Feminist Fury: Aesthetics, Action, and Reaction 

Feminist rage is all the rage. Rageful protest and dissident mourning are historically dominant strategies by which women have mounted challenges to patriarchal power. Widespread rage and grief at injustice call out to be collectively metabolized in minimally healthy and cohesive democratic societies. Yet the movements these affects inspire span from egalitarian to virulently misogynistic. How can feminist challenges to contemporary patriarchal power deploy furious affects in actionary, rather than reactionary, ways? How do our interpretations of feminist anger blunt its revolutionary potential?

In Feminist Fury, Agatha A. Slupek argues that the answer to this question lies in the way the experience of betrayal has informed feminist political action and critique. She reveals how feminist acts of aesthetic creation propelled by experiences of betrayal mobilize furious affects in ways that challenge the discursive grounds that breed reactionary, misogynistic hatred. Tracing a lineage of what she calls feminist fury in works of Greek tragedy and their reception, U.S. second-wave publications, feminist theater projects, and in 21st courts of law and public opinion, Slupek finds visionary power in feminist articulations of betrayals ordinary and extraordinary, intimate and institutional. 

Drawing inspiration from feminist philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and radical democratic thought, Feminist Fury offers a novel perspective on how negative affects can sustain the psychic conditions for radical political action.

in the works

“Ti-Grace Atkinson’s Revolutionary Aesthetics” (under review)

“The Rhetoric of Reaction in Simone de Beauvoir’s La Femme Rompue” (in preparation)