Dramatizing Intimate Femicide: Petitions, Plays, and Public Engagement (with a Shakespearean Gloss)

Abstract

This article discusses the author's current research project, an arts-based cultural intervention designed to shock audiences into registering intimate femicide as a first-order political problem in Western societies. Based on cases retrieved over the years from the English case law and recent cases unearthed by the most prolific of a new wave of feminist anti-violence bloggers, the project is pitched as an early educational intervention. A series of interactive learning modules in the form of theatre performances for schools invites young people to query the continuing legal and cultural salience of men's excuses for killing "their" women. Shakespeare's many problematizations of possessive jealousy in men are enlisted to help highlight the long shadow that historically mandated male possessory rights over women still cast over criminal trials. The author argues for the continuing value of Foucauldian genealogies conceived as "counter-memories" for anti-violence feminist work. A case study of a specifically feminist forgetting of what is at stake in the representation and response to "family violence" cases underlines the magnitude of the task of shifting sympathy from perpetrators to victims.