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Abstract
This dissertation critically examines the gendered features of the liberal democratic tradition’s longstanding repudiation of vengeance as inimical to political life. Liberal societies purport to have transcended private vengeance as a means of dispute settlement in favor of public means of resolution in and through law. Existing research in political theory approaches the problem of vengeance and its attendant states like anger and resentment instrumentally, considering their utility or inutility to flourishing public spheres. This way of framing the problem of vengeance, I argue, fails to account for its gendered figuration. Though men too can figure as agents of vengeance, their ventures beyond the law are typically portrayed as righteous defenses of its normative foundations. Women, by contrast, are often portrayed, from Greek tragedy to our own day, as voicing claims that are not incidentally but by definition outside the law: claims that bring its normative order into question. More than a critique of the gendered grammar by which women’s claims to justice tend to be reduced to cries for vengeance, this dissertation explores how women and other feminized groups creatively negotiate the terms of their figuration as agents of vengeance to challenge our very understanding of what counts as a matter of public justice. By way of three substantive chapters analyzing historical and contemporary examples of women’s speech – as represented in Greek tragedy, in 20th century French theater and protest, and in contemporary American courts of law and public spheres – I track the ways in which the specter of the vindictive woman whose defiant speech threatens to upend the order continues to shape our understanding of what justice is—and of who can properly be said to be laying claim to it.