“Understanding female violence”: the title of this call for papers for the journal Champ Penal/Penal Field entails a voluntary restriction based on gender. Female violence, undeniably a minority phenomenon in terms of statistical occurrence, nourishes a collective imagination peopled by violent feminine figures (bellicose heroines or monstrous characters),  but it still remains a topic that has been little studied in the social and human sciences in France. However, female violence is a constant phenomenon. As for Durkheim, for whom suicide or crime, far from being pathological, are regular phenomena worthy of sociological investigation,  we would like to demonstrate that this small object, at least apparently, constitutes a lever for analyzing the social relationships of sex, of violence, on the one hand, and the norms of socialization, on the other. Behind the use of violence by women, one can ask the wider question regarding the sexuation of the regulation and production of the social order.

Indeed, the social organization rests on a material and symbolic creation based on a bipolarity which distributes tasks and stereotypes, opposing nature/culture, private space/public space, granting life/meting out death, strength/weakness, virility/femininity, masculine sex/feminine sex. Violent females contribute to the blurring of these borders, they create a confusion-a confusion that is quite social and not only in the nature of an historical or clinical exceptionality. While violence may be a domain reserved for men, they  do not have a monopoly on it. What are the social conditions for the transgression of this sexual order? Do the main participants even see it as a transgression? Are violent women “cases” which confirm the rule of a differentiated socialization? Do they allow us, on the contrary, to highlight social organizations, historical moments and social situations regulated by other hierarchies? Is the inversion of roles a complete one or does it not reenact the sexual division of violent “work”? How do societies stage the violence of women and how do they treat it?  

Three axes of analysis will be favored. They are all possible directions for the potential contributor(s) to this special issue:

1. The analysis of female violence: methodological stakes

How indeed to understand the violence by  women, while the violence against  women is by far the most manifest and the most common? Underlining this are the methodological problems in studying minority phenomena and in doing a male/female comparison,something which is necessarily asymmetric with regards to the data and the demography. As a result, it will be necessary in the articles to specify the manner in which the sample or the corpus has been established and to identify the method of analysis adopted (biographical, statistical, ethnographic, etc.)

While recognizing the effective marginality of the phenomenon, we will also examine the process of invisibilization of violent women for which the low number is maintained by an under-reporting, but also by a reaction different from that applied to men, under other terms, which consequently generates an asymmetry between the sexes. A critical analysis of the sources and the process of labeling violence and non-violence is imperative.

Still in methodological terms, should we frame the violence of women in terms of equality/inequality, delay/recovery, of minor/major phenomena? This assumes a quantification, a standard and an horizon that we can qualify as an extension of women’s struggle . Treated as a dreaded spectre, the result has been a de facto quarantine of this “dirty” object, because of the fear of political misuse of scientific research pointing to the very minority feminization of groups claiming the use of violence. Universalist, relativist and essentialist positions, all will require their blind spots to be looked at.

2. The uses of legal and illegal violence by women

The second axis will concern the violence observed in situ or narrated retrospectively. It will involve establishing the use by the women of different forms of physical violence (armed or not), the distribution of violent “work” between the sexes both vertically (sponsor, executor) and horizontally (between pairs). It will also be necessary to determine the place occupied by the use of violence in relation to the other activities of the group, but also in terms of trajectory, while being careful to restore the social conditions of possibility of these practices.

The expected papers can concern the legal or illegal use of violence by women. By “legal use of violence”, we are referring to institutions legally authorized or legitimately supported by powers in place to use a weapon or a physical activity aimed at constraining, causing pain or killing. Most usually, it is the army, the police and prison that carry out these operations of “maintaining order”, “public force”, of physical constraint. For their part, athletes refer to that which is authorized by the rules, or the “art” (martial arts, hunting, bullfighting). All these practices, even if legal, are nonetheless ambivalent, infused with abuse, of breaches of rules, which occur behind the scenes, or are de facto legitimated. It is necessary to analyze the position of women in these deviant behaviors which question the legal framing of violence. One must not forget the role of women in the “statutory” punitive actions, elaborated in the workplaces, educational and religious institutions, as well as in the extreme cases of extermination camps and genocides.   

The illegal use of violence will be another pole of investigation: political violence (terrorism, insurgent violence, independentist, demonstration) / collective violence (girl’s gang, organized crime, procuring, punk movement, sexual violence at meetings), intra familial violence (infanticide, parricide, spousal murder, women abusers, pedophilia) / other forms of crime and criminality (female serial killers, theft-violence) / the incrimination of women and mothers in male violence. Women are present throughout this whole repertoire, the matter of modality is the topic that remains to be defined.

3. The social reaction to female violence

Lastly, the third axis of this issue will deal with the social reaction to female violence, whether it is to represent the phenomenon, to sanction it or to understand it. We will distinguish here among:

-The institutional treatment of female violence. We will attempt to concretely understand how the reaction and intervention toward female violence functions. Are all violent women submitted to the same power of normalization? Is it necessary to speak of invisibilization or contrarily the overcriminalization or overstigmatization of the violent behaviors of women (or girls)? Such are the questions that we would like to see empirically studied, whether it is in the most visible institutions of social control (police, justice, prison) or other institutions of regulation (social work, for example) that are also places where female deviance is taken care of.  

Aside from this, to the extent that this institutional treatment relies upon different bodies of knowledge, the expected papers can also be about the way in which these disciplines (criminology, psychology, psychoanalysis amongst others) have sought and seek to understand female violence. How, in these disciplines, do we see in action the process of differentiation of the sexes which confers upon female violence an unnatural or only private and psychological characteristic? What are therefore the categories, the tools and the norms that are implemented? Can we discern an evolution in the way that the sciences think about and make sense of female violence?

-The fantastical treatment given to female violence. From the mythical amazons to the viragos of novels, from Nikita to Lara Croft, from heroines of mangas to witches, many are the violent feminine figures that populate the imagination of cultural and media creations. Heroic or monstrous, sometimes defined as the instigators of male violence, they simultaneously arouse craze, fascination and repulsion. How is the violence of women represented? What is their repertoire of action, their “destiny”? What sort of reception is reserved for these works? To answer these questions, the papers may deal with domains as varied as literature, painting, film and the media. In this sense, this call for papers is addressed as much to social science researchers as to specialists in literature, film or art history.  

In general, the expected papers must either stem from a precise empirical study, or attempt a literature review- by discipline or transversal-  of studies  from sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, law, criminology, literature, art, and that deal with the violence of women.

Proposals of 3000 characters are to be sent to Coline Cardi (Paris VIII - CSPRP) and Geneviève Pruvost (CESDIP-CNRS-UVSQ) before December 1 for a definitive delivery of the article in April-May 2010.

gpruvost@free.fr  coordinator of the special issue.

cardi.caroline@gmail.com coordinator of the special issue.

We are at your disposal for any information required about the content of your proposal as well as relevant dates.