Divergent Women

The teenage girl constructs her identity amidst a chorus of conflicting voices. She both replicates and resists the patterns of good girl/bad girl as displayed by earlier generations, trying to figure out who she is and how she might live in her body, in the world.

Evil women – bad girls – defy the binary definitions of good and bad, both in body and spirit. They are the bad feminist, they are the Sea Witch, they are the art monster. But when we claim the monster as our role model, we commit her (and ourselves) to the constraints of the patriarchy – replicating a predetermined way of being a girl. There must be a way to define ourselves beyond these constraints. How does one become the monster?

Teen identity is constructed via research, rehearsal and performance: the trying on of multiple possible selves. One person's performed identity becomes the benchmark that others measure themselves against.

Like Courtney Love, who said she didn't want to be with the band, she wanted to be in the band, we all want to belong. We all want to stand out. How sharply we carve the edges of ourselves to fit.

This interactive ‘Fakebook dialogue’ allows Bec and Simmone to draw a line through theory and personal experience, bringing the voices of academia to life, and imagining them in conversation with ourselves and the women whom we have resisted, used as role models or temporarily dreamed ourselves into being. Our piece is set in the nexus of the body and the self. We incorporate autotopography and self-representation as shaped by shared cultural objects to interrogate existing modes of replication and resistance and try to imagine the monstrous shape of our true identity.

Many depictions of women in the west, through images and old stories, focus on women as either mothers or as young girls in an idealized state. Whenever behaviour deemed correct to their sex has been disrupted, images and tales about women shift the focus onto blame, using women as scapegoats for their persecuted lives, or showing women's essentialist biological ‘weaknesses’ as the cause of wrongdoing. Surrounded by a blame culture with its negative effects, have women demonstrated a female agency as they project blame back onto a force beyond themselves? Struggling with disappointment and fears, a common belief in ‘bad-luck’ would allow women to voice a varied imaginary of superstitions, omens and presences in the past. While such imagery derives from less legitimate forms of knowledge (i.e. vernacular), remaining chiefly in folklore and fairy, such projections which move between the interior and exterior world as liminal presences expand the domestic sphere, long considered the norm for women. The function of such blaming by women, rather than be read as complaints without a resulting action, instead can be viewed as a positive action which allowed women relief and release, a chance to express and reveal the frustrations of a group with limited power over their own lives. This chapter examines how images and tales reveal and maintain blame culture towards women and suggests a view of blame and blaming transformed into survival tools for women in the past.

This chapter reviews the media's fascination with one of the most infamous women in Canadian history. Karla Homolka was found guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of two Ontario teenage girls in the early 1990s. Her husband, Paul Bernardo, was convicted on a number of charges associated with these deaths, including sexual assault and first degree murder. The chapter traces the initial print reports of the arrest, trial and sentencing of Karla Homolka; the application of the ‘Ken and Barbie’ moniker as a description of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo; and the characterization of Karla Homolka's sentencing as the proverbial ‘deal with the devil’. The media continued to pursue Karla Homolka long after she had completed her twelve-year prison sentence and was released into the community. The media's evolution in coverage of this case is described, and it is argued that Karla Homolka's treatment by the media was, and continues to be, an example of the kind of biased coverage that illustrates the gendered manner in which violence is conceptualized in our society, and calls into question the structural and systematic condemnation that is directed towards those women who commit violent crimes. This chapter emphasizes that the lens through which the media covers violent crimes for which women are accused and/or convicted is often clouded with vitriol and malevolence.

A strange phenomenon among women writers of the late eighteenth century, both conservative and liberal minded, was the predominance of female villains in their novels. While this can be seen as an after-effect of masculine patriarchal discourse, particularly for those women writers who possessed a more religious-based ideology, why was it prevalent among feminist writers of the time who should have been aware of misogynistic stereotypes? Two such writers who emulated this strange paradox were Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith. Both these women had been vilified by the Anti-Jacobin British 18th press as notorious and corrupt ‘female philosophers’ who followed in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft. This chapter will conduct a historical feminist close comparative reading of Robinson's novel, Walsingham, and Smith's novel, The Young Philosopher, based on feminist scholarship on eighteenth-century female writers. It will examine how the female villains in the novels overpowered even the male antagonists and were often the cause behind the misfortunes, directly or indirectly, of the heroines/heroes. While these villains did serve as warnings against inappropriate behaviour, they illustrated the disaster for women when there is a lack of female community. Specifically, in the case of Robinson, her Sadean villains illustrated that no one is spared from the corruption of power and that the saintly female figure is nothing but an illusion of the male imagination. They were fallen Lucifers, rebels who relished in their freedom and power despite their damnation and punishment. The patriarchal system was temporarily demolished by them.

While in Art Spiegelman's non-fiction narrative Maus (1980–1991), the voice of the mother Anja is silenced, Eunsung Kim's non-fiction graphic narrative My Mother's Story (2020) revives a mother's voice that has been hardly heard in the history of Korean literature and culture. Just as the narrative in Maus is based on the interview between a son and his father, who has survived the Holocaust or the concentration camp in the Second World War, in My Mother's Story, a mother in her eighties tells the story of her entire life to her daughter. The writer's mother underwent Japanese colonization, the Korean War and the following years of industrial modernization, migrating from one place to another throughout her life. By visualizing a woman's personal memory, which has been forgotten for quite a long time, the Korean graphic narrative incorporates the subjective and subaltern voice into history. Thus, appropriating Michel Foucault's notion of subjectivation, which generally refers to the construction of the individual subject, I would argue that this visualization or revitalization of the silenced voice of the old woman can be called a process of ‘resubjectivation’, or reconstruction of the marginalized and thereby discarded subject of an aged woman in Korea. But this essay is not exactly a comparative study, paralleling the two different graphic narratives together. Instead, it focuses on uncovering ontological meanings of the feminine narrative in Korean culture as the process of resubjectivation involves not only the recovery of an individual woman's lost voice, but it is also related to the retrieval of a lost cultural legacy.

In recent years, there has been no shortage of research on the enormous pressure women face to have children. Similarly, the pressures put on mothers and the impossibility for women to live up to the ideal standards of motherhood are increasingly the subject of scrutiny. However, a shadowy figure lurks in the cultural imagination: the woman who refuses to have a child, or worse, hates the children she has. If narratives of maternal distress, anxiety and regret represent ‘the last taboo’, then narratives of willful rejection exist even outside of those boundaries.

This chapter explores narratives of women who are villainised for their negative relationships to motherhood and mothering, in canonical texts of the Western Anglosphere culture. Drawing examples from the Bible, from Charles Dickens, and from the Disney corporation, Çakmak and Rumson demonstrate the variations and ongoing poignancy of the narrative that women who reject or fail to have children are evil.

The voluntarily childless woman is constructed in Western cultural consciousness as an aberration. Against her will, she is perceived as defective, deviant, unnatural and incomplete. However, online community spaces are providing opportunities for childfree women to connect with one another, take hold of the narrative of their lives and in doing so write into being a new way of doing womanhood that intentionally claims deviance as its defining characteristic. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which women participants in online childfree communities write their identities against hegemonic markers of ‘good’ womanhood, recasting the heroes and villains of Western culture's persistent myth of mandatory motherhood.

A reciprocal relationship between fairy tales and psychoanalytic theories is at the heart of this chapter and the focus is on the mother's point of view in the well-known tale type ‘Snow White’ (ATU709), from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. ¹ This tale type deals with the mother–daughter relationship, on the change the mother goes through as her daughter reaches adolescence.

I have chosen to focus on versions deriving from a Muslim-Arab source, most of them archived in the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA). My assumption was that versions of this tale type could provide fertile ground for a deep look into motherhood and its representation in the psyche, and the subjective experience of mothers in face of their daughters' puberty in particular.

I have found that through creative means, this story depicts feminine experiences that psychoanalytic theory has not yet conceptualised. I divided the process undergone by mothers into three phases: (1) A defining moment (2) A fantasy of reversal (3) A new horizon for feminine development in adulthood.

In midlife, women experience physical, mental and social changes that can feel devastating at first and may lead to destructive reactions. However, the process described in this chapter exemplifies how women in general and mothers in particular can develop as they age from denial of reality and sorrow about the loss of their beauty, youth and fertility, to acceptance of the change and a realisation that there is room for further development as a woman and as a mother.

The word witch conjures up a black-cloaked figure with a pointed hat flying on a broomstick, often with green skin and a hooked nose: the epitome of feminine evil. Although this version of witches was popularised in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and commercialised in mid-twentieth-century North American Halloween costumes, conjecture is that it originated from the slightly greenish hue of applying botanical remedies, or the appearance of witches who had endured bruising and painful torture. During the height of the European witch hunts (about 1450–1750, with the greatest intensity 1550–1650), an estimated 40,000–60,000 witches were executed (Levack, 1987). Although some men factored into this death toll, estimates are that 75–80% of witches executed were women (Gibbons, 1998). Fear and persecution of witches exists globally, dating to Ancient Rome, but the more systematic purges were the result of complex forces, including rapid social and economic changes of the Early Modern era, the Reformation, the Little Ice Age and the Plague (Federici, 2014; Golden, 2006). Those perceived as witches, often impoverished, older, single women, were easy scapegoats for society's ills.

In recent decades, the depth and accuracy of archival research into witch hysteria have improved. Drawing on this research, this chapter examines the place of witch persecutions in the contemporary context. Although people often recognise the injustice of these persecutions, few countries have granted legal pardons or erected memorials to their victims. Why is the acknowledgement of these injustices so slow coming? What fears about witches do we still harbour?