The Woman Who Snaps, The Woman Who Kills

Abstract

In the United States, women are statistically more likely to be targets of domestic violence than of any other type of violence. The Family Violence Prevention Fund reports that “In the year 2001, more than half a million American women (588,490 women) were victims of nonfatal violence committed by an intimate partner” (1). Although the extent to which domestic violence occurs within Western society has long been underestimated, public scrutiny and condemnation of this troubling phenomenon has recently increased and, correspondingly, the more general theme of violence toward women is becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary arts such as literature, film, and television.

Everyone knows that a place exists… That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.

Hélène Cixous