All the Rage. The Challenges of Female Anger

2. bis 4. April 2025 ifk Arkade & ifk@Zoom

Das ifk lädt zur Tagung

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), Lena Ekelund (Hamburg), 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)

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