T.L. Cowan

Picking up at Take Back the Night: Feminist Anti-Violence Performance and the Erotics of Community Protest and Mourning

Panel Abstract: From torture chicks to female offenders to she-male monsters the displacement of women’s aggression onto deviant sexuality has obsessed contemporary culture and created a sexualized pathological public sphere. Mark Seltzer defined pathological public sphere (Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture) as the collective gathering around spectacularly wounded bodies that transform the very notion of sociality and public spectacle into wound culture. This panel discusses performative responses to this widespread obsession with the injured, disastrous collective body and how the gendered nature of this public sphere creates new contradictions and anxieties that generate a unique blend of terror and jouissance, fascination and horror (Braidotti). This panel consists of three papers:

– Dr Susanne Luhmann’s Performing Perpetrator Publics: Domesticating Female Nazi Perpetrators at Ravensbr‚ck,

– Dr Donia Mounsef’s Women, Torture, and the Banality of Jouissance,

– Dr T.L. Cowan’s Picking up at Take Back the Night: Feminist Anti-Violence Performance and the Erotics of Community Protest and Mourning.