Keywords

Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere considers the cultural representation of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance with a focus on the transnational dimension of our contemporary visual and literary cultures in English. Previous research on the notion of vulnerability gained momentum when Judith Butler (2004) theorized on the sociopolitical context of the USA after 9/11. According to her, by exposing the vulnerability of one of the most powerful countries in the world, the attacks to the World Trade Centre in 2001 would force the USA to acknowledge a common humanity with less developed countries whose vulnerability in comparison with USA’s political, economic and military superiority had been wielded to justify its imperialistic policies in the Middle East. The concept of vulnerability thus re-emerged in close relation with Trauma Studies. Similarly, in the Introduction to their edited collection, Catriona Mackenzie et al. (2014) establish the idea that vulnerability as a condition pertaining to humanity exposes human beings to illness, injury, disability and death, giving to the notion a social and emotional dimension. They point out that human beings are also vulnerable to the environment and even to technologies. Consequently, precarity materializes in tangible life conditions determined by unemployment, poverty, migration, political corruption or environmental changes, military aggression against civilians and high criminality rates, racial and ethnic discrimination, poor healthcare systems, religious or gender discrimination or limited access to spaces and technologies and sociopolitical participation, as well as justice. Because these are common features of our contemporary world, the concept of vulnerability is likewise linked to the complex issue of the subjects’ specific responses, and particularly to whether they will strive for resilience (often critiqued as being closely knitted to neoliberal, late-capitalist ideas of success) or opt for resistance (more closely connected to subaltern subjectivities).

Vulnerability Studies have gained traction in the last few years. An Academia.edu search on the topic turned up over 10,000 followers and over 11,000 paper titles. However, most of the output comes from the Social Sciences and relatively little contribution has been made to date in the Humanities. Therefore, Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere aims to fill this gap within Literary and Cultural Studies by undertaking the analysis of concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in a wide range of cultural texts written in English. These texts have been published or circulated in the last two decades across a wide geography encompassing India, Ireland, Canada, the USA and the UK: memoirs and testimonies, films, TV series, crime fiction and literary fiction. Thus, the collection provides a rich array of cultural case studies to explore gender vulnerability in a transnational framework, in turn providing fresh insights into vulnerability itself as a “travelling theory,” following Edward Said’s (1983) formulation. In his view, ideas and theories travel from person to person, from situation to situation and from one period to another. In his words, cultural and intellectual life is nourished by the circulation of ideas, and it is important to discern if these ideas or theories gain or lose strength when travelling from one culture to another. This is indeed the volume’s further aim: to meditate on the application of theories of vulnerability and resistance in different spatial and temporal frames so that it can be asserted whether these notions are adopted or resisted in the diverse cultures that the literary and visual texts represent, developing new positions in relation to the original ones. In tracing these conceptual travels, the collected essays avoid regarding different contexts as simply passive receptacles or recipients of theories and instead posit them as creative dynamic sites which add interesting dimensions to thinking through gender-based vulnerability and resistance.

Transnationalism is not only a key term for the analytical framework adopted in Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere; it is also descriptive of the contributors, a group of gender studies scholars based in Spanish and Portuguese universities that have for some time been collaborating in the analysis of cultural productions in English. Their work has been enabled by two subsequent research projects collectively entitled “Bodies in Transit” that have obtained funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. We adopt the Mediterranean as a vantage point from which to look on a globalised world, acknowledging on the one hand that the Mediterranean has for ages been a space of cultural encounters and hybridisation, and on the other, that on this day and age it is likewise subject to ongoing processes of exclusion and discrimination that must be open to our scrutiny. As part of the outputs of the project, in the Spring of 2019 an international seminar on Vulnerability in Literary and Cultural Studies was organised by María Isabel Romero-Ruiz and Elena Cantueso-Urbano and hosted by the University of Malaga. This productive forum enabled many critical conversations, and the workshopped papers became the starting point for this book. When she first theorised the notion of vulnerability, Butler (2004) emphasised the relevance that representing vulnerable alterity has in constituting the basis of mutual humanity beyond the enforcement of exclusionary policies and ideologies. Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance: A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere intends to explore the literary and media displays of precarious conditions. Its aim is to look into how these displays are affected when intersecting with various gender and ethnic identities, thus resulting in structural forms of vulnerability that generate and justify diverse forms of oppression, and forms of individual or collective resistance and/or resilience, acknowledging a condition of mutual vulnerability.

The collection comprises eleven chapters structured into three thematic sections meant to elucidate different contexts and related definitions within the field. The first section, “Gender Vulnerability, Resilience and Resistance”, teases out and contrasts various responses to gender-based violence. In rethinking vulnerability and resistance together, Butler later claims that vulnerability is not ontological but politically imposed and unequally distributed. Those more vulnerable oppose this condition first by recognising it and then through performative bodily acts of resistance (2016, 13–27). However, the latter imply taking risks, as Butler argues: “[I]t is already more than clear that those who gather to resist various forms of state and economic power are taking a risk with their own bodies, exposing themselves to possible harm” (2016, 12). Nonetheless, she claims, “there is plural and performative bodily resistance at work that shows how bodies are being enacted on by social and economic policies that are decimating livelihoods”. Moreover, “these bodies, in showing this precarity, are also resisting those very powers; they enact a form of resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and opposes precarity” (2016, 15). Resistance emerges from “a space of appearance”, that is, from being seen and acknowledged (Butler 2016, 14).

In contrast, Sarah Bracke argues that resistance is “characterised as the ability of something or someone to return to its original shape after it has been pulled, stretched, pressed, or bent” (2016, 54). In her view, resistance leads to resilience and often subjects who are vulnerable and victims of trauma or violence want to recover their subjectivities and identities through a “denial of vulnerability” and “a disidentification with dependence”, gaining restoration and agency (Bracke 2016, 59). According to Bracke, resilience is used by neoliberal governments to deny vulnerability and justify violence. She claims that those marginalised are named “resilient” not in relation to security, since they are not secure, but in relation to survival as their capacity to overcome threats and attacks from those in power. She proposes to call this group “a subject of subaltern resilience, or the resilience of the wretched of the earth, which is born out of the practice of getting up in the morning and making it through the day in conditions of often unbearable symbolic and material violence” (2016, 60). Resilience, from her point of view, is a mode of subjectification used by biopower; she affirms that we are entertained with the idea of becoming resilient without exploring other possible ways, without challenging the power which causes these situations and our vulnerability (Bracke 2016, 61–62).

In the first essay in this section, Elena Cantueso-Urbano describes that precise kind of resilience for the survivors of the Irish Magdalene Laundries system. “Growing Resilient in Irish Magdalene Laundries: An Analysis of the Justice for Magdalenes’ Oral History Project (2013) and Kathy O’Beirne’s Autobiography Kathy’s Story. A Childhood Hell inside the Magdalen Laundries (2005)” examines the reform system for “deviant” women that was in force in Ireland for the best part of two centuries in the voice of some of its survivors. These testimonies, variously collected by activists involved in the Justice for Magdalenes’ Oral History Project or by the survivors themselves, attest to multiple forms of resistance within and without those institutions as well as to the women’s growing resilience in the face of their trauma and of Irish society’s refusal to provide the reparation they demand or to bring the Church and the Irish state—the perpetrators—to account. Cantueso-Urbano concludes that in the case of the Magdalenes’ vulnerability, resistance and resilience complement each other enabling survival and opening a path to healing. Gender violence is also the subject of the next chapter in the section, “Vulnerable Bodies, Resistant Minds and Resilient Subjects in Emma Donoghue’s Room”. This groundbreaking novel, inspired by a real case of sexual violence, provides María Elena Jaime-de Pablos with a case study for what she conceives of as a two-stage process grounded in resistance against repeated acts of psychological, physical and sexual violence and eventually evolving towards resilience, drawing from Boris Cyrulnik’s theory. The abusive conditions suffered by Ma and Jack in the novel are analysed with the help of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, whereas the different forms of violence they encounter, this time wielded by mass media and the medical establishment in their pressure for them to conform and integrate, are examined under the lens of Foucault’s panopticon and Judith Butler’s theory of language. For Jaime-de Pablos, then, Donoghue’s fiction conveys a compelling picture of vulnerability in resistance. In the next chapter, “Of Mice and Women: Gendered and Speciesist Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Martyrdom’”, Maria Sofia Pimentel-Biscaia approaches a different kind of sexual violence against women as relayed by the US author in her short story “Martyrdom”. The text is a brutal allegory of marriage where a cruel husband abuses his wife, Babygirl, by neglecting, beating, prostituting and, in the end, raping her with a live rat. This horrifying intersection of patriarchal and speciesist violence is based on a conceptual definition of women and rats as subaltern subjects to human males and therefore bound to be treated differently, in this case as mere instruments for the human male’s sexual gratification. Pimentel-Biscaia’s analysis is sustained on recent debates on vulnerability and its relation to resistance outlined above and aims to untangle the multiple threads of systemic violence exerted over subaltern subjectivities, an aim shared as well by other chapters in the collection, more specifically here through the instrumentalisation of animal bodies. Closing this section, “‘Nobody Kills a Priest’: Irish Noir and Pathogenic Vulnerability in Benjamin Black’s Holy Orders” turns to consider the concept of “institutional precariousness” drawn by Brian S. Turner (2006), insofar as it affected certain social groups in 1950s Ireland as portrayed by Benjamin Black (John Banville’s crime fiction penname). Auxiliadora Pérez-Vides argues that Holy Orders focuses on the multi-layered precarity and pathogenic vulnerability of the travellers to the corrupted network of Catholic authorities, the press and the police at the time, so that the bodies of this subaltern community (and particularly those of its women and children) remain under control and any form of resistance becomes void, leading to further victimisation. The novel also sketches the possibility of vigilantism to bring about some sort of reparative justice in the face of such institutional corruption and the system’s general lack of accountability and frames questions about how to make these subjects’ lives fully livable.

The second section, “Gender Vulnerability, Agency and Interdependency,” introduces two other related concepts, agency (a key topic in much feminist theory to date) and interdependencies (resulting from the acknowledgement of our deeply human vulnerability). Bracke claims that when individuals willingly become the subjects of a moral discourse, that endows them with agency (2016, 62–63). But, as Mary Evans argues, agency in relation to gender or when applied to women is circumscribed by notions of patriarchy, that is, as defined by men and associated with them and their actions. Therefore, agency is on the feminist agenda “to challenge the poverty and the lack of social power of women in both the global north and the global south” (Evans 2013, 48). She makes use of the idea of “gendering agency” by attributing features of “individualism, self-sufficiency, voluntarism, unencumberedness and free action” as characteristic of the male gender. These traits must be imitated by women in order to gain agency in a patriarchal world (Evans 2013, 48). Further, she sees agency as arising from a subject’s sympathy towards the suffering of others in our modern world and from his/her subsequent wish to alleviate it. In her opinion, agency can be also associated with the body and emotional health (Evans 2013, 51, 54).

In this sense, in their introduction to their edition, Mackenzie et al. establish that vulnerability is something inherent to the human condition and argue that we are not only vulnerable to the actions of others, but also dependent on their care and support. These ideas locate the vulnerable subject at the heart of social policy and state responsibility (2014, 4–5), and this is part of the argument of some contributors to this volume, like Pérez-Vides above. They also establish a taxonomy of vulnerability and speak of “inherent vulnerability” when the origin of this condition is intrinsic to the human condition; “situational vulnerability”, when it is context-specific; “dispositional/ocurrent vulnerability” when there is a distinction between potential and actual vulnerability; and “pathogenic vulnerability” defined as generated by a variety of sources like abusive social and interpersonal relationships, sociopolitical oppression or injustice (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 7–9). Similarly, they make people with power and authority responsible for the vulnerable condition of others (especially children and the elderly, but also women and gender minorities in certain geographical locations) and its amelioration. The intention is to endorse national and transnational aims such as promoting autonomy, implementing social justice and avoiding exploitation to provide the vulnerable with respect and dignity (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 13–15). In her reflections about precarity, Judith Butler meditates on contemporary violence and on global events that make her wonder: “Who counts as human, Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (2004, 20; emphasis in original). According to her notion of precarity, the lives and deaths of the people who belong to the category of the other and the subaltern do not deserve public mourning. They cannot be labelled as human, as their destinies are not a matter of concern for the regimes of power that control them. Butler defines bodies as associated with mortality, vulnerability and agency; she affirms that we live in communities and we are all interdependent. And yet, there are certain groups who are more vulnerable to violence than others, such as the bodies of the poor, the sexually “deviant” and the “racialised other”. These are all bodies vulnerable to political and social conditions and, as such, victims of different forms of violence. Butler’s discourse of dehumanisation of certain individuals and groups is a complex one. According to this discourse, subaltern groups do not deserve being regarded as human, nor does in consequence their loss deserve any grief (Butler 2004, 26–29).

As social and political beings, we are produced, recognised and represented by power but those excluded from the social system fail to be represented and to be considered human: “ … those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanised, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed not regarded at all” (Butler 2004, 147). This is one of the aims of this volume: to give representation through literature and popular culture to individuals who are the victims of violence and discrimination, whose lives are precarious in a transnational context that covers different parts of the Anglosphere. This is very much the case in Pilar Cuder-Domínguez’s chapter, “Crime Fiction’s Disobedient Gaze: Refugees’ Vulnerability in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s A Dangerous Crossing (2018), which, like the last chapter in the previous section, addresses the power of the crime genre to denounce systemic forms of violence against certain collectivities (here, refugees) and the failure of institutions (here supranational rather than national) to end them. The chapter’s main argument is that the refugees’ situational vulnerability is compounded both by the contradictions inherent in the discourse of international human rights and by the racial and gender politics of nations towards forced migration. It shows, through the crime genre plot in Khan’s novel, that female and male refugees are perceived and treated differently despite their common racialisation; risk is emphasised in the case of men, vulnerability in women. Cuder-Domínguez concludes that Khan uses crime genre conventions for advocacy for refugees, both by stressing their agency and by using empathy to dismantle the affective economies of hate that keep them as subaltern subjects. Continuing this crime fiction thread, the chapter “Detection, Gender Violence and Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series” by Beatriz Domínguez-García analyses the British author’s use of detection in the light of Marcia Mueller’s definition of “humanistic” crime fiction as that conveying a pointed social critique. In so doing, Domínguez-García finds strong differences between the portrayal of the detective/hero Jackson Brodie in the written series and in the BBC adaptation. In the former, Brodie’s repeated exposure to multifarious forms of violence against women (starting with the murder/rape of his sister) increases his own vulnerability; his empathic connection to victims and survivors of gender violence renders him ultimately powerless and in turn empowers the women, promoting their autonomy. On the contrary, in the BBC series the detective/hero retains his agency; his stronger detachment allows him to continue to perform his patriarchal duty of male care over the female victims. In “Resisting Binaries: Vulnerability and Agency through a Feminist Critical Gaze”, Guillermo Iglesias-Díaz takes another turn to the concept of resistance, arguing that a feminist, critical gaze in film narrative is not only possible but, arguably, one of the most effective forms of resistance. Although vulnerability has been traditionally opposed to resistance and agency, this proposition has been contested recently as a simplistic opposition of the binary kind. In the film Red Road (Andrea Arnold 2008), the myth of the male sovereign subject in Teresa De Lauretis’s technologies of power is inverted, and it is the male character that is under the female gaze. Iglesias-Díaz’s analysis is focused on how Arnold presents her characters as vulnerable but always with full agency, and never as victims. The dualism victims/agents is similarly relevant in María Isabel Romero-Ruiz’s chapter, “Trans-national Neo-Victorianism, Vulnerability and Gender in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006)”, where she explains how the trope of the presence of Empire in the Victorian period allows for neo-Victorian novels to deal with issues of vulnerability in the confrontation between colonisers and colonised populations. To the transnational approach, she adds the gender dimension by stressing the female role in the colonisation process and the situation of extreme vulnerability of native women in Australia. At the same time, she questions the construction of a British identity associated with civilisation in contrast with that of the native population. On the contrary, Romero-Ruiz’s contention is that both sides became involved in a relationship of mutual vulnerability.

The third and final section, “Gender Vulnerability and Trans*/Post-Identities”, seeks new paths to envisage embodiment beyond heteronormative constrictions in recent TV, Sci-Fi film and dystopian fiction. Its three chapters look into the cultural representations of non-binary identities in combination with vulnerability. “The Vulnerable Posthuman in Popular Science Fiction Cinema” engages with contemporary debates around techno-culture and feminist posthumanism to explore the meanings, paradoxes and contradictions of the posthuman in its embodied perspective. Here Rocío Carrasco-Carraso takes as a point of departure the premise that posthuman beings are frequently depicted as vulnerable beings doomed to privileging and perpetuating the “normative” idea of the body in terms of gender and race. However, in her discussion of the films Under the Skin (2013) and Ghost in the Shell (2017), by Glazer and Sanders, respectively, she argues that these characters still manage to disrupt established configurations of power by offering audiences an unfamiliar experience. This is achieved through filmic strategies such as identification or sympathy, enabling us to temporarily refuse normative human ethics and to understand the posthuman subject as it is, with its alien/transhuman body and non-normative actions and desires. In the next chapter, “Trans* Vulnerability and Resistance in the Ballroom: A Case Study of Pose (Season 1)”, Juan Carlos Hidalgo-Ciudad explores ballroom culture in 1980s New York bringing to the fore a variety of vulnerable subaltern identities that go through a process of total rejection and nullification in both homo and heteronormative communities due to their ethnicity, gender, class and sexuality. He understands the trans* condition as one that leads to resistance instead of reproducing heteronormative dichotomies of gender, sex and sexuality in a continuous process of “(un)becoming other(s)”. In doing so, the trans* subject reflects the contradictions inherent to any embodiment of a model figure, which Hidalgo-Ciudad reads as a generative nothingness which explodes in a volatile multiplicity that nullifies “normality”. Finally, Antonia Navarro-Tejero’s chapter “A Trans Journey towards Resistance: Vulnerability and Resilience in the Dystopian Narrative of Manjula Padmanabhan” looks into concepts of womanhood and Indianness that intersect with ideas about vulnerability and resilience in two feminist dystopian narratives by Manjula Padmanabhan, Escape (2008) and its sequel The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Fluid gendered resistance in the context of female genocide in India becomes the tool to combat sexual violence and bring about solidarity through the lens of aligned resilience. Navarro-Tejero argues that the trans protagonists are victims who achieve empowerment and contends that Padmanabhan’s feminist dystopian fiction is channelling South Asian women’s anger about the misogyny of the present and their anxiety about a future where reproduction is instrumentalised and trans women are violently abused.

While the collection’s main critical conversation is staged in the fields of Gender and Vulnerability Studies generally, the above description of the chapters proves that the contributors also draw substantial insights from Animal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights Studies, Post-Humanism and Postcolonialism. These engaging, interconnected fields and their concepts are addressed by contributors in this volume through the analysis of the representation of gender-based vulnerability in a rich variety of cultural texts that the book addresses across a wide geography, resulting in a proportional wealth of insights into the overall field of Gender and Vulnerability Studies. In addition, as stated before, all these theories about and/or connected with vulnerability are interrelated by a common thread which is Said’s travelling theory. As mentioned above, for Said a theory or an idea, wherever it arises, is always the result of specific historical circumstances but it is often used again in different circumstances and for new reasons, offering new possibilities and establishing its limits (Said 1983, 230). However, he contends that theories must never lose touch with their origins in politics, society and economics and can change depending on history and a particular situation (Said 1983, 234, 237). In his view, critical consciousness entails awareness of the differences between situations, awareness also of the fact that no theory or system exhausts the situation out of which it emerges or to which it is transported. After all, it is the exchange and circulation of ideas that nourish cultural and intellectual life. And, above all, critical consciousness is awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict (Said 1983, 242). Said’s notions have proved essential to our work in this volume, as we have kept always in sight the diverse approaches to theories of gender-based vulnerability which travel across different locations and historical periods. We are grateful to the contributors for being our travel companions in this particular project and we also want to express our gratitude to Leticia Sabsay for encouraging us along the way. It is our hope that the collection will be making a meaningful contribution to current feminist conversations around issues of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance in the Humanities and more specifically in the fields of Literary and Cultural studies, where, despite the powerful emergence of Vulnerability Studies as a productive area of inquiry in the last two decades, it remains still very much a minority concern.