screaming our way back to gender essentialism

a polemic against female rage

pearl screams about being a star. jennifer’s going to eat your soul and shit it out. rue hates herself and her mother. what exactly do these women have in common, aside from the fact that they’re all screaming in the carefully curated selection of clips? according to the caption beneath the tiktok, the answer is, of course, their female rage.

‘female rage’ first began to coalesce in the cultural zeitgeist around 2017, with a series of thinkpieces in the post #metoo era about sexism and feminism and how women were angry. the term began to circulate amongst film and media critics discussing anything from fleabag to handmaid’s tale to wonder woman, and in the summer of 2022 it made its way onto tiktok, where spliced-together clips of movies like don’t worry, darling and hereditary and lolita overlaid against dramatic background music (maybe some mitski, or paris paloma) received hundreds of thousands—sometimes even millions—of views and likes, cementing the term’s ubiquity.

toni collette in hereditary (2018)

for proponents of the term, female rage is first and foremost about feminism. in a patriarchal society that pressures women to bottle up their anger, depictions of angry women break gender roles, expand avenues for representation, and help to shift cultural norms in ways that empower women—or so the argument goes. in her article about female rage in film and tv, miriam balanescu writes that, “For contemporary female directors, in particular, portraying violent women is often a means towards realising female empowerment on screen.”¹ later, she goes on to add that, “Elsewhere, female violence on screen is depicted as a means of dispelling still-entrenched notions around women's fragility and weakness by portraying them as anything but.”² in a ‘female rage’ video essay with over 226,000 views and 14,000 likes, the speaker takes some time to critique the overwhelming whiteness of ‘female rage’ in pop culture, yet still takes an overall positive tone towards the liberatory potential of ‘female rage.’ the video ends on this note:³

Women are taught to swallow their anger, to suppress and substitute this sensation with words such as “disappointed” or “frustrated,” perpetually shrinking themselves smaller, even subconsciously. No longer confined to the expectations of feminine performance, bearing witness to the “unhinged woman” in cinema is being given permission to exhale after a lifetime of holding our breath.

this all sounds very nice, as long as you don’t try to nail down any clear definitional boundaries around ‘female’ or ‘rage’ and buy into the idea that affective representations correlate directly to changes in material conditions.

otherwise, it sounds like a load of horseshit.

who gets to feel female rage?

at its foundation, ‘female rage’ is a flawed term because it lacks any clear definitional boundaries. ask 5 different people to define the term, and you’ll get 5 different definitions. usually, those definitions will go something like this:

female rage is when [women/females/people socialized as women/people who society views as women/femmes/insert other equally nebulous umbrella term] who have been oppressed by a patriarchal society express anger as a way to [confront/undermine/push back against/etc] the men who oppress them.

regardless of how someone attempts to define the boundaries of ‘female’ (typically insisting that the term is not biologically essentialist, despite the word choice), it is fairly easy to poke holes in those boundaries. if ‘females’ means everyone socialized as women, for example—socialized as women how? by who? in what context? for how long? there is no single, monolithic ‘female socialization’ that every woman goes through; even if there was, where would this leave, say, trans men? is their anger towards patriarchal oppression ‘female rage’? or something else? the moment we begin to move past binary sex as a starting point, the entire term begins to fall apart.

let’s poke some more holes—if what we’re dealing with here is specifically rage against patriarchal oppression, why limit it to females⁴? what about other sexual and gender minorities who are also oppressed by patriarchy? is there some form of oppression specific only to females, and to all females? if we try to zoom in, to draw a line in the sand that separates the patriarchal oppression of females versus the patriarchal oppression of all other sexual and gender minorities, we will inevitably leave some females out—for example, say we try to refine the term by arguing that patriarchal oppression against females is unique (and the rage against it is, thus, unique) due to the aspect of motherhood and reproductive rights bound up in that oppression. suddenly, we are excluding all people who would otherwise be included in the ‘female’ category who cannot bear children or become mothers. on the flipside, if we zoom out enough to truly include all ‘females’ by simply stating ‘all females experience misogyny,’ then we are back to the conundrum of having a whole host of other groups who also experience misogny, but would not necessarily fit our definition of ‘females.’

what direction are we going?

in addition to the thorny issue of trying to define ‘female,’ the claim that ‘female rage’ is an expression of anger specifically against patriarchal oppression falls apart just as quickly upon closer examination. while some of the most commonly used examples—alice chambers from don’t worry, darling, dolores haze from lolita, ellie from the last of us—certainly do provide representations of backlash against specifically patriarchal oppression, there are many more examples that simply…don’t. rue from euphoria’s screaming match with her mother, jennifer from jennifer’s body threatening to kill needy, the yellowjackets girls’ ritualized cannibalistic violence—none of these are exactly scenes in which any of the characters are presenting a salient challenge to patriarchy. yet the fact that they are all, sweepingly, labeled ‘female rage’ suggests that what’s really important here is not so much females being angry at something; rather, it’s just females being angry at all.

and sure, we could argue that females being angry is in and of itself a challenge to patriarchy—many people point to the fact that women are expected not to show anger. but to act as though this is a facet of oppression specific to patriarchy locates such affective policing in gender, rather than its actual source: power. women are not the only minority expected not to show anger; in virtually any situation where one group holds power over another, the oppressed group is expected to display emotion only in palatable ways. additionally, to act as though female anger is revolutionary regardless of context disregards any attempt at an intersectional analysis that acknowledges instances in which female anger has actively supported and upheld systems of oppression—the anger of white women towards men of color whom they view as ‘threatening’ comes immediately to mind as an example that problematizes the simple assertion that ‘female rage’ directed against men is always feminist.

if we truly want to fashion rage into a useful political tool, the question of direction is crucial. rage is only useful insofar as it is directed against patriarchal oppression. directionless or misdirected rage are not feminist simply because someone identified as female is the one feeling them. and yet, examples of such rage continue to be labeled ‘female,’ and ‘female rage’ continues to be lauded as feminist.

why?

megan fox in jennifer’s body (2009)

the sleight of hand

the crux of the issue, as i see it, is that ‘female rage’ is starting in the wrong spot. the unifying factor of anger characterized by its backlash against sexism is not an internal quality—it is not a discrete, prediscursive identity uniformly held by all those who are angry—but an external quality—namely, the figures which the anger is directed towards. when we obscure that fact by shifting focus onto internal sites of identity, we lose all steady ground from which such anger might lend itself to building a politics. the focus is no longer on what we’re angry at, but simply on who is angry. this is why we see so much variance in what actually gets labeled as ‘female rage’—because it doesn’t matter if the rage is actually directed against sexism, only that it’s a certain type of person (most often: pretty, thin white women) getting angry in a certain way.

without that external ground in which to base our terminology, the only locus left around which ‘female rage’ can cohere is the internal identity—the ‘female’. and to do so requires accepting the assumption that there is some ontologically discrete, prediscursive identity which exists within every ‘female’ exhibiting such rage. in other words: gender essentialism.

promises, promises

despite rooting itself in the exact premise that gives rise to gendered oppression, proponents of female rage still expect the term to put in quite a bit of work. female rage is supposed to be ‘empowering’—but empowering how? and to who? while there may certainly be some personal catharsis in watching a character who you relate to scream it out onscreen, depictions of angry women do very little to actually alter the material conditions of their audience’s lives. those most ‘empowered’ by the movies and tv from which so many examples of ‘female rage’ are drawn are those who actually make money off the depictions—a group which tends, disproportionately, to include men. to claim, then, that such depictions are inherently ‘empowering’ is at best naive and at worst an obfuscation that precludes any further analysis or critique.

other proponents might argue that ‘female rage’ does the important feminist work of ‘normalizing’ expressions of anger that women often suppress. i think this is perhaps giving too much credit to dramatized shouting matches—it is difficult to imagine that mia goth screaming about how she’s a star will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in opening up the floodgates to let stymied women suddenly access their full range of emotion. (i am being a bit facetious here, but the point stands; many of these ‘female rage’ movies are very extreme depictions of emotion under very unusual circumstances, which are not necessarily going to make anger more socially acceptable in everyday life.) and even to the extent that depictions of ‘female rage’ work as a sort of consciousness-raising to challenge gendered norms, we still return to the question: what exactly is the utility in labeling that rage, specifically, as ‘female’? does tacitly reinforcing the idea that men feel ‘(male) rage’ while women feel ‘female rage’ not perpetuate the very gender roles that ‘female rage’ is supposedly challenging?

mia goth in pearl (2022)

at the end of the day, the main work that i see ‘female rage’ doing is less the advancement of any feminist project and more a reification of our cultural investment in gender roles, by way of perpetuating the idea that there is an inherent ‘female’ quality to certain types of rage. the problem is that such terminology is not simply an observation about gender after the fact; using terms like ‘female rage’ to create aesthetic and affective groupings is a way of actively constructing gender. to quote judith butler:⁵

…because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.

if we really want to make a feminist project out of rage, maybe it’s time we drop the ‘female,’ admit that rage is just rage, and begin to focus more on the direction in which that rage is pointed.

1. female rage: the brutal new icons of film and tv - miriam balanescu, 12th october 2022

2. balanescu, 2022

3. the obsession with female rage in media - final girl studios, 21st march 2023

4. a note here on language—i do my best throughout this essay to keep my language limited to the term ‘females,’ as that is, after all, the term used in ‘female rage.’ this is because i don’t want to conflate my own definitional boundaries around ‘women’ and ‘females,’ where ‘women’ is an umbrella term based on the social construction of gender and ‘female’ is an umbrella term based on the social construction of sex. while it can be easy to slip between the two, especially given the conflation that often goes on by people who use ‘female rage’ to talk about women, i think it would be a bit hypocritical of me to be lax in my own slippage given what i’m critiquing.

5. performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory - judith butler, dec 1988