2 - Hysteria and the Feminization of the Violent Woman

Summary

“BONNIE UND KLEID” (Bonnie and dress/Clyde) was the title of a short fashion article published in Der Spiegel in February 1968. Arthur Penn's film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) had been released in West Germany two months earlier and would be cited continually in association with terrorist violence in the decade to come. Aside from being a mildly amusing pun, the Spiegel title is indicative of a cultural tendency to feminize the violent woman (and that which is deemed culturally threatening). I want to address this tendency now, in an exploration of how the violent woman's threat is defused through association with the typically feminine and typically female, and with hysteria as a particularly heightened form of femininity and femaleness. By the typically feminine and female, I mean clichés of womanhood that are imposed upon women: everything that elicits the misogynistic response “typical woman,” from vanity and refined femininity to madness, fanaticism, and being ruled by nature and one's body. Hysteria provides a useful lens here as popular understandings of that phenomenon cover the range of clichés of womanhood; according to Susan Bordo, hysteria spans “the continuum between female disorder and ‘normal’ female practice.”

A Bild article on the arming of policewomen in 1973 demonstrates the desire to feminize the violent woman, not least because of her allure as a powerful, potentially (sexually) dominating woman — and this part of it is crucial (fig. 11). The article takes up the majority of page 4 of the Bild edition and the page is dominated visually by the largest of the three photographs.