Dissertation

“Fury at the Limits of Law: Towards a Feminist Political Theory of Vengeance”

My dissertation, “Fury at the Limits of Law: Towards a Feminist Political Theory of Vengeance,” critically examines the gendered features of the liberal democratic tradition’s longstanding repudiation of vengeance as inimical to political life. Liberal societies purport to have transcended private vengeance as a means of dispute settlement in favor of public means of resolution in and through law. Existing research in political theory approaches the problem of vengeance and its attendant states like anger and resentment instrumentally, considering their utility or inutility to flourishing public spheres. This way of framing the problem of vengeance, I argue, fails to account for its gendered figuration. Though men too can figure as agents of vengeance, their ventures beyond the law are typically portrayed as righteous defenses of its normative foundations. Women, by contrast, are often portrayed, from Greek tragedy to our own day, as voicing claims that are not incidentally but by definition outside the law: claims that bring its normative order into question. More than a mere critique of the gendered grammar by which women’s claims to justice are reduced to cries for vengeance, my dissertation explores how women and other feminized groups creatively negotiate the terms of their figuration as agents of vengeance to challenge our very understanding of what counts as a matter of public justice. By way of three substantive chapters analyzing historical and contemporary examples of women’s speech – as represented in Greek tragedy, 20th century theater and protest, and contemporary courts of law – I track the ways in which our understanding of justice remains haunted by the specter of the vindictive woman whose defiant speech threatens to upend the legal order.

Chapter 1 examines the touchstone text and foundational myth through which justice is distinguished from vengeance in legal and democratic theory: Aeschylus’ Oresteia. I advance a novel feminist reading of the tragedy that attends to the text’s rhetorical depiction of the Furies: the ancient goddesses of vengeance charged with the guardianship of oaths and the protection of kinship ties. My reading explores how vengeance comes to be associated with the feminine and how its figuration as such blinds us to the real gendered exclusions that are at the heart of this narrative of the foundations of law. Reanimating the Furies’ role as guardians of oaths, I recover their democratic significance for contemporary feminism as speakers of wrongs done to women that are unmoored from the strictures imposed on women’s speech acts in courts of law.

In Chapter 2, I turn to the ways in which 20th century feminists have envisioned what the mythological Furies might contribute to contemporary discussions of justice, law, and responsibility. I offer a reading of a political theater piece by the French-Algerian feminist Hélène Cixous. The Perjured City or the Awakening of the Furies (1993) was written in the wake of scandalous revelations as to the French government’s fatal inaction on AIDS. Cixous calls upon the Furies’ perspective to reveal the court of law’s limited ability to address injustices for which no single individual is responsible and whose victims come from historically marginalized groups. My original archival research into the play’s production fills out the political context in which she awakens a female Aeschylus and the Furies themselves to stage the founding of a court that would be capable of reckoning with crimes of inaction and neglect, including the colonial legacies that subtend the nation’s universalism. This chapter and the next explore how women respond to their figuration as vengeful in ways that challenge and expose the limitations of strictly juridical understandings of harm, responsibility, and redress. 

Chapter 3 analyzes the #MeToo movement against sexual injustice alongside the emergence of contemporary abolitionism as a framework of political analysis in feminist and anti-racist practice and scholarship. I critically interrogate the function served by 148 women’s victim impact statements in one of #MeToo’s highest-profile cases: that of the conviction of serial sexual and child abuser Larry Nassar. Showing how the case brought women’s voices into the public sphere alongside both defenders of #MeToo and its abolitionist critics, I advance of a theory of public justice that emphasizes the centrality of practices of accusation and collective appearance to the feminist politics of change. In my analysis, the case – and #MeToo – reveals how feminist practices of speech, even when they take place within existing legal frameworks, can reclaim them for public and political ends.

Manuscripts under review

“Oaths that (Un)Bind: Recovering the Furies’ Radical Democratic Potential in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.” (Revise & Re-submit)

“#MeToo, Abolition Feminism, and the Agonistic Politics of Public Speech.” (Under Review)

Working Papers

“The Disavowed Gender of Rawlsian Envy.”

Public Writing

“Finding the Enemy Without: Patriarchy in Bruce La Bruce’s The Misandrists.” Red Wedge Magazine. October 2018.

“Nazi Punching, or, Simone Weil on Resistance and the Organized Left.” Journal for the History of Ideas Blog. January 2018.

“Interview with Sylvia Walby.” SASE Newsletter. January 2018.

 With Trish Kahle. “Who’s the Boss?” Jacobin. September 2016.