The Female of the Species
At the Interface
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Dr Ken Monteith
Lisa Howard
Dr Daniel Riha
Advisory Board
James Arvanitakis
Katarzyna Bronk
Jo Chipperfield
Ann-Marie Cook
Peter Mario Kreuter
S Ram Vemuri
Simon Bacon
Stephen Morris
John Parry
Karl Spracklen
Peter Twohig
Kenneth Wilson
An At the Interface research and publications project.
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/
The Evil Hub
‘Evil, Women and the Feminine’
2013
The Female of the Species:
Cultural Constructions of Evil, Women
and the Feminine
Edited by
Hannah Priest
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/
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ISBN: 978-1-84888-131-0
First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2013. First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Hannah Priest
vii
PART I Writing the Evil Woman
Medea’s Medicine: Women and Pharmaka in Greek
Mythology
Alison Innes
3
The Representation of the Evil Woman in Elizabethan
Literature
Abdulaziz Al-Mutawa
23
(De)centring Women in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses
Zubaidah Mohamed Shaburdin
37
PART II Reproductive Evils
Alien Queens and Monstrous Machines: The Conflation
of the Out-of-Control Female and Robotic Body
Simon Bacon
57
The Ultimate Cold War Monster: Exploring ‘Mother’ in
the Film The Manchurian Candidate
Kathleen Starck
75
The Tainted Birth in Lovecraft’s Fiction
Cécile Cristofari
91
PART III The Evil That Women Do
Sugar and Spice, But Not Very Nice: Depictions of Evil
Little Girls in Cartoons and Comics
Jacquelyn Bent, Helen Gavin and Theresa Porter
A Wellspring of Contamination: The Transgressive
Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical
Discourse
J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
Myra: Portrait of a Portrait
Shelley Campbell
107
121
141
Introduction
Hannah Priest
This volume of essays develops out of the third annual Evil, Women and the
Feminine conference, which took place in Warsaw in May 2011. This
interdisciplinary conference brought together scholars from numerous countries,
backgrounds and specialties to discuss a wide range of iterations and
representations of gendered evil - considering female perpetrators of ‘evil’ deeds,
but also female experiences of evil and the construction of the female as evil. The
title of the conference itself, with its sometimes silent comma, specifically points to
its manifold focus. While many papers presented explored the question of ‘evil
women,’ an equal number examined ‘evil and women.’ Moreover, the conference
project’s separation of ‘the feminine’ from both ‘women’ and ‘evil’ allows for a
wider definition of gender and gendered evil than merely anatomical or positional
classifications.
Nevertheless, while the title of the conference project - and the subtitle of this
collection - resists singular interpretation and encourages inter- and
multidisciplinary engagements, it also threatens to overwhelm us with its openness.
The three nouns - evil, women and the feminine - are a triad of ontological
uncertainty. What is evil? What is woman? What is the feminine? Do these
concepts exist in anything other than abstract terms? Can we attempt to reach some
consensus as to meaning? Or is such a project doomed to fall into a definitional
abyss?
In considering the concept of ‘evil,’ for example, one is struck by its
intangibility. At once a moral absolute and a matter of behavioural degree, a
cultural construct and an issue of personal ethics, evil resists both categorisation
and containment. And yet, one knows evil when one encounters it. One recognises
its effects and its victims. In The Philosophy of Evil, Lars Svendsen explores this
paradox, arguing that ‘[o]n the one hand, therefore, evil is something abstract and
elusive; on the other hand, something concrete and tangible.’ 1 He suggests that this
results in our ‘living in a paradoxical situation where evil is both absent and
omnipresent - absent in our concrete experience, but everywhere in the reality we
perceive in the media.’ 2 Svendsen’s comments here point to one of the key
contradictions in the conceptualisation of evil: though it remains undefinable, it is,
nonetheless, continuously visible in cultural productions and representations. In
fact, Svendsen suggests, it may be that evil has no ontology outside of these
cultural productions, and that ‘what starts out as a means of representation is
confused with an actual, active force.’ 3
As this ‘means of representation’ becomes conflated with a putative ‘actual,
active force,’ a concomitant project emerges, which seeks to identify the
individuals - or group of individuals - who either wield or embody this ‘actual,
active force.’ While some discussions of ‘evil’ might posit it as a free-floating,
viii
Introduction
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abstract concept, it is more usual to find this ‘force’ being enacted by and upon
human beings: we associate evil with victims and perpetrators. Moreover, as Philip
Zimbardo writes, we tend to perceive the perpetrators of evil as categorically
separate from us: ‘[m]ost of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent
in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their
destinies unfold.’ 4 Thus, for ‘most of us,’ evil is not simply an ontological category
- which may or may not exist outside of cultural representation - but it is an
inherent characteristic of certain types of people. As Zimbardo’s study shows,
these ‘evil people’ are frequently and emphatically not us, though we might
recognise them if we see them.
This collection is not concerned, as such, with defining evil; it is, instead, an
exploration of so-called ‘evil people’ (specifically, as the subtitle suggests, ‘evil
women’). What is of interest, then, is not what evil is, but how it is represented. If,
as Svendsen suggests, evil is ‘a means of representation,’ rather than ‘an actual,
active force,’ how do we come to represent certain individuals as ‘evil people’?
Zimbardo suggests that the
process begins with creating stereotyped conceptions of the
other, dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as
worthless, the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the
other as an abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to
our cherished values and beliefs. 5
The construction of a person, or people, as evil begins with a dehumanisation and
an othering.
The ways in which these dual strategies of dehumanisation and othering
function in relation to evil have been interpreted by a number of critics - from
different disciplines - as being discursive and definitional strategies. Considering
‘periods of moral panic,’ for example, Stanley Cohen suggests that, in such cases,
‘[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a
threat to societal values and interests.’ 6 Cohen, then, argues that the emergence of
the ‘folk devil’ is the emergence of a definition. The role of wider society in this is
made clear: the threat
is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass
media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops,
politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping
are evolved or (more often) resorted to. 7
Like Zimbardo, Cohen draws attention to the importance of stereotyping in the
construction of the evil person. Additionally, his invocation of the ‘mass media,’
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‘editors, bishops, politicians’ and the pronouncements of ‘socially accredited
experts,’ reminds us that the construction of evil relies on particular modes of
language and (re)presentation. If the correct authorities say so, a stereotyped group
might become evil.
In her monograph, Cruelty, Kathleen Taylor explores this linguistic process of
othering the ‘evil’ enemy, suggesting that we might read particular patterns of
language use in creations of evil, which give us ‘two ways to otherize our
enemies:’
The first uses language like “malevolent”, “treacherous”, and
“cunning”, speaking of witches, spies, and secret agents, devils
and demons, and enemies. All of these fully intend the harm they
do. The second refers to “deadly”, “venomous”, “contaminating”
forces which inflict sickness, weakness, and death: dangerous
animals, tumours, germs and their carriers - all of which destroy
unthinkingly, because it is in their nature. Inconsistent as it may
seem to imagine your enemy both as agent and non-agent,
actively malicious and impersonally destructive, the language of
atrocity employs both forms of otherization. 8
These simultaneous ‘ways to otherize our enemies’ evoke notions of malevolence
and manipulation, but also of contamination, disease and corruption. The
construction of evil also relies on a paradoxical combination of active agency and
inherent malice.
Though none of the theoretical explorations of evil cited thus far engage
directly with the question of gender, Taylor’s formulation certainly seems to point
us towards ‘women’ and ‘the feminine’ - in her mention of ‘witches’ and
‘dangerous animals,’ for instance - or, at least, seems to suggest the possibility that
a group of people who become, in Cohen’s words, ‘defined as a threat to societal
values and interests’ might be grouped specifically by gender. Moreover, the idea
of a group that can be understood as ‘both as agent and non-agent, actively
malicious and impersonally destructive’ certainly seems to approximate to some
pervasive stereotypes of women and femininity. Nevertheless, in order to identify
whether the theoretical frameworks for understanding evil, as proposed by Taylor,
Svendsen and Zimbardo among others, might be read as related to specific
constructions of gender - for example, whether we might understand Taylor’s
‘language of atrocity’ and ‘otherization’ as related to the language deployed in the
othering of women - we must turn our attention to definitions of the other two
terms of this project’s title: how might we understand ‘women’ and ‘the feminine’?
And what is the connection between these separate, but inextricably intertwined,
terms and ‘evil’?
x
Introduction
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In common parlance, ‘woman’ is most often used to denote an anatomical or
genetic category of human, whereas ‘feminine’ is an adjective describing attributes
or behaviours commonly associated with the category of ‘woman.’ Though it is
somewhat of a cliché to offer a dictionary definition in an introduction to
problematic theoretical terms, I would like to cite the Oxford English Dictionary’s
definitions of ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ in order to reveal some of the difficulties in
understanding and using such terminology. The OED’s primary definition of
‘woman’ is ‘an adult female human being;’ the primary definition of ‘feminine’ is
‘belonging to the female sex.’ And yet, definitions of this sort have long been
scrutinised and found insufficient characterisations of the ways in which the terms
are deployed. To offer one of the founding arguments of second-wave feminism,
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, as an example: ‘every female human being
is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious
and threatened reality known as femininity.’ 9 While the dictionary serves to
conflate ‘woman’ and ‘the feminine’ under the, apparently, all-purpose categories
of ‘female’ and ‘human,’ cultural representations have long undermined this
conflation. As de Beauvoir suggests, femininity is often understood as a condition
of womanhood, which is not necessarily predicated on ‘femaleness’ (in its
biological sense).
It is, of course, beyond the scope of this introduction to rehearse the many and
varied arguments that have been posited to explain gender and sex. Suffice to say,
the theoretical divide of ‘gender’ (as behavioural, or as social construct) and ‘sex’
(as an anatomical or chromosomal designation) has been thoroughly problematised
in recent years. Judith Butler, for instance, in her highly influential work on
gender, suggests that ‘[s]exual difference … is never simply a function of material
differences which are not in some way both marked and formed by discursive
practices.’ 10 Elsewhere, in work that draws on neuroscience to explore problems
with received notions of gender difference, Cordelia Fine suggests ‘the cultural
beliefs about gender that are so familiar to us all … are in that messy tangle of
mental associations that interacts with the social context.’ 11 If dictionary entries
leave us in a dissatisfactory definitional loop, scholarly theorisations result in a
‘messy tangle.’
Moreover, there is no firm agreement amongst scholars as to what might
constitute either the ‘material differences’ of sex, or the behavioural or social
differences of gender. In her seminal work, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Donna
J. Haraway argues that ‘the ongoing constructions of what counts as sex or as
female have been hard to theorize, except as “bad science” where the female
emerges as naturally subordinate.’ 12 As I suggested of the term ‘evil,’ we are left
with concepts that are ontologically uncertain, but which we claim to recognise if
we see them. What the quote from Haraway’s work highlights is that this supposed
recognition is often predicated on a subordination of one gender or gendered group
- women and the feminine - to another - men and the masculine. The dominant, or
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privileged, group is, therefore, in position of power: it has both authority and
authorship over its subordinate, and might use this to construct, represent and other
them.
Understandings of women and the feminine as subordinate and inferior to, and
‘weaker’ than, men and the masculine have long gone hand-in-hand with
constructions of women and the feminine as evil. Indeed, there are multiple
cultural histories of using the former to explain the latter. In what might be deemed
the most famous handbook for dealing with the ‘evil’ woman, the Malleus
Maleficarum, we see this explanation writ large across the pages:
The reason determined by natures is that [a woman] is more
given to fleshly lusts than a man, as is clear from her many acts
of carnal filthiness. One notices this weakness in the way the first
woman was moulded, because she was formed from a curved rib,
that is, from a chest-rib, which is bent and [curves] as it were in
the opposite direction from [that in] a man; and from this
weakness one concludes that, since she is an unfinished animal,
she is always being deceptive. 13
Thus, for the authors of the Inquisition and its literature, woman is physically
predisposed to deception, weakness and ‘many acts of carnal filthiness.’ Her
formation from Adam’s rib - an object which, by its very shape, bends away from
the ‘direction’ of man - results in both an inferior physicality and a natural
propensity for sin and depravity.
The Malleus Maleficarum is, it should be noted, a particular type of text written
in a very specific social context, and for a very specific purpose. And yet we find
analogous constructions of women and the feminine in countless other cultural
productions. In her ground-breaking monograph on femininity in horror cinema,
Barbara Creed asserts that ‘[a]ll human societies have a conception of the
monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying,
horrific, abject.’ 14 This conception of femininity as being, in its very nature,
‘shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject’ speaks to Zimbardo’s formulation of the
construction of evil: ‘dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless,
the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an abstract monster.’
Given this long, multicultural history of association, it is hardly surprising that
we find the (re)iteration of women and the feminine as deeply connected with evil
in various cultural products. As I stated at the beginning of this introduction, all
three of the key terms of this volume’s subtitle defy easy definition. What is clear,
however, is that understandings of the three are intimately connected in the cultural
conscious. Furthermore, identical strategies of othering, subordination and
separation are employed for the reification of each. The material presented in this
volume reveals the extent of the association of women and femininity with evil and
xii
Introduction
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monstrousness; however, the essays also evidence the ways in which this
association might be read ‘in reverse.’ The pervasiveness of the woman-as-evil
stereotype creates a situation in which, when we encounter wickedness and
monstrosity, we are often inclined to gender it female.
In the collection of essays that came out of the first Evil, Women and the
Feminine conference, held in Budapest in 2009, editor Maria Barrett proposes that
the included papers explore ‘the myriad of ways in which the feminine permits a
reading of women as demonic and monstrous; violent and uncaring; powerful and
resistant, transgressive, ambivalent and at the very least as Other.’ 15 Similar tropes
emerge in the essays collected in this collection, and we find the concept of
‘woman as…’ scrutinised from various disciplinary and cultural perspectives.
However, while Barrett’s collection took as its focus readings of women as evil,
the current volume examines constructions of evil, women and the feminine. The
two approaches, I suggest, necessarily function in partnership: readings of the
monstrous/evil feminine are based in, and contribute to, representations in media,
literature and film.
In the nine chapters collected here, the authors discuss myth, literature, medical
tracts, film, visual art and cartoons, presenting us with women who are
characterised as evil, but also as selfish, illegal, marginalised and rebellious.
Moreover, in some of the papers herein, ‘the woman’ is not present at all, and the
relationship between ‘the feminine’ and evil comes to the fore. Iconographic and
stereotypical portrayals of femininity are interrogated, revealing a significant
absence of ‘real,’ tangible or individual women in discourses of feminine
wickedness. Definition eludes us throughout, but the mechanisms of constructing
and reifying the evil feminine are laid bare. The writers are informed by differing
theoretical frameworks and utilise varying scholarly tools, but the analyses reveal perhaps unsurprising - repetitions and recurrences. The power of patriarchal
societal structuring to define and construct its subjects, for instance, is a theme
explored in several of the essays. The fear and anxiety provoked by female agency
- particularly when at odds with the values or interests of the male - is another.
The three chapters that comprise the first section of this volume explore the
ways in which the ‘evil woman’ has been written, across and through diverse
historical contexts. The cultural productions under consideration here span
millennia, but common themes emerge. Texts that construct evil women often
evince anxieties about female agency and access to power, about women’s roles in
social and political domains, and about the relationship between femininity and
masculinity.
Alison Innes’s chapter, ‘Medea’s Medicine: Women and Pharmaka in Greek
Mythology’ explores presentations of women with pharmacological knowledge in
Greek myth, epic and tragedy. Presenting Medea, Circe, Helen and Deianeira as
women skilled with, and willing to use, medicinal herbs and plants, Innes argues
that Greek myth and literature conceive of a particularly ‘female’ use of
Hannah Priest
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pharmaceutical experience - a desire to cause harm, and to disrupt familial and
societal structures. These women, often operating outside of the watchful eye of a
kyrios (male guardian), act in ways that might be interpreted as irrational, selfish or
wilfully malevolent. However, this raises important questions about the ways in
which female agency is constructed in these narratives, and Innes examines some
of the cultural anxieties that may have fed, and been fed by, such mythological
representations.
The question of agency is explored further in Abdulaziz Al-Mutawa’s chapter
on ‘The Representation of the Evil Woman in Elizabethan Literature.’ Taking three
‘evil’ women from the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe - Lady Macbeth,
Catherine de’Medici and Isabella of France - Al-Mutawa considers the ways in
which female evil is connected to political and sovereign power, with reference to
both the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli and the violent hostility of ProtestantCatholic relations in early modern England. Again, the selfish or self-serving
woman might be understood as a convergence of cultural fears and is associated
with ‘evilness;’ moreover, the extent to which these women can be read as
‘feminine’ is also questioned. As in Innes’ examination of the women of Greek
myth, Al-Mutawa argues that the ‘evil’ women of Elizabethan drama are often
depicted thus as a result of their acquiring power in a male-dominated world.
Patriarchal social structures are also scrutinised in Zubaidah Mohamed
Shaburdin’s chapter, which focuses on contemporary literature and, specifically,
the presentation of women in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Once again,
however, we see that female characters negotiate a realm in which self-interest and
assertiveness are condemned as ‘evil,’ and may result in both self- and social
destruction. Drawing on deconstructionist and psychoanalytic theory, Shaburdin
argues that language plays a vital role in the construction of patriarchal ideals of
femininity. Ultimately, as this chapter argues, female characters in literature are
regularly marginalised and placed in an auxiliary role to the male protagonists.
While the first section of this volume considers so-called ‘evil women,’ the
second explores aspects of the ‘evil feminine’ - or, more accurately, ‘evil
maternity.’ Two key issues are addressed in this section. Firstly, these essays
reveal the ways in which maternity and reproduction are constructed as feminine
(and vice versa). Secondly, the writers reveal the ways in which monstrous
reproductive femininity is often, in fact, divorced from the human, female body.
Simon Bacon’s chapter addresses the conflation of the ‘out-of-control’ robotic
body with the ‘out-of-control’ female body, particularly in relation to reproduction,
in the Alien and Transformers series of films. As Bacon demonstrates, these series
- though, in many ways, very different - share common ground in their
representation of reproductive, feminised and abject bodies. The Alien Queen and
the Decepticons represent a challenge to the patriarchal order, with their boundarycrossing physicality and problematic configurations of gender. However, the
reproductive power of these ‘fluid’ bodies also speaks to the Freudian Death Drive,
xiv
Introduction
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and to an excess that destabilises Foucaultian Law and Order. Their containment by Optimus Prime or by Lt. Ellen Ripley - might be read as a (temporary)
reinforcing of the sterile, clean and non-procreative Law of the Father, but the
life/death force of the feminised alien invaders continually re-emerges.
The insidious, invasive quality of maternal reproductive power is also discussed
in Kathleen Starck’s chapter, which considers the figure of Mother in the 1962
film, The Manchurian Candidate. As in the preceding chapter, the maternal female
under discussion both threatens and undermines masculine identities. In her
exploration of Mother, Starck reflects on the ways in which Cold War narratives
are gendered, pointing to a connection between ‘feminine evil’ and ‘Communist
evil.’ Like in the case of the women in Elizabethan drama discussed by AlMutawa, the connection between political power and the ‘evil’ woman is clear.
Moreover, Starck identifies some of the problems inherent in gendering the evil
woman; the unnamed mother is the ‘phallic woman’ of psychoanalytic theory,
emasculating the men around her and appropriating their masculine role. This, as
Starck argues, might be read in the context of the ‘vagina dentata’ and castration
anxiety. The combination of political evil, ‘overmothering’ and phallic
appropriation reveals complex configurations of gender that float free of
anatomical femaleness.
In the third essay in this section, Cécile Cristofari considers ‘The Tainted Birth
in Lovecraft’s Fiction.’ Through an examination of the presentation of racial
purity, hybridisation and ‘blood,’ Cristofari argues that Lovecraft’s short stories
reveal an anxiety about reproduction, which might be read in light of
contemporaneous cultural concerns. Significantly, in Lovecraft’s writing, these
anxieties are not explicitly related to a notion of the ‘evil woman’ or a specific
conceptualisation of the female body as monstrous; rather, they reveal a fear of sex
and reproduction in and of themselves, as acts inextricably based in corruption,
disease and degeneration. The female body, then, is a vessel, rather than a site, of
‘unavoidable decay.’ As in Bacon’s chapter at the beginning of this section,
reproduction is a monstrous act - one which inevitably results in impure hybrids
that threaten the integrity of the (masculine) species.
Feminine agency, reproductive power and access to knowledge, then, are
constructed as ‘evil’ in diverse cultural productions and media. The relationship
between ‘evil’ and ‘femininity’ is a complex one, at once undeniable and
intangible. How, then, might we seek to understand the particularities of women
who perform acts of cruelty, violence and transgression? What approach can we
take when the evil that women do becomes more tangible?
In ‘Sugar and Spice, But Not Very Nice: Depictions of Evil Little Girls in
Cartoons and Comics,’ Jacquelyn Bent, Helen Gavin and Theresa Porter employ
tools of forensic psychology to explore presentations of ‘evil little girls’ in cartoons
and comics. The authors’ occasionally tongue-in-cheek discussion of ‘playful’
female evil nevertheless raises important issues about gendered representations of
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human capacity for violence, psychopathy and anti-social behaviour. The
popularity of blood-thirsty young females, in pop cultural productions aimed at
children, is a subject that has, thus far, attracted little scholarly interest. And yet, as
the authors of this essay demonstrate, the ‘evil little munchkins’ of cartoons offer a
perspective on female wickedness that is at odds with dominant representations.
Characters such as Wednesday Addams and Lenore are not sexualised femme
fatales, nor are they victims, mothers or hapless sidekicks. Bent, Gavin and
Porter’s chapter thus offers significant food for thought, as it reminds us that,
though we might encounter serial-murdering children on television and in comics,
this does not correlate with statistics and debates related to female offending
patterns.
The second chapter in this section, J. Shoshanna Ehrlich’s essay ‘A Wellspring
of Contamination: The Transgressive Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century
Medical Discourse,’ addresses the question of women’s marginalisation through a
focus on the regulation and observation of women’s bodies, specifically the bodies
of prostitutes. Ehrlich’s argument considers the dichotomy of the transgressive
woman: on the one hand, ‘evil,’ illegal and dangerous, on the other, a construction
of patriarchal society. In exploring nineteenth-century discourses on prostitution
and venereal disease, Ehrlich argues that women were (and are) frequently seen as
a source of contamination, not only for the male with whom they interact, but also
for the ‘virtuous’ females to whom the contamination is passed. What is revealed
in this chapter is the extent to which the ‘evil’ woman, with her potential for
infection and corruption, might be read, not as an individual, but as an exaggerated
version of the patriarchal construction of the female body, and of femininity itself.
The final chapter in this collection, Shelley Campbell’s ‘Myra: A Portrait of a
Portrait,’ considers representations of a figure who might be described, certainly by
British audiences, as the ultimate embodiment of feminine evil: Myra Hindley.
While Campbell’s chapter gives some thought to media responses to, and
constructions of, Hindley’s crimes, her main focus is Marcus Harvey’s 1995
painting, Myra. Situated by the artist as a reproduction of the infamous police
‘mugshot’ of Hindley, which is reprinted continually (to this day) wherever
Hindley’s crimes are discussed. Campbell argues that Harvey’s painting, its
method of production and the artist’s own comments on his work call into question
the idea of ‘transgression’ as relates to visual art. Moreover, the repetitious nature
of the Hindley mugshot gives it an ‘uncanny’ quality (in the Freudian sense),
which has implications for the ways in which we might read the gendering of
Hindley. As a monster - forever divorced from ‘Hindley the woman’ - the
peroxide-blonde, unrepentant Hindley of the photograph serves as a reminder of
the gender norms that were denied in her participation in the ‘Moors Murders.’ As
Campbell suggests, these norms do not only govern the portrayal of the ‘monster,’
but the construction of all femininity and all female identities.
xvi
Introduction
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As noted at the beginning of this introduction, definitions of ‘evil,’ ‘women’
and ‘the feminine’ are often dissatisfactory or incomplete. The chapters collected
herein, in fact, do not specifically set out to clarify or offer further evidence for
particular definitions. Rather, they explore how we might understand these
problematic terms, by revealing the mechanisms of construction that underlie both
our usage of such terminology and our comprehension of the concepts. The
collection thus represents an intervention into on-going scholarly debates regarding
the interconnection of women and evil, and the reification of women as evil.
Notes
1
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Evil, trans. Kerri A. Pierce (Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 28.
2
Ibid., 18.
3
Ibid., 19.
4
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London:
Rider, 2007), 6.
5
Ibid., 11.
6
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2011), 1.
7
Ibid., 1.
8
Kathleen Taylor, Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13.
9
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. Howard M. Parshley
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 1.
10
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York
and London: Routledge, 1993), 1.
11
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences
(London: Icon Books, 2010), 235.
12
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(London: Free Association Books, 1991), 134.
13
P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, ed. and trans., The Malleus Maleficarum (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 75, translator’s insertions.
14
Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
15
Maria Barrett, ‘Introduction’, in Grotesque Femininities: Evil, Women and the
Feminine, ed. Maria Barrett (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), vii.
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Feminine, edited by Maria Barrett, vii–xix. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010.
Hannah Priest
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