All the Rage. The Challenges of Female Anger

Everyone seems to be angry these days, but female anger in particular is surfacing in unprecedented forms and shades. Numerous examples from politics, theory, art, and literature speak to the proliferation of female rage, from Greta Thunberg’s »How dare you!« and the resentment voiced by the BLM co-founders to countless new literary and academic titles. Writers like Leslie Jamison, Brittney Cooper, and Soraya Chemaly follow in the footsteps of Audre Lorde‘s The Uses of Anger (1981), (re)claiming and embracing an emotion long denied to women. In fictional works such as Fatma Aydemir’s Ellbogen (2017) or Virginie Despentes’ Cher connard (2022), however, the ambivalences of this self-empowering feeling also become evident. The social and political sciences, for example, have recently started to look closely at the role of women’s anger in right-wing milieus, which has long been considered male-dominated.

One of the challenges of anger is that it is essentially selfjustifying: Figures of all political stripes insist on the legitimacy of their feelings, their right to be heard. How can (queer-)feminist theory contend with the explosive contradictions, the fraught aptness of anger? What would a conception of female anger look like that takes seriously the pitfalls, intersections, and double binds at its base? What would a history of female anger entail? Is there a framework that allows us to navigate the line between the use and abuse of anger? Together with scholars, activists, artists, and writers, we want to explore the complexities and ambiguities of this emotion at a time when female anger is all the rage.

Concept: Julia Boog-Kaminski (ifk Vienna), Alexander Draxl (Vienna)

Participants: Fatma Aydemir (Journalist, Author), Déborah Brosteaux (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin / Université Libre de Bruxelles), Iris Därmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham), Ute Frevert (Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung Berlin), Julia Freytag (Hamburg), Esther Lehnert (Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin), Marina Rauchenbacher (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), Marlene Streeruwitz (Author), Paige Sweet (Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis), Fiona Wachberger (ifk Vienna)

A cooperation with the Sigmund Freud Museum and aka / Arbeitskreis Kulturanalyse

Supported by Stadt Wien

Program

Wednesday, 2 APRIL 2025

10:00–12:00 Sadismus mit und ohne Sade
Workshop mit Iris Därmann, Déborah Brosteaux und Fiona Wachberger (Anmeldung unter hoegler@ifk.ac.at)

14:30 Welcome and Introduction: Julia Boog-Kaminski and Alexander Draxl
15:00 Marina Rauchenbacher: Taking Up Space. Feminist/Women’s Rage in Comics
16:00 Paige Sweet: Rage. A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
17:30 Lisa Downing: Female Rage/Female Reason. A Paradox for 21st-Century Feminism

Thursday, 3 APRIL 2025

10:00 Iris Därmann: »Wir könnten uns von dieser Hölle befreien…« (Ester Wajcblum). Netzwerke weiblichen Widerstands in Auschwitz
11:00 Déborah Brosteaux: Frauen im Faschismus. Eine Relektüre von Maria Antonietta Macciocchi
12:30 Esther Lehnert: Women in the Far Right. The Dark Side of Female Anger?
15:00 Ute Frevert: Rage, Honour, Shame. A Gendered History
16:30 Julia Boog-Kaminski: Raging Daughters, Absorbing Mothers.On the Representation of Female Rage in Contemporary Literature
18:30 Fatma Aydemir Ellbogen (Lesung und Gespräch)

Friday, 4 APRIL 2025

10:00 Julia Freytag: Die Tochter Elektra. Eine Figur weiblicher Wut in Literatur und Psychoanalyse
11:00 Fiona Wachberger: Fremde Wut. Weibliche Gewalt an der Schnittstelle von Wirklichkeit und Fiktion
13:30 Marlene Streeruwitz im Gespräch mit Alexander Draxl: Dauerzustände des Affektiven

THE CONFERENCE WILL BE HYBRID

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To participate in person, no registration is currently required.