for favouring
euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide is that these methods make suicidal death
appear 'passive and compliant' and, therefore, compatible with cultural stereotypes
of femininity.116 There is some evidence to support this explanation. Firstly, as I discussed earlier, the distinct
assumption of femininity as passive and compliant.114

gender patterns in preferences about assisted death methods revealed by the empirical data. Physician-assisted
suicide is more likely to be chosen by men than by women. Women demonstrate a stronger preference for the more
passive method of euthanasia. Similarly, in the Kevorkian deaths, women strongly preferred the more passive,
structured method of death by lethal injection. The incidence of female self-inflicted suicide compared with the
incidence of female assisted death also supports the explanation. In self-inflicted suicides, the people killing
themselves must assume an active role. The vast majority of these suicides are men. Thus in the United States, for
example, women are less likely to kill themselves than men by a ratio of 1:4.117 This ratio has remained constant
since 1989 and 'is consistent with international patterns, with the exception Med Law Rev (2007) 15 (1): 1 at 25 of
rural China'.118 Yet, as I have outlined in Part II, the incidence of assisted death by women in the Netherlands,

It is clear
that increasing numbers of women decide to die when offered the more passive
options of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide . There is also the observation, noted at the
Oregon and elsewhere is nearly four times that of female self-inflicted suicide in the United States.

beginning of this paper, that the assisted deaths that receive prominent media exposure are predominantly women.

Canetto and Hollenshead point to pro-euthanasia literature that most often uses women as models or case studies
of assisted death.119 Wolf argues: even while we debate physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia rationally,
we may be animated by unacknowledged images that give the practices a certain gendered logic and felt

studies analysed here challenge the notion that women's decisions for
assisted death are unambiguous expressions of autonomy and choice. The decisions
for death of some women could reflect the influence of socio-cultural forces that uphold a
perception of femininity as passive and compliant, a stereotype that reinforces gendered power
differentials. 2. Assisted Death 'Plays Out' Male Dominance and Female Subjugation
correctness.120 The

Women's experience of power imbalance and gender domination could be 'played out' in a clinical relationship and

the paternalism which still pervades the


medical profession and has a particular impact on female patients : When the patient
is female and the doctor male, as is true in most medical encounters, the problem is
likely to be exacerbated by the background realities and history of male dominance and female subjugation in
the broader society.121 Thus, a male physician's own cooperation with a woman's request for
death might reflect entrenched gender roles. His assessment of the Med Law Rev (2007)
15 (1): 1 at 26 meaninglessness or burden of her life might be influenced by the same
sexism that could have influenced her request in the first place . There is evidence
that the attitudes of doctors can and do influence their patients' preferences in end-of-life decisions and even their
patients' suicides. Miles refers to several studies demonstrating that doctors underestimate the
quality of a patient's life compared with the patient's perception . Largely on this basis,
doctors wrongly infer that such patients would decide to abstain from life prolonging interventions. The complex
emotions of a difficult clinical relationship can also cause a doctor to legitimate suicidal ideation that
may precipitate suicides. This is confirmed by a more recent Australian study of 252 doctorpatient
explain the decision for assisted death. Wolf points to

relationships: where there is a greater perception of a patient's emotional distress and hopelessness, combined
with a doctor's limited psychological training and his or her own difficulty in caring for the patient, the doctor may
be more inclined to hasten the death of the patient.122 Moreover, Miles says that doctors may develop an inflated
confidence in their insights regarding suicidal patients and proceed to the 'unacknowledged medical enabling of
suicidal choices'.123 There was a similar finding in the Australian study: 'an attitude that conveys endorsement of

the wish to hasten death on the part of the doctor may facilitate that stance on the
part of the patient'.124 Miles concludes that there is support for concerns that: a patient's suicidal decision
can at least partly arise in response to a physician's need for release from a painful clinical relationship, rather than
as an independent patient's choice.125 Women's preferences for more structured, passive deaths at the hands of
their physicians could be evidence of gender dynamics at play. Is there a sense that dying in such a way is more
'feminine' and deferential, more befitting of a woman's gender role, and the gender role Med Law Rev (2007) 15
(1): 1 at 27 of her (more often than not) male physician? One commentator has observed that: The fatal attraction
for the women who used the Kevorkian techniques is that it offered them a passive way to end their life with the
approval of a paternalistic figure.126 F. Women have Limited Access to Health Care Canetto and Hollenshead

women's decisions for assisted death are influenced by their entrenched


social and economic disadvantage that limits their options for care . Women enter mid- to
argue that

late-adulthood, the time when decisions about hastened death are most likely to occur, with vastly different

women are more likely than older men to


suffer from disabling chronic diseases older women are more likely to be poor, widowed,
live alone, and to have limited access to family care As a result, they may be more
likely to see themselves, and/or be seen by others, as appropriate candidates for a
hastened death.127 There is evidence that care assistance is less available to women: Women provide most
personal, social and economic resources than men older

of the care that is given to dying patients, although women who need care tend to receive less assistance from
family members than men, and are more likely to have to pay for assistance even if married Wives are only one

There are indications that


economic disadvantage does influence decisions at the end of life , with one report stating
that in 7.9% of actual cases of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in the
United States, financial burden was a 'core motive' .129 Such economic disadvantage
falls disproportionately upon women. The suggestion is that some 'choices' for assisted
third as likely as husbands to report their spouses as caregivers 128

death may be influenced by lack of choice . There are also indications that women have less access
to healthcare than men. For example, a number of studies show that in the US women receive fewer cardiac
treatments and procedures than men and have worse outcomes.130 Women are also more likely than men to Med
Law Rev (2007) 15 (1): 1 at 28 suffer inadequate pain control.131 However, studies also suggest the converse: On
average, women visit physicians more frequently, use more preventative and curative drugs, are more likely to
have a regular doctor and undergo general medical check-ups than men.132 Others argue that low class position
and low income are more determinative of inequalities in health than is gender. One British study demonstrates
that 'structural inequalities in health are equally pronounced for women and men in later life'.133

We are the physical target of violence - we fear it, but it is a


universal condition - this violence comes in the form of
beatings, imprisonment, enslavement, rape, prostitution,
torture, and murder, but is both normalized and justified in
rhetoric deemed rational and is carried out in even minor
socializing processes. We must expand the definition of
conflicts to include the perpetual terrorism that women face in
order to challenge the structures that silence us.
Ray 97 A. E. Ray The Shame of it: gender-based terrorism in
the former Yugoslavia and the failureof international human
rights law to comprehend the injuries. The American
University Law Review. Vol 46.
In order to reach all of the violence perpetrated against the women of the former Yugoslavia that is not committed
by soldiers or other officials of the state, human lights law must move beyond its artificially constructed barriers

A feminist perspective on human rights would require a


rethinking of the notions of imputability and state responsibility and in this sense would
challenge the most basic assumptions of international law. If violence against women were considered by
between "public" and "private" actions:

the international legal system to be as shocking as violence against people for their political ideas, women would

The assumption that underlies all law, including international


human rights law, is that the public/private distinction is real: human society, human lives can be
separated into two distinct spheres . This division, however, is an ideological construct
rationalizing the exclusion of women from the sources of power. 2 6 The international
community must recognize that violence against women is always political, regardless of
where it occurs, because it affects the way women view themselves and their role in
the world, as well as the lives they lead in the so-called public sphere . 2 6 ' When
women are silenced within the family, their silence is not restricted to the private
realm, but rather affects their voice in the public realm as well, often assuring their
silence in any environment. 262 For women in the former Yugoslavia, as well as for all women, extension
have considerable support in their struggle....

beyond the various public/private barriers is imperative if human rights law "is to have meaning for women
brutalized in less-known theaters of war or in the by-ways of daily life." 63 Because, as currently constructed,
human rights laws can reach only individual perpetrators during times of war, one alternative is to reconsider our

When it is universally true that


no matter where in the world a woman lives or with what culture she identifies, she
is at grave risk of being beaten, imprisoned, enslaved, raped, prostituted, physically
tortured, and murdered simply because she is a woman, the term "peace" does not
describe her existence. 2 5 In addition to being persecuted for being a woman, many
women also are persecuted on ethnic, racial, religious, sexual orientation , or other
grounds. Therefore, it is crucial that our re-conceptualization of human rights is not limited to violations based
on gender." Rather, our definitions of "war" and "peace" in the context of all of the world's
persecuted groups should be questioned. Nevertheless, in every culture a common risk
understanding of what constitutes "war" and what constitutes "peace. " "

factor is being a woman, and to describe the conditions of our lives as "peace" is to
deny the effect of sexual terrorism on all women. 6 7 Because we are socialized to
think of times of "war" as limited to groups of men fighting over physical territory or
land, we do not immediately consider the possibility of "war" outside this narrow
definition except in a metaphorical sense, such as in the expression "the war against poverty."
However, the physical violence and sex discrimination perpetrated against women
because we are women is hardly metaphorical. Despite the fact that its prevalence makes
the violence seem natural or inevitable, it is profoundly political in both its purpose and its effect.
Further, its exclusion from international human rights law is no accident, but rather part of a
system politically constructed to exclude and silence women. 2 6 The appropriation
of women's sexuality and women's bodies as representative of men's ownership
over women has been central to this "politically constructed reality . 2 6 9 Women's
bodies have become the objects through which dominance and even ownership are
communicated, as well as the objects through which men's honor is attained or
taken away in many cultures.Y Thus, when a man wants to communicate that he is
more powerful than a woman, he may beat her. When a man wants to communicate
that a woman is his to use as he pleases, he may rape her or prostitute her. The
objectification of women is so universal that when one country ruled by men (Serbia)
wants to communicate to another country ruled by men (Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia) that
it is superior and more powerful, it rapes, tortures, and prostitutes the "inferior"
country's women. 2 71 The use of the possessive is intentional, for communication
among men through the abuse of women is effective only to the extent that the
group of men to whom the message is sent believes they have some right of
possession over the bodies of the women used. Unless they have some claim of right to what is
taken, no injury is experienced. Of course, regardless of whether a group of men sexually terrorizing a group of

the universal sexual


victimization of women clearly communicates to all women a message of
dominance and ownership over women. As Charlotte Bunch explains, "The physical territory
of [the] political struggle [over female subordination] is women's bodies ." 7 2
women is trying to communicate a message to another group of men,

ALT vote negative to kill joy. Using the negative positionality


of the Feminist Killjoy stands in the way the male-centric
perceptions of happiness. We must rage against sustained
signs of patriarchy even if it means laying our bodies on the
line.
Ahmed in 10
Sara Ahmed. Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects). The Barnard Center for
Research on Women the Scholar and Feminist Online. Issue 8.3. Summer 2010.
To be unseated by the table of happiness might be to threaten not simply that table,
but what gathers around it, what gathers on it. When you are unseated, you can
even get in the way of those who are seated, those who want more than anything to
keep their seats. To threaten the loss of the seat can be to kill the joy of the seated.
How well we recognise the figure of the feminist killjoy! How she makes sense! Let's take the figure of the
feminist killjoy seriously. One feminist project could be to give the killjoy back her
voice. Whilst hearing feminists as killjoys might be a form of dismissal, there is an
agency that this dismissal rather ironically reveals. We can respond to the

accusation with a "yes." The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place
her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to
justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is
understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely " it is always easy to describe
as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others]."[ 4] Not to agree to stay
in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is wished for. To be
involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness.
Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we
want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus
unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of "the happy
housewife;" Black critiques of the myth of "the happy slave"; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of
heterosexuality as "domestic bliss." The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are
made. We inherit this horizon.

To be willing to go against a social order, which is protected


as a moral order, a happiness order is to be willing to cause unhappiness, even if
unhappiness is not your cause. To be willing to cause unhappiness might be about
how we live an individual life (not to choose "the right path" is readable as giving up
the happiness that is presumed to follow that path). Parental responses to coming out, for
example, can take the explicit form not of being unhappy about the child being queer but of being unhappy about

Even if you do not want to cause the unhappiness of those you


love, a queer life can mean living with that unhappiness. To be willing to cause
unhappiness can also be how we immerse ourselves in collective struggle, as we
work with and through others who share our points of alienation. Those who are
unseated by the tables of happiness can find each other. So, yes, let's take the figure of the
feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people's joy by pointing out moments
of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or
negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger
the child being unhappy.[5]

about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the

The feminist subject "in the room" hence "brings others down"
not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing how
happiness is sustained by erasing the signs of not getting along. Feminists do kill joy
in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found
in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists
might not be happily affected by what is supposed to cause happiness, but our
failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.We can consider
the relationship between the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy and how
certain bodies are "encountered" as being negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression
involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in
which you find yourself. As she puts it, "it is often a requirement upon oppressed people
that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our
acquiescence in our situation." To be oppressed requires that you show signs of
happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye " anything but the
sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or
dangerous".[6] To be recognized as a feminist is to be assigned to a difficult category
and a category of difficulty. You are "already read" as "not easy to get along with"
when you name yourself as a feminist. You have to show that you are not difficult
through displaying signs of good will and happiness. Frye alludes to such experiences
when she describes how: "this means, at the very least, that we may be found to be
"difficult" or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one's livelihood ."[7] We
surface in a certain way?

can also witness an investment in feminist unhappiness (the myth that feminists kill
joy because they are joy-less). There is a desire to believe that women become
feminists because they are unhappy. This desire functions as a defense of happiness
against feminist critique. This is not to say that feminists might not be unhappy;
becoming a feminist might mean becoming aware of just how much there is to be
unhappy about. Feminist consciousness could be understood as consciousness of
unhappiness, a consciousness made possible by the refusal to turn away. My point here
would be that feminists are read as being unhappy, such that situations of conflict,
violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists, rather than
being what feminists are unhappy about.Political struggles can takes place over
the causes of unhappiness. We need to give a history to unhappiness. We need
to hear in unhappiness more than the negation of the "un." The history of the word "unhappy"
might teach us about the unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant to cause

We
can learn from the swiftness of translation from causing unhappiness to being
described as unhappy. We must learn.The word "wretched" has its own genealogy,
coming from wretch, meaning a stranger, exile, banished person. Wretched in the sense of
misfortunate or trouble. Only later, did it come to mean to feel misfortunate, in the sense of wretched or sad.

"vile, despicable person" was developed in Old English and is said to reflect "the sorry state of the outcast." Can we
rewrite the history of happiness from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as wretched,
perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them. The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different
angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might
estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.Phenomenology helps us explore how the familiar is that which
is not revealed. A queer phenomenology shows how the familiar is not revealed to those who can inhabit it. For

To be "estranged
from" can be what enables a "consciousness of ." This is why being a killjoy can
be a knowledge project, a world-making project.
queers and other others the familiar is revealed to you, because you do not inhabit it.

Our rage is critical to the extinction of patriarchy it not only


provides women agency in challenging power but materially
grounds our resistance. The Feminist Killjoy enacts anger from
womens experience of violence. Women will no longer be the
docile, walking apologies men force us to be instead we
engage in a new female-driven world-making that tears at the
walls of male supremacy
Kaplow in 1973
Susi Kaplow. Getting Angry Radical Feminism. 1973.
Two scenarios: An angry man: someone has infringed on his rights, gone against his interests, or harmed a loved
one. Or perhaps his anger is social--against racism or militarism. He holds his anger in check (on the screen we can
see the muscles of his face tighten, his fists clench) and then, at the strategic moment, he lets it go. We see him
yelling, shouting his angry phrases with sureness and confidence--or pushing a fist into his opponent's stomach with
equal conviction. In either event, the anger is resolved; our hero has vented it and is content with success or
accepts what he knows to be unmerited defeat. Dissolve to scene two. An angry woman: angry at her man for
cheating on her or (more likely) at the other woman. If we're in the good old days, she stomps up to her man and
begins to scream wildly, he holds her down with his pinky, her anger melts in his embrace. After the fade-out, we
find a puzzled heroine wondering how she could have been angry at such a good man. Or she marches over to the
local saloon, hurls a few choice epithets at her rival, and then the hair-pulling begins. This ludicrous scene is always
broken up by the amused and slightly scandalized gentlemen on the sidelines. In modern dress the same episode
would be played differently. Discovering her hsuband's or lover's infidelity, the woman would smolder inwardly until
the anger had burned down to a bitter resentment or becomes such a pressurized force that it could only come out

in a rage so uncontrollable that the man (and the audience) can dismiss it as irrational. "I can't talk to you when
you're like this." Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. For a woman in our society is denied the forthright
expression of her healthy anger. Her attempts at physical confrontation seem ridiculous; "ladies" do a slow burn,

A
woman has learned to hold back her anger: It's unseemly, aesthetically displeasing,
and against the sweet, pliant feminine image to be angry. And the woman fears her
own anger: She the great conciliator, the steadier of rocked boats, moves, out of her fear, to quiet
not only others' anger but also her own. Small wonder that when the vacuum-sealed
lid bursts off, the angry woman seems either like a freaked-out nut or a bitch on
wheels. Her frenzy is intensified by the shakiness of her commitment to her own
anger. What if she's really wrong? What if the other person is right? --Or worse (and this is the greatest fear) hits
back with, "You're crazy, I don't know what you're so mad about." Why can't women allow themselves
the outlet of their contained anger? Why do those around them find an angry
woman so frightening that they must demoralize and deflate her into a degraded,
inauthentic calm? Healthy anger says "I'm a person. I have certain human rights which you can't deny. I have
letting out their anger indirectly in catty little phrases, often directed against a third party, especially children.

a right to be treated with fairness and compassion. I have a right to live my life as I see fit, I have a right to get
what I can for myself without hurting you. And if you deprive me of my rights, I'm not going to thank you, I'm going

A person's anger puts him or her on center stage. It


claims attention for itself and demands to be taken seriously, or else. (Or else I won't talk
to say 'fuck off' and fight you if I have to."

to you, I won't work with you or be friendly toward you, or else, ultimately, our association is over.) Expressing
anger means risking. Risking that the other person will be angry in return, risking that he or she will misunderstand

you need
strength to say you're angry--both the courage of your convictions and the ability to
accept that your anger may be unwarranted without feeling crushed into
nothingness. You must not have your total worth as a person riding on the worth of
each individual case of anger. Thus anger is self-confident, willing to fight for itself
even at the jeopardy of the status quo, capable of taking a risk and, if necessary, of
accepting defeat without total demise. Above all, ang er is assertive. The traditional
woman is the polar opposite of this description. Lacking confidence in herself and in her own
the anger or refuse to deal with it, risking that the anger itself is misplaced or misinformed. So

perception, she backs away from a fight or, following the rules of chivalry, lets someone else do battle for her.
Strong emotions disturb her for the disruption they bring to things-as-they-are. So shaky is her self-image that every

She is a living, walking apology for her own


existence--what could be more foreign to self-assertion? Although the reality has changed somewhat, most
women will recognize themselves somewhere in this description. And society clings to this model as
its ideal and calls an angry woman unfeminine. Because anger takes the
criticism is seen as an indictment of her person.

woman out of her earth mother role as bastion of peace and calm, out of
her familial role as peacemaker, out of her political role as preserver of
the status quo, out of her economic role as cheap labor, out of her social
role as second-class citizen . It takes her out of roles altogether and makes
her a person . It is no accident, then, that the emotion which accompanies the first
steps toward liberation is, for most women, anger. Whatever sense of self-worth you have been
able to emerge with after twenty or thirty years of having your mind messed with, gives you the vague feeling that
your situation is not what it should be and sends you looking tentatively at the world around you for explanations.
Realizations are, at first, halting, and then begin to hit you like a relentless sledge hammer, driving the anger
deeper and deeper into your consciousness with every blow. Your fury focuses on the select group of individuals
who have done you the most damage. You are furious at your parents for having wanted a boy instead; at your
mother (and this fury is mixed with compassion) for having let herself be stifled and having failed to show you
another model of female behavior; at your father for having gotten a cheap bolster to his ego at your and your
mother's expense. You are furious at those who groom you to play your shabby role. At the teachers who demanded
less of you because you were a girl. At the doctors who told you birth control was the woman's responsibility, gave

you a Hobson's choice of dangerous and ineffective devices, then refused you an abortion when these failed to
work. At the psychiatrist who called you frigid because you didn't have vaginal orgasms and who told you you were
neurotic for wanting more than the unpaid, unappreciated role of maid, wet nurse, and occasional lay. At employers
who paid you less and kept you in lousy jobs. At the message from the media which you never understood before:
"You've come a long way, baby" -- down the dead-end, pre-fab street we designed for you. Furious, above all, at
men. For the grocer who has always called you "honey" you now have a stiff, curt "don't call me honey." For the
men on the street who visit their daily indignities on your body, you have a "fuck off," or, if you're brave, a knee in
the right place. For your male friends (and these get fewer and fewer) who are "all for women's lib" you reserve a
cynical eye and a ready put-down. And for your man (if he's still around), a lot of hostile, angry questions. Is he
different from other men? How? And when he fails to prove himself, your rage explodes readily from just beneath
the surface. This is an uncomfortable period to live through.

You are raw with an anger that seems to

have a mind and will of its own. Your friends, most of whom disagree with you, find you strident and
difficult. And you become all the more so because of your fear that they are right, that you're crazy after all. You
yourself get tired of this anger--it's exhausting to be furious all the time --which won't
even let you watch a movie or have a conversation in peace. But from your fury, you are gaining strength. The
exercise of your anger gives you a sense of self and of self-worth. And the more this sense increases, the angrier
you become. The two elements run in a dialectic whirlwind, smashing idols and myths all around them. You see,
too, that you can get angry and it doesn't kill people, they don't kill you, the world doesn't fall apart. Then this
anger, burning white hot against the outside world, suddenly veers around and turns its flame toward you. Sure,
they fucked you up and over, sure, they oppressed you, sure they continue to degrade and use you. But--why did
you let it happen? Why do you continue to let it happen? All of a sudden you are up against the part you played in

You internalized your own


inferiority, the pressing necessity to be beautiful and seductive, the belief that men
are more important than women, the conviction that marriage is the ultimate goal.
Seeing this, you are violent against yourself for every time you were afraid to try
something for fear of failing, for all the hours lost on make-up and shopping, for
every woman you missed because there was a man in the room, for getting yourself
stuck as a housewife or in a job you hate because "marriage is your career." This phase
your own oppression. You were the indispensible accomplice to the crime.

of anger turned inward is terrifying. You are alone with your own failed responsibilities toward yourself, however
much you can still blame others. It is this phase that some women find unbearable and flee from, returning to the
first phase of anger or dropping out altogether.

Because this inturned anger demands action-change--and won't let go until its demands begin to be satisfied. You can fall back
on your inability to control others and their behavior toward you. But you can't
comfortably claim powerlessness over your own conduct. Nor can you, at least for long, go on
being furious at others (the forty-five-year-old who still blames mommy, flounders) if you don't even try to get

This inturned anger is a constructive or rather reconstructive catalyst. For


what you can do under its impetus is to restructure yourself, putting new images,
patterns and expectations in place of the old, no longer viable ones. As you use your
anger, you also tame it. Anger becomes a tool which you can control, not only to help you
yourself together.

make personal changes but to deal with the world outside as well. You can mobilize your anger to warn those
around you that you're not having any more bullshit, to underscore your seriousness, to dare to drive your point
home. Through the exercise of your anger, as you see its efficacy and thus your own, you gain strength. And the
growing feeling that you control your anger and not vice versa adds to this strength. As you gain this control,
become surer of yourself, less afraid of being told you're crazy, your anger is less enraged and, in a sense, calmer.
So it becomes discriminating. You reserve it for those individuals and groups who are messing with your mind--be

This progression of anger finds its ultimate meaning as an


experience shared with other women. All striving to understand their collective
situation, women in a group can help each other through the first, painful phase of
outward-directed anger. Through consciousness-raising each woman can (at least
ideally) find sufficient confirmation of her perceptions to be reassured of her own
sanity--and can find growing strength to do without such confirmation when necessary. In the second
phase of inturned anger, women can support one another in their attempts at selfdefinition and change, change which others will try to forestall. And, at the same time, they
they men or other women.

can start to move together to create new social forms and structures in which individual changes can come to

fruition.

Controlled, directed, but nonetheless passionate, anger moves from the

personal to the political and becomes a force for shaping our new destiny.

The feminist Killjoy calls to anger the collective wrongdoings of


patriarchy. The fantasy figured produced by the Killjoy
produces rage toward the injustices motiving anger.
Ahmed in 10
Sara Ahmed. Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects). The Barnard Center for
Research on Women the Scholar and Feminist Online. Issue 8.3. Summer 2010.
A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective
wrongs. And yet, it is important that we do not make feminist emotion into a site of truth: as if it is always clear
or self-evident that our anger is right. When anger becomes righteous it can be oppressive; to assume anger makes
us right can be a wrong. We know how easily a politics of happiness can be displaced into a politics of anger: the
assumption of a right to happiness can convert very swiftly into anger toward others (immigrants, aliens, strangers)
who have taken the happiness assumed to be "by right" to be ours. It is precisely that we cannot defend ourselves

Emotions are not always just, even


those that seem to acquire their force in or from an experience of injustice. Feminist
emotions are mediated and opaque; they are sites of struggle, and we must persist
in struggling with them.[8]After all, feminist spaces are emotional spaces, in which the experience of
against such defensive use of emotion that would be my point.

solidarity is hardly exhaustive. As feminists we have our own tables. If we are unseated by the family table, it does
not necessarily follow that we are seated together. We

can place the figure of the feminist killjoy


alongside the figure of the angry Black woman, explored so well by Black feminist
writers such as Audre Lorde[9] and bell hooks[10]. The angry black woman can be
described as a killjoy; she may even kill feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms
of racism within feminist politics. She might not even have to make any such point
to kill joy. Listen to the following description from bell hooks: "a group of white feminist activists who do not
know one another may be present at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis of
shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room. The white
woman will become tense, no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory."[11]It

is not just that feelings are


"in tension," but that the tension is located somewhere : in being felt by some
bodies, it is attributed as caused by another body, who comes to be felt as apart
from the group, as getting in the way of its enjoyment and solidarity . The body of
color is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared
atmosphere. As a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to cause
tension! The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective conversion . We
learn from this example how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an
atmosphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way.
Atmospheres might become shared if there is agreement in where we locate the
points of tension.A history can be preserved in the very stickiness of a situation. To speak out of
anger as a woman of color is then to confirm your position as the cause of tension;
your anger is what threatens the social bond. As Audre Lorde describes: "When
women of Color speak out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with
white women, we are often told that we are 'creating a mood of helplessness ,'
'preventing white women from getting past guilt,' or 'standing in the way of trusting
communication and action.'"[12] The exposure of violence becomes the origin of
violence. The woman of color must let go of her anger for the white woman to move
on.The figure of the angry black woman is a fantasy figure that produces its own

effects. Reasonable, thoughtful arguments are dismissed as anger (which of course


empties anger of its own reason), which makes you angry, such that your response becomes
read as the confirmation of evidence that you are not only angry but also
unreasonable! To make this point in another way, the anger of feminists of color is attributed. You might
be angry about how racism and sexism diminish life choices for women of color.
Your anger is a judgment that something is wrong. But then in being heard as angry,
your speech is read as motivated by anger. Your anger is read as unattributed, as if
you are against x because you are angry rather than being angry because you are
against x. You become angry at the injustice of being heard as motivated by anger,
which makes it harder to separate yourself from the object of your anger. You
become entangled with what you are angry about because you are angry about how
they have entangled you in your anger. In becoming angry about that
entanglement, you confirm their commitment to your anger as the truth "behind"
your speech, which is what blocks your anger, stops it from getting through. You are
blocked by not getting through. Some bodies become blockage points, points where
smooth communication stops. Consider Ama Ata Aidoo's wonderful prose poem, Our Sister Killjoy, where
the narrator Sissie, as a black woman, has to work to sustain the comfort of others. On a plane, a white hostess
invites her to sit at the back with "her friends," two black people she does not know. She is about to say that she
does not know them, and hesitates. "But to have refused to join them would have created an awkward situation,
wouldn't it? Considering too that apart from the air hostess's obviously civilized upbringing, she had been trained to
see the comfort of all her passengers."[13]Power

speaks here in this moment of hesitation.


Do you go along with it? What does it mean not to go along with it? To create
awkwardness is to be read as being awkward. Maintaining public comfort requires
that certain bodies "go along with it." To refuse to go along with it, to refuse the
place in which you are placed, is to be seen as causing trouble, as making others
uncomfortable. There is a political struggle about how we attribute good and bad
feelings, which hesitates around the apparently simple question of who introduces
what feelings to whom. Feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we
describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on the
feelings with which they get associated.

We have to have this discussion here and now. Women have


quit after having unpleasant experiences in a male-dominated
environment. Last years NDT saw only three women get
speaker awards, ZERO women in the finals of the NDT, judges
or debaters, and the semi-finals with NO female debaters and
one female judge out of ten. This can be a productive forum if
you allow it to be. Debate is an important site of knowledge
production and critique.
Mohanty 03 [Chandra Talpade, Prof of Women's Studies at Hamilton College,
Core Faculty at Union Institute and U of Cincinnati, Feminism Without Borders, 194195]
In any case, "scholarship" - feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, or Third World--is not the
only site for the production of knowledge about Third World women/peoples. The
very same questions (as those suggested in relation to scholarship ) can be raised in
relation to our teaching and learning practices in the classroom, as well as the

discursive and managerial practices of U.S. colleges and universities. Feminists


writing about race and racism have had a lot to say about scholarship, but perhaps
our pedagogical and institutional practices and their relation to scholarship have not
been examined with quite the same care and attention. Radical educators have long
argued that the academy and the classroom itself are not mere sites of instruction.
They are also political and cultural sites that represent accommodations and
contestations over knowledge by differently empowered social constituencies. Thus
teachers and students produce, reinforce, recreate, resist, and transform ideas
about race, gender, and difference in the classroom. Also, the academic institutions
in which we are located create similar paradigms, cannons, and voices that embody
and transcribe race and gender. It is this frame of institutional and pedagogical
practice that I examine in this chapter. Specifically, I analyze the operation and
management of discourses of race and difference in two educational sites: the
women's studies classroom and the workshops on "diversity" for upper-level (largely
white) administrators. The links between these two educational sites lie in the (often
active) creation of discourses of "difference." In other words, I suggest that
educational practices as they are shaped and reshaped at these sites cannot be
analyzed as merely transmitting already codified ideas of difference. These
practices often produce, codify, and even rewrite histories of race and colonialism in
the name of difference. Chapter 7 discussed the corporatization of the academy and
the production of privatized citizenship. Here I begin the analysis from a different
place, with a brief discussion of the academy as the site of political struggle and
radical transformation. Knowledge and Location in the U.S. Academy A number of
educators, Paulo Freire among them, have argued that education represents both a
struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations. Thus, education becomes
a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the lived culture of
individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political spaces. This way
of understanding the academy entails a critique of education as the mere
accumulation of disciplinary knowledges that can be exchanged on the world
market for upward mobility. There are much larger questions at stake in the
academy these days, not the least of which are questions of self- and collective
knowledge of marginal peoples and the recovery of alternative, oppositional
histories of domination and struggle. Here, disciplinary parameters matter less than
questions of power, history, and self-identity. For knowledge, the very act of
knowing, is related to the power of self-definition. This definition of knowledge is
central to the pedagogical projects of fields such as women's studies, black studies,
and ethnic studies. By their very location in the academy, fields such as women's
studies are grounded in definitions of difference, difference that attempts to resist
incorporation and appropriation by providing a space for historically silenced
peoples to construct knowledge. These knowledges have always been
fundamentally oppositional, while running the risk of accommodation and
assimilation and consequent depoliticization in the academy. It is only in the late
twentieth century, on the heels of domestic and global oppositional political
movements, that the boundaries dividing knowledge into its traditional disciplines
have been shaken loose, and new, often heretical, knowledges have emerged,
modifying the structures of knowledge and power as we have inherited them. In
other words, new analytic spaces have been opened up in the academy, spaces that

make possible thinking of knowledge as praxis, of knowledge as embodying the


very seeds of transformation and change. The appropriation of these analytic
spaces and the challenge of radical educational practice are thus to involve the
development of critical knowledges (what women's, black, and ethnic studies
attempt) and, simultaneously, to critique knowledge itself.

Female rage is a necessary strategy for the fight against


patriarchy forcing the movement underground behind closed
doors keeps the conversation in the domestic sphere
Lesage 1985 Julia. Professor at University of Oregon. Women's Rage
from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry
Grossberg (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988) from Jump Cut, No. 31
(1985).
Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist
struggles demand our participation. Yet how, specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women
move into action? How does change occur? What political strategies should feminists pursue? How, in our political work, can we
constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender oppresses women? In 1981 I visited Nicaragua
with the goal of finding out how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us
everything," I was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond home and
children." In fact, many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most
enthusiastic supporters. For example, they form over 50 percent of the popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense against
United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and
child abuse. Yet in Nicaragua we still see maids, the double standard sexually, dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare.
Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of an extremely idealized notion of
motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because Nicaraguan
women are very conscious of the power of their own revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the
Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women militants are looking at women's role in the
Salvadoran revolution. Because of the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary
for their survival, but the women also want to combat, in an organized and self-conscious way, specific aspects of male supremacy
in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in Nicaragua, women's daily conversation is about the politics of daily life.
They talk to each other often, complaining about men and about managing the domestic sphere. Women's talk also encompasses
complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United States that

same themes and may even serve to


reconfirm women's stasis within these unpleasant situations. Here such
conversation offers little sense of social change; yet in our recent political history,
feminists have used this preexisting social form--women's conversation in the
domestic sphere--to create consciousness-raising groups. But to what degree is
consciousness raising sufficient to change women's behavior, including our selfconception and our own colonized minds? We do not live in a revolutionary situation
in the United States. There is no leftist political organization here providing
leadership and a cohesive strategy, and in particular the struggle against women's
oppression is not genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a
context, women need to work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our
revolutionary consciousness and to empower us to act on our own strategic
demands. That is, we need to promote self-conscious, collectively supported, and
politically clear articulations of our anger and rage . Furthermore, we must
understand the different structures behind different women's rage. Black women
rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism.
Lesbians rage against heterosexual privilege, including their denial of civil rights.
Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the
United States. If, in our political work, we know this anger and the structures that
conversation usually circulates pessimistically, if supportively, around the

generate it, we can more genuinely encounter each other and more extensively
acknowledge each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression.

If we
do not understand the unique social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we run the risk of divisiveness, of fragmenting our
potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different women's anger is the precondition of our
finding a way to work together toward common goals. I think a lot about the phenomenon of the colonized mind. Everything that I
am and want has been shaped within a social process marked by male dominance and female submission. How can women come to
understand and collectively attack this sexist social order? We all face, and in various ways incorporate into ourselves, sexist
representations, sexist modes of thought. Institutionally, such representations are propagated throughout culture, law, medicine,
education, and so on. All families come up against and are socially measured by sexist concepts of what is "natural"--that is, the
"natural" roles of mother, children, or the family as a whole. Of particular concern to me is the fact that I have lived with a man for
fifteen years while I acutely understand the degree to which heterosexuality itself is socially constructed as sexist. That is, I love
someone who has more social privilege than me, and he has that privilege because he is male. As an institution, heterosexuality
projects relations of dominance and submission, and it leads to the consequent devaluation of women because of their sex. The
institution of heterosexuality is the central shaping factor of many different social practices at many different levels--which range,
for example, from the dependence of the mass media on manipulating sexuality to the division of labor, the split between the public
and private spheres, and the relations of production under capitalism. Most painfully for women, heterosexuality is a major, a social
and psychological mode of organizing, generating, focusing, and institutionalizing desire, both men's and women's. Literally, I am
wedded to my own oppression. Furthermore, the very body of woman is not her own--it has been constructed by medicine, the law,
visual culture, fashion, her mother, her household tasks, her reproductive capacity, and what Ti-Grace Atkinson has called "the
institution of sexual intercourse." When I look in the mirror, I see my flaws; I evaluate the show I put on to others. How do I break
through representations of the female body and gain a more just representation of my body for and of myself? My social interactions
are shaped by nonverbal conventions which we all have learned unconsciously and which are, as it were, the glue of social life. As
Nancy Henley describes it in Body Politics, women's nonverbal language is characterized by shrinking, by taking up as little space as

Woman is accessible to be touched. When she speaks in a mixed group, she is


likely to be interrupted or not really listened to seriously, or she may be thought of
as merely emotional. And it is clear that not only does the voyeuristic male look
shape most film practice, but this male gaze, with all its power, has a social analog
in the way eye contact functions to control and threaten women in public space ,
where women's freedom is constrained by the threat of rape. We need to articulate these levels
possible.

of oppression so as to arrive at a collective, shared awareness of these aspects of women's lives. We also need to understand how
we can and already do break through barriers between us. In our personal relations, we often overcome inequalities between us and
establish intimacy. Originally, within the women's movement we approached the task of coming together both personally and
politically through the strategy of the consciousness-raising group, where to articulate our experience as women itself became a
collective, transformative experience. But these groups were often composed mostly of middle-class women, sometimes
predominantly young, straight, single, and white. Now we need to think more clearly and theoretically about strategies for
negotiating the very real power differences between us. It is not so impossible. Parents do this with children, and vice versa; lovers
deal with inequalities all the time. The aged want to be in communion with the young, and third-world women have constantly
extended themselves to their white sisters. However, when women come together in spite of power differences among them, they
feel anxiety and perhaps openly express previously suppressed hostility. Most likely, such a coming together happens when women

Yet as we seek mutually


to articulate the oppression that constrains us, we have found few conceptual or
social structures through which we might authentically express our rage. Women's
anger is pervasive, as pervasive as our oppression, but it frequently lurks
underground. If we added up all of women's depression--all our compulsive smiling,
ego-tending, and sacrifice; all our psychosomatic illness, and all our passivity-- we
could gauge our rage's unarticulated, negative force. In the sphere of cultural
production there are few dominant ideological forms that allow us even to think
"women's rage." As ideological constructs, these forms end up containing women .
work together intensively on a mutual project so that there is time for trust to be established.

Women's rage is most often seen in the narratives that surround us. For example: Classically, Medea killed her children because she was betrayed by their
father. Now, reverse-slasher movies let the raped woman pick up the gun and kill the male attacker. It is a similar posture of dead end vengeance. The
news showed Patty Hearst standing in a bank with a gun embodying that manufactured concept "terrorist," and then we saw her marrying her FBI
bodyguard long after her comrades went up in flames. In melodrama and film noir, as well as in pornography, women's anger is most commonly depicted
through displacement onto images of female insanity or perversity, often onto a grotesque, fearful parody of lesbianism. These displacements allow
reference to and masking of individual women's rage, and that masked rage is rarely collectively expressed by women or even fully felt. We have relatively
few expressions of women's authentic rage even in women's art. Often on the news we will see a pained expression of injustice or the exploitative use of
an image of a third- world woman's grief. Such images are manipulated purely for emotional effect without giving analysis or context. Some great feminist
writers and speakers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman have provided models by which we can
understand ourselves, but too often the very concept of "heroine" means that we hold up these women and their capacity for angry self-expression as the
exception rather than the rule. In Illinois, women chained themselves together in the state house when it was clear that the ERA would not pass; the
women sought to express our collective anger at our legislators' cowardice and to do so in a conspicuous, public way. But actions such as these often have
little effect beyond their own time span. We need to think beyond such forms to more socially effective ones. It is a task open to all our creativity and skill-to tap our anger as a source of energy and to focus it aesthetically and politically. We may have to combine images of anger with something else--say,
images of how women can construct the collectivity as a whole. It is here that, by their example, our third-world sisters have often taken the lead. Rosa
Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, Harriet Tubman leading slaves to the North, an Angolan mother in uniform carrying a baby and a rifle, a
Vietnamese farmer tilling and defending her land, Nicaraguan women in their block committees turning in wife abusers to the police--these images let us
see that women can gain more for themselves than merely negating the bad that exists. And it is in their constant need to attack both sexism and racism,
as well as poverty and imperialist aggression, that third-world feminists now make us all see much more clearly both the urgent need for and the

Artistically, emotionally, and politically women


seem to need to glimpse dialectically the transcendence of our struggle against
sexism before we can fully express sexism's total negation, that is, our own just
rage. Sometimes our suppressed rage feels so immense that the open expression of
it threatens to destroy us. So we often do not experience anger directly and
consciously, nor do we accurately aim our rage at its appropriate target. To
transcend negation and to build on it means that we have to see what is beyond our
rage. An example of such transcendence was demonstrated by Nicaraguan mothers
of "martyred" soldiers (those killed by U.S.-paid counterrevolutionaries) to Pope John
Paul II when he visited Managua in April 1983. They stood in the rows closest to the
podium where the Pope spoke and they all bore large photos of their dead children.
As the events of the day unfolded, the women created an image that stirred the
whole people, one that the Pope could not go beyond or even adequately respond
to. Here is what happened: The Pope spoke on and on to the gathered crowd about
obeying the hierarchy and not getting involved with the things of this world. In
frustration and anger, the women began to shout, "We want peace," and their chant
was taken up by the 400,000 others there. The women's rage at personal loss was
valorized by the Nicaraguan people as a whole, as the grieving mother became a
collective symbol of the demand for peace. The chant, "We want peace," referred
simultaneously to national sovereignty, anti-imperialism, religion, and family life.
The women spoke for the whole.
possibility of reconstructing the whole world on new terms.

Until the women who experience this violence are freed they wont
have access to decision making, politics etc. - Aggressive resistant
strategies enable women to confront their imprisoned state
Law, 2010 Victoria is an anti-prison activist. New Politics. Nor Meekly Serve Her
Time: Riots and Resistance in Womens Prisons
http://newpolitics.mayfirst.org/fromthearchives?nid=174
Anti-prison activist Victoria Law offers this history of uprisings and organizing by
women prisoners. They demanded education and service programs, and fought
brutal prison policies. She closes by offering ways we can support the struggle by
women inside. Originally published in New Politics, Winter 2010. Reprinted with
permission of the author. IN 1974, WOMEN IMPRISONED at New Yorks maximumsecurity prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion.
Prisoner organizer Carol Crooks had filed a lawsuit challenging the prisons practice
of placing women in segregation without a hearing or 24-hour notice of charges. In
July, a court had ruled in her favor. In August, guards retaliated by brutally beating
Crooks and placing her in segregation without a hearing. The women protested,
fighting off guards, taking over several sections of the prison, and holding seven
staff members hostage for two and a half hours. Male state troopers and (male)
guards from mens prisons were brought in to suppress the uprising, resulting in
twenty-five women being injured. In the aftermath, twenty-four women were
transferred to the Matteawan Complex for the Criminally Insane. Three years earlier,
male prisoners in Attica, New York, captured headlines nationwide when they took
over the prison for four days demanding better living and working conditions. The

governor ordered the National Guard to retake the prison; 54 people (prisoners and
guards) were killed. The rebellion catapulted prison issues into public awareness,
becoming the symbol of prisoner organizing. In contrast, the August Rebellion is
virtually forgotten today, leading to the widespread belief that women prisoners do
not organize or resist. Women prisoners have always resisted. When imprisoned in
male penitentiaries and work camps, they refused to obey the rules. When states
began housing them in separate facilities, they protested substandard conditions,
sometimes violently. In 1835, New York State opened its first prison for women. The
environment was so terrible that the women rioted, attacking and tearing the
clothes off the prison matron and physically chasing away other officials with
wooden food tubs.[1] A century later, women continued to protest horrifying prison
conditions: In 1975, women imprisoned in North Carolina held a sit-down
demonstration demanding better medical care, improved counseling services, and
the closing of the prison laundry. When prison guards attempted to end the protest
by herding them into the gymnasium and beating them, the women fought
back.////// Using volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete, and hoe handles, they
drove the guards out of the prison. Their rebellion was quashed only after the state
called in over one hundred guards from other prisons.[2] Some instances of
resistance remain little known outside the prison. Former political prisoner Rita Bo
Brown recounts that women imprisoned in Nevada took action against the prisons
psychiatrist who had been pushing psychotropic medication, even to women who
did not need it. One woman died as a result. Her death unleashed the womens
anger. The next time the psychiatrist visited the prison, the women threw chairs,
tables, and anything they could lift, driving him not only off-premises but also off
the job. Not only was the psychiatrist replaced (with the prisons first woman
psychiatrist who did not share her predecessors enthusiasm for drugging patients),
but so were the prisons doctor, warden, assistant warden, and other higher-ups in
the prison administration. The womens action did not make the news. Brown
learned of it only after arriving at the prison itself two months later. Former political
prisoner Laura Whitehorn also recounted tales of resistance that, were she not
outside telling them, would have remained buried behind prison walls. When she
first arrived at the Baltimore City Jail in 1985, she quickly learned that she would
have to fight for her rights, even those she was entitled to under jail regulations,
state law, and the constitution. As a white middle-class woman, I really hate
waiting on lines. I didnt want to. But I had to learn the difference between making
that an issue, which no one else there thought was the big issue, and fighting for
things that were really important to people. And taking leadership from the women
who knew better than I did what was important to resist. She recounted that, like
many other jails and prisons, the food was almost inedible. We had been hoping
that at Thanksgiving, we would get a piece of turkey, something that was decent,
she recounted. Come Thanksgiving, they [the guards and administration] hand out
these, I dont know, they were dinosaur legs! You could break a window with them.
And, in this prison, when you come in and you had dentures, they would take your
teeth away. So most of the women didnt have teeth. I couldnt eat them with my
big choppers and other women couldnt either. We were all furious. We marched out
and we threw them all in the garbage and walked out. That was the first little bit of
resistance around this issue. So me, with my Were going to make a revolution

here, I started talking to my friends. And I said, At Christmas, lets do a hunger


strike, or Lets throw the trays back at them or something. And people were like,
No, we dont want to do that. And what they came up with, which was much
better, was that we should not go to dinner that day. Just not go, and that we should
organize the community people that came in, which were a nun, a teacher, a
chaplain, and the decent guards to bring food and make a Christmas party. And so
we got that. And the whole time Im thinking Oh yeah, this is really revolutionary, a
Christmas party. Well, it was. Because it was saying Fuck you. You dont want to
give us our rights but were going to take them in this small way. It was the most
wonderful thing. It was really great.[3] MORE RECENTLY, WOMEN INCARCERATED in
Arizona attempted to protest and draw public attention to the use of cages in
Arizona prisons. The only coverage was a short article in the Arizona Republic.[4]
The incident might have been forgotten had blogger Peggy Plews not taken on the
issue, reprinting the article on her blog, reaching out to other prisoner rights
advocates, organizing protest actions, and demanding accountability from Arizona
prison and elected officials.[5] Arizona has more than 600 outdoor cages where
prisoners are placed to confine or restrict their movement or to hold them while
awaiting medical appointments, work, education, or treatment programs.[6] On May
20, 2009, Marcia Powell, a mentally ill 48-year-old incarcerated in Perryville, died
after being left in an unshaded cage for nearly four hours in 107 degree heat. Two
and a half weeks later, three women at the same prison simultaneously set fire to
their mattresses in an attempt to draw outside attention to these conditions.[7]
Women have also resisted in less visibly dramatic ways. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
allows male guards to work in female prisons. Many states do not restrict guards
access to the women, often leading to sexual harassment, abuse, and assault.
However, incarcerated women have resisted staff sexual abuse, both individually
and collectively. One woman, incarcerated in Ohio during the early 1990s,
recounted that a male officer constantly harassed her cellmate. Hed make nasty
insinuations about her breasts and what he would like to do to them and how he
would like to do it and what hed do to her.[8] The guard threatened to place
cocaine among their possessions if she or her friends reported his behavior. His
threat worked; the women kept quiet about his harassment. One night, he assaulted
his victim. Her cellmate and another prisoner heard her screams and found her with
semen on her face. Despite their fears, the three filed a complaint with prison
officials and later testified before a grand jury, leading to the officers arrest and
conviction. Their actions encouraged other women to resist male guards abuse of
power. It was a funny thing after that happened, the woman stated. A lot of the
nastiness and that vulgarness . . . was seeming to cease a little bit and to ease up a
little bit, because they began to get nervous. And more women stood up, and two
other officers were escorted off because the women found enough courage to stand
up.[9]

Case
PAS disproportionally targets women lack of healthcare,
longer lifespan, and depression means that physicians apply
cultural stereotypes to women and encourage death as a
treatment.
Susan Wolf 1996 (Susan wolf 1996, Susan Wolf, JD, McKnight Presidential
Professor of Law for Medicine & Public Policy at the University of Minnesota,
"Gender, Feminism, and Death: Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,"
Feminism and Bioethics)
Women in America still live in a society marred by sexism, a society that particularly
disvalues women with illness, disability, or merely advanced age. It would be hard
to explain if health care, suicide, and fundamental dimensions of American society
showed marked differences by gender, but gender suddenly dropped out of the
equation when people became desperate enough to seek a physician's help in
ending their lives... Gender differences may translate into women seeking
physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia for somewhat different reasons than men.
Problems we know to be correlated with gender--difficulty getting good medical care
generally, poor pain relief, a higher incidence of depression, and a higher rate of
poverty--may figure more prominently in women's motivation. Society's
persisting sexism may figure as well. And the long history of valorizing
women's self-sacrifice may be expressed in women's requesting assisted suicide or
euthanasia... To institute physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia at this point in
this country--in which many millions are denied the resources to cope with serious
illness, in which pain relief and palliative care are by all accounts woefully
mishandled, and in which we have a long way to go to make proclaimed rights to
refuse life-sustaining treatment and to use advance directives working realities in
clinical settings--seems, at the very least, to be premature... Against those
background conditions, legitimating the practices is more than just premature. It is
a danger to women. Those background conditions pose special problems for
them. Women in this country are differentially poorer, more likely to be either
uninsured or on government entitlement programs, more likely to be alone in their
old age, and more susceptible to depression. Those facts alone would spell danger.
But when you combine them with the long (indeed, ancient) history of legitimating
the sacrifice and self-sacrifice of women, the danger intensifies . That history
suggests that a woman requesting assisted suicide or euthanasia is likely to be seen
as doing the 'right' thing. She will fit into unspoken cultural stereotypes. She
may even be valorized for appropriate feminine self-sacrificing behavior, such as
sparing her family further burden or the sight of an unaesthetic deterioration. Thus
she may be subtly encouraged to seek death. At the least, her physician may
have a difficult time seeing past the legitimating stereotypes and valorization to
explore what is relaly going on with this particular patient, why she is so desperate,
and what can be done about it."

Embracing violence and domination turns Nietzsches ability to


affirm life
Schutte, 84 (Ofelia, professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, PhD
from Yale, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks, p. 159-60, JD)

Nietzches fascination with dominationitself a project of Western valuesruptured


the intent of his project and brought the transvaluation of all values to a halt. The
concrete result of Nietzsches alienation can be seen in the way he handles the
relationship of the elite to the masses as well as that of men to women in his
mature and late works. Some of the psychological and political aspects of this
problem will be discussed in Chapter 7. It should be clear so far, however, that the
psychology of domination calls for the war of all against all. Out of distrust for the
people, out of distrust for women, out of distrust for ones own body, the
authoritarian conscience establishes the need for obedience regardless of the
absurdity of the rule. Under the psychology of domination, the contribution to
personal well-being that grows out of a healthy and life-affirming morality is
replaced by the commanding voice of a despot who would very much like to rule the
world. This reversion to repression undermines all the liberating aspects of
Nietzsches philosophy. The Dionysian affirmation of self-transcendence is
contradicted by the implementation of rigid boundaries in human life (leader and
herd). The joy and pride in ones own values (it is our worklet us be proud of
it) is undermined by the defense of breeding and slavery. Above all, the union of
truth and life which was the aim of the Dionysian transvaluation of values is
completely shattered when the doctrine of the overcoming of morality is used to
sever truth from life.

The Foucauldian notion of genealogy leaves female sexuality


invisibleour kritik turns your case
Marume, 7 Faculty of Architecture and Planning, Thammasat University
(Wijitbusaba, Foucaults Work for the Analysis of Gender Relations: Theoretical
Reviews. http://www.tds.tu.ac.th/jars/download/jars/v3/07_Wijitbusaba
%20Marome.pdf)
Michel Foucaults focus on power relationships has drawn political scientists,
political philosophers, and feminists to his texts. His argument which analyses
power and discourse takes political analysts beyond state as the locus of power. In
general, his work is important for feminist analyses, especially the three- volume of
historical account of sexuality, because it shares with feminists and intense and
critical gaze at sexuality, power and knowledge. However, Foucaults politics of
Western sexuality leaves female sexuality invisible. To complete this historical
account of sexuality requires feminist critiques which extend and alter the
analysis to include female sexuality. Thus, the question is not if, but how
Foucault should be situated into contemporary feminist theory. This paper examines
four major criticisms that traditional feminists have argued against Foucaults

understanding of theory-justification, power relations, collective politics, and gender


neutrality. We argue that the first three criticisms are undiscovered, but offer an
important set of political tool to feminism. For the gender neutrality criticism, we
argue that Foucaults neglect of gender difference in his history of sexuality falls
short of feminist goals. Finally, feminists should approbate only the aspects of
Foucauldian philosophy that are conductive to gender analysis and move beyond
Foucaults androcentrism to create alternative histories of sexuality and
opportunities for resistance.

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