Citation

Gilligan J. Br. J. Psychother. 2009; 25(2): 239-256.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1752-0118.2009.01118.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Estela Welldon's analyses of female violence show that we cannot understand any violence, including that of men, without understanding that of women. Past research has identified shame and humiliation as a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of violence. Why, then, are women not more violent than men since they are often treated as inferior to men? Because both sexes are honoured for conforming to the gender role into which they are socialized, and are shamed for behaving in ways assigned to the other sex. Men are honoured for being perpetrators and victims of violence, and hence ‘violence-objects’, and shamed for non-violence. Women, by contrast, are honoured for sexual chastity and non-violence, and shamed for having sex outside marriage, behaving violently, or in any other way behaving like a man. They thus become ‘sex-objects’ (having renounced their sexual subjectivity), and will become violent only if (like Medea), they have already been shamed so severely and irretrievably that they have nothing more to lose by resorting to violence.