Margaret Betz
Assistant Teaching Professor
Rutgers University Camden
Fight Like a Girl: Resistance Violence by Women
Gendered norms promote deference, compliance, and pleasantness in women while reserving for men the entitlement to express assertiveness, anger and, sometimes, to commit violence. Gender roles fall within class, race, ethnicity, and gender expressions, creating a complex web of social positionings that reserve the right to stand up for oneself to a select few. Despite this, women from within marginalized groups like enslaved women and Jewish women during WWII refused to comply with the respectability politics of their expected deferential race, gender, and class roles and chose to fight back. In this paper, I describe their use of physical force as resistance violence, or violence carried out by politically vulnerable people with the understanding they will likely pay with their lives. As such, this violence is not self-defense in any traditional sense; instead, resistance violence represents resistance to one’s dehumanization. This paper explores our social discomfort with the personal advocacy involved in women’s rage and violence and the epistemic justice issues involved.