Fighting in concert: exploring the emancipatory potential of women's violence

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Sept. 30, 2021

Sept. 30, 2025

Feminist philosophers have an uneasy relationship with women's use of violence. Most reject violence in principle, while others grudgingly justify it as instrumental to achieving gender justice. My project, however, will examine whether and how women's violence can be considered an intrinsically emancipatory practice, and what this entails for a feminist ethics of (non)violence (FENV).

Attempts to ground a FENV on women's allegedly natural or social inclination to 'care' (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984) or on the virtues of mothering (Ruddick 1989) have been traditionally criticised as essentialist (Kaplan 1994). Currently, philosophers like Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero (Butler 2020; Cavarero et.al. 2021) defend a FENV based on human vulnerability. As sophisticated as these accounts might be, they still overlook the emancipatory potential of certain practices of women's violence.

My project aims to unpack such a potential by building a Foucauldian-Arendtian philosophical framework. My hypothesis is that we may conceive of women's violence as emancipatory only when it can be understood as both a Foucaldian bodily 'practice of the self' and as a form of Arendtian political action.

To appreciate the need for this framework, consider the case of women's self-defence training (WSDT). WSDT is an example of women's engagement with violence deeply valued by its participants but difficult to reconcile with a feminist unqualified commitment to nonviolence. My intuition is that WSDT can be theorised as an example of Michel Foucault's 'practices of the self'-an ethical undertaking wherein individuals reshape their subjectivities by relating to prevailing power structures. Foucault's 'practices of the self', which are overlooked by feminist scholarship, can shed light on the emancipatory effect of WSDT on individual women's bodies. However, to conceptualise whether WSDT can be collectively emancipatory, we need to move beyond Foucault's intrinsically individualist account. My plan is to build on Hannah Arendt's concepts of action, power, and freedom to rethink the potential of WSDT as 'acting in concert', i.e., as a collective exercise of freedom. My interpretative hypothesis is that Arendt can address Foucault's neglect of the importance of collective action, which many feminists criticise. Foucault's focus on the body as both a target of power and a site of resistance, in turn, can amend Arendt's failure to conceptualise the body as 'political'. If WSDT can be theorised as emancipatory, other historical and contemporary forms of women's violence (e.g. British suffragettes' violence against themselves and others, or the anarchic feminist group Bloque Negro's violent protests against femicide in Mexico) might be reconsidered too through a Foucaldian-Arendtian framework.

To carry out my research, I will first review the relevant literature, including feminist philosophy of (non)violence; studies of representations of violent women within public discourse (e.g. Sjoberg & Gentry 2007); and of women's experiences with exercising violence (e.g. McCaughey 1997). I will also engage with Arendtian scholarship on political action and violence and with feminist readings of Foucault to advance my original interpretations. Next, I will construct my approach & address but hopefully reject potential objections. Finally, I intend to further develop my framework by applying it to a wide range of practices of women's violence, so as to (i) identify a set of normative criteria to distinguish practices that can be considered emancipatory from those that cannot and (ii) consider the implications of my account for a FENV.

My hope is that my original framework will enable feminists to recognise the emancipatory potential that some practices of violence have for women while strengthening the feminist case against other forms of women's violence. In so doing, my project will advance an innovative & nuanced feminist account of (non)violence.