Beyond Mothers Monsters Whores

“If women ran the world there would be no war” [1] is a commonsensical phrase that we all probably heard at least once, and it’s the kind of “traditional wisdom” that Gentry and Sjoberg seek to question in Beyond Mothers Monsters Whores. As the authors show it is based on “traditional images of women as pure, maternal, emotional, innocent and peace-loving” or even on “feminist images of liberated women as capable and equal but not prone to men’s mistakes, excesses and violence” (p. 2).

This inability or unwillingness to view violence perpetrated by women as no different than the violence perpetrated by men is reflected in gendered narratives (which the authors define as “a story about an event or set of events recounted for an audience or readership” – p. 139). These narratives tend to portray women who commit violence as abnormal women; as mothers, monsters or whores.

Without going into further details about the book, I would like to propose a more general question about the book and about feminist theory, two specific questions and comment on two absences.

Firstly, as I started reading the book it struck me that this all seemed obvious to me. I found this interesting because it’s clearly not obvious. Yet I was not at all familiar with Gentry and Sjoberg’s work. This got me questioning how theory might slip into public discourse and reach broader audiences and also the purpose of theories more broadly. The authors advocate that their aim is to “complicate ideas” and to “shift how people think about, approach and live gender” (p. 16). Where does that leave us in our debate about what is theory and what should we do with it?

The first specific question is about the authors defense that there is no such thing as a gendered experience, that there is no such thing as “a common character or common experience that can be attributed to people on the basis of membership to those groups [men and women]” (p.5). While, yes, we all experience our femininity/masculinity differently, it seems to me that there is enough of a common experience.

The second question is really a doubt regarding the author’s criticism of rational choice theory for “ignoring traits associated with femininity such as human emotion and interdependence” (p. 33).

Finally, I noticed two absences. They are both understandable given the scope of the book, but I though they’d be interesting topics to expand the debate.

First, I noticed the authors barely comment on the fact that women commit much less violence than men: only 7% of murders in the US [2], for example. While I don’t think this goes against the authors thesis that violence perpetrated by women is underrepresented, I think it’s interesting to debate whether the recent opening to women of spaces of violence from which they were secluded is going to affect these trends more generally. Furthermore, is it going to affect expectations of feminine violence more generally?

Secondly, I noticed the absence of race. While I know we have been at this again and again, and it is not possible to include all “exclusions” in every debate, it seems that given predominant racial stereotypes regarding especially Black women and violence it would be a worthy inclusion is this particular debate.

[1] Yet only 7% of Americans think women in Public Office are better at dealing with national security: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/10/gender-leadership.pdf

[2]https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl03.xls