Feminism and the abomination of violence

Three extraordinary women whose work examined the nature of violence, and the ways in which this might inform feminism’s response to violence towards women today, will form the subject of a public lecture by Cambridge’s visiting Professor of Gender studies this evening.

Professor Jacqueline Rose is the current Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies and is affiliated with St John’s College during her time in Cambridge. Her talk, “Feminism and the Abomination of Violence” will take place at 17:00 on Monday, 3 November, in the William Mong Hall, Sidney Sussex College.

Professor Rose’s research at Cambridge further develops an ongoing investigation which brings aspects of psychoanalysis to bear on feminism. Its starting point is the apparent global escalation in acts of appalling violence towards women, not least in western countries where feminism is sometimes dismissed as a political movement whose work is already done. 

The ugly, and increasingly prominent, reality that women are still and perhaps increasingly targets for assault and violent abuse suggests that this is far from the case. A letter to the Guardian published on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2013, by 50 signatories including prominent human rights lawyers observed that that women aged 15 to 44 the world over are “more at risk from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, car accidents, war and malaria combined”.

This has only been made more obvious by shocking stories that appear in the media on an almost daily basis, from the kidnap of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, to the grooming and sexual exploitation of schoolgirls in Rotherham. Writing in a recent article of her own for the Guardian, Rose remarked: “Reckoning with such violence may be the greatest challenge feminism faces today. Certainly, I cannot remember another moment where it has appeared so rampant and so brazen.”

At the same time, Rose argues that discussion of violence towards women has often been appropriated as an issue by radical feminists, who see it as the straightforward expression of male sexual power. This, she suggests, has made it difficult to address violence as part of the complexity of the human mind.

Reflecting her wider research project at Cambridge, the talk will examine the work of three great women thinkers who, even when not tackling the specific question of assaults on women by men, demonstrate how women have often provided the profoundest insight into the nature of violence itself. They are the Marxist theorist and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, and the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.

Rose’s aim is to provide a perspective on violence that can inform modern feminism and its response to one of the darkest social problems of the 21st century.

The Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship is endowed by Carl Djerassi (Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and inventor of the contraceptive pill) in honour of his late wife, Diane Middlebrook. Further information about Professor Rose’s lecture can be found on the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies website: www.gender.cam.ac.uk/seminars/vpLecture.

The event will be preceded by an “In Conversation” discussion between Carl Djerassi and Martin Rees, also in the William Mong Hall on 3 November, between 1pm and 2.30pm. further details are available on the Gender Studies website.